Amish Dedication to Farming and Adoption of Organic Dairy Systems - Re-Thinking Organic Food and Farming in a Changing World - page 247

other complex systems-based decisions outside of the Amish communities. All
farmers may have value-based factors shaping farm decisions besides economics,
and they make decisions in the face of a significant amount of uncertainty. Many
other-non-Amish farmers exhibit principled information satisficing as they seem to
value hand labor over efforts to gather information about their farm and alternative
farming practices. This can mean many farmers do not really systematically
consider alternatives like organic dairy. Although the focus on unity is not as explicit
with other non-Amish farmers as it is within Amish society, it is clear that social
pressure within the broader farm culture can potentially result in less adoption of
emerging management techniques than there might be otherwise.
Adoption decisions of the Cashton and Hillsboro Amish offer insights about
farm decision-making on the broader landscape in the sense that adoption decisions
are complex and can involve oikonomia/bounded rationality behaviors in addition
to full-information profit-maximizing criteria. Although there is not as clear of a
leadership structure within non-Amish communities as within Amish communities,
there may be opinion leaders in farming communities who set the tone for what
farming practices are acceptable. There are also norms within rural communities
that make it difficult to be different than other farmers thus making it difficult for
some farmers to convert to organic farming (Bell 2004 ; Brock 2010 ). For example,
some of the non-Amish farmers also had similar anchoring issues with the idea
that all milk is milk, as reported here for some of the Cashton Amish. Relatedly,
there is also a focus among non-Amish on cheating, but there is not a subtle
temptation focus like there is with the Cashton Amish. There are also patterns
of organic adoption decisions among families and spatial clustering that probably
reflects social networks (Brock 2010 ; Lewis et al. 2011 ), but this is not as likely
to be pervasive as it is within the tight social confines of the Amish church. This
chapter points a path forward for further work on these themes.
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