When people ask me about the Amish, they ask mostly about their clothes, their horses and buggies, their rejection of electricity and modern conveniences,  their donuts and pies, and of course, the Patriarchy.

To me, what is the most interesting thing about them now that I’m getting to know them is what I never saw before – their astonishing agricultural engineering skills and their deep and spiritual love of the land.

A few days ago, Moise invited me to come and see the amazing powerless irrigation system he built on more than 100 acres of his farm in two days, and all by himself and two horses.

This project, I saw right away, was about so much more than irrigation; it was about building a new life and coping with great change, even as time sometimes stood still.

It was about being independent and protecting your children from the ravages of the modern world.

I understood Moise in a new way, with my jaw dropped when I saw his creation, perhaps as someone who also left the normal and familiar and set out to build a new life.

I did that; I know the joy and glory of that.

Both of us, meeting along the Hero Journey from very different places.

The irrigation system was an engineering and architectural feat. And more

As always, Moise had no people, electricity, or battery-powered tools to help him. While I was holed up in my air-conditioned study during three days of heat, he was building pumps, laying hoses, and attaching scores of blue knobs, each one of a hundred hoses spread out for hundreds of feet that could be individually set depending on the crop – dripping for the blueberry bushes, soaking for the tomatoes and the corn, trickling for the kale.

Honestly, I could hardly believe he had accomplished this in blistering heat by himself in just a couple of days.

I’m not an engineer, so I’ll skip most of the details, especially if I don’t understand them. I should say Moise uses hand pumps and sometimes kerosene to power pumps. But almost all of his pumps relate to position and gravity.

 

Earlier this year, Moise and two plow horses dug out a 2,000-foot ditch from a creek in the woods at the very back of his property (he hired an excavator for the rocky part of this work). The line led to the house and ran up the hill above the crops he grew and hoped to sell this year.

He installed a gravity pump attached to a plastic water tank and then laid hoses alongside every crop row. The water in their kitchen and temporary home also comes from a gravity pump.

Each day, Moise or one of the children walks up and down to check on the blue knobs that set the pace and frequency of the water. On the hot days, they set each row. On the cooler days, they can turn the knobs off from a central switch on the tank.

Moise never brags, but I can tell when he is proud of his work. He wants me to see it.

We walked up and down the rows, and he demonstrated how each knob could be turned and how the water flows to the tank at the top of the hill. It flows downhill naturally.

The Amish can fool people.

It’s easy to see them as a backward and rustic community, a kind of benign cult, makers of shoofly pies and strawberry donuts.

Most people do. See them that way. That is a mistake.

They are more sophisticated than I imagined.

They have been working with soil, crops, animals, and agriculture for 500 years and are pioneers in smart farming. You could cry when Moise talks about the soil and about his love of plowing it, studying it, touching it.

Moise’s range of knowledge is truly breathtaking.

He can talk about soil, planting, horses, crops, water flow,  plumbing, tilling, carpentry, tiles, insulation, windows, donuts, plowing, construction, plants and crops, and roofing with equal ease and great detail.

The Amish have long had a love affair with the land and nature; many Amish sects consider farming a religious tenet, the tilling of the soil a divine duty God directed in the Garden of Eden.

The Amish believe farms are the best place to raise children in the faith.

Agriculture is revered, wrote one Amish writer decades ago, because “farming allows us to be part of the cycle of life, death and renewal that God planned in his wisdom. In our daily contact with creation, we cannot help but stand in awe of wonder and God.”

Surprisingly, that is how I feel about my farm, even though I am not a farmer or a fundamentalist Christian.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the  Amish and their Anabaptist ancestors had a reputation as innovative farmers known for their stewardship of the land, their mastery of the soil, and animal husbandry.

The Amish were pioneers in intelligent farming, from elaborate immigration systems (unknown at the time) to rotational grazing and soil conservation.

At the time, nature became a matter of survival, not choice.

The Amish were a persecuted people, hunted, burned at stake, tortured,  hung, and murdered.

They found it impossible to survive in urban communities; they fled to the country where they developed groundbreaking crop production and livestock-raising skills.

One of the things I felt right away when I spent time with the Millers and especially with Moise was an almost childlike wonder at the natural world.  Nature is considered good, a sanctuary from corruption and evil.

“Its beauty is apparent in the universe,” writes John A. Hofstetler in Amish Society, “in the orderliness of the seasons, the heavens, in the world of living plants as well as in the many species of animals, and the forces of living and dying. It is common to see Amish families visiting zoos in metropolitan areas.”

The animal rights movement often singles out the Amish as animal abusers (accused of overworking their horses and selling puppies in puppy mills.)

This puzzles me because Amish live with animals as a matter of faith; there are always animals working and living with them and around them – horses, dogs, goats, sheep, cows, pigs, chickens –  most for work, some for good, others for silence and unspoken companionship.

In the car, on our rides, Moise talks about his animals a lot and asks me about mine.

The horses work hard, but no harder than Moise and his family.

Amish people don’t gush and oooh-and-aaaah over their animals the way we do, nor do they spoil them with anything they don’t need. It’s a different relationship, but I’ve never witnessed anything abusive about it.

“Animals are considered part of the Creation,” says Hoffstetler, “and those not found on Amish farms are of great interest.”

When the Amish first came to America, tilling, planting, and harvesting were done with hand tools and oxen. They turned to horses in 1800. They were among the first farmers in their communities to adopt new machinery.

But they weren’t too different from most American farmers until farms began to mechanize.

Although most Amish had stayed abreast of new machines in the nineteenth century, Amish leaders were concerned about the pace of technological change in farming – a theme that has intensified in our time.

They became alarmed by the advent of “monstrous equipment,” as one bishop called it, and saw it as threatening their way of life.

They froze their turn-of-the-century farming methods for five decades. They saw mechanized farming as something that would destroy the pattern and fabric of family farms that anchored Amish society for decades.

The Amish were prescient.

American farmers were slower to see the implications of mechanized farms, and now, corporate farming. They couldn’t and can’t compete.

The new machines raised debt, kept prices down, and countless family farms have disappeared in the last decades.

They also made it difficult for Amish farms to thrive.

Many are moving, as Moise has, to small communities with few factory farms and lots of available pasture.

After the 1960s, the Amish began adopting technology to boost their agricultural productivity – as Moise has – while staying with the bounds of the Ordnung (the unwritten set of rules and regulations that guide everyday Amish life. The Ordnung provides the foundation for the Amish Christian Community).

Instead of buying from huge commercial suppliers, the Amish began modifying and building their own tools like building horse-drawn equipment, modifying factory-built machines created for tractors.

Still, on Amish farms, some of the reimagined tractors are powered by small gasoline engines and pulled by horses.

They also chose to be transparent – to let the people who buy their goods see how it is made. This is one reason the Amish farmers are open to visitors and welcome them.

One Ohio Bishop, quoted in the book “The Amish,” explained it this way:

“All of our farm work is visible to the community, unlike industrial work hidden in a factory or shop.”

Because Amish farming is so public, the Ordnung is transparent, and “people can see what you are doing, what tools and equipment you are using and what practices you are following so you can receive advice and counsel from the community.”

This was also far-sighted. Americans feel trapped by corporations, it is almost impossible to live without them, but fewer and fewer people trust them.

By contrast, the Amish are trusted,  widely regarded as honest, responsible, and organic in their methods. They never profiteer or advertise; they always charged modest promises, no matter what the demand.

People can see the process for themselves. And their favorite promotion told Moise, “is to make good things.”

While American family farms are close to vanishing (they cannot compete with the giant factory farms), Amish farms are actually increasing in small numbers over the past few years.

They are figuring out how to do it.

Although the percentage of Amish farmers declined sharply in the first half of the nineteenth and twentieth century, rapid Amish population growth means the actual number of Amish families that are farming is still increasing.

Moise is in many ways a model for the modern Amish farmer, clinging to tradition but evolving when he needs to.  He doesn’t own a tractor, but when he needed to dig his immigration ditch, he didn’t hesitate to hire a professional excavator.

Moving to Cambridge was a huge step for him and his family. He knew no one and there was no Amish community to greet him.

When he decided to move, he became a pioneer; it took courage and daring.

He looked for a community with a small government and few regulations and an agricultural history, lower real estate prices, and an underserved town when it came to the things the Amish make and sell.

The Amish have also become skilled at diversifying.

The Miller farm and the others in their family sell fruit, vegetables, baked goods (donuts, pies), paint houses, build and repair roofs, sell lumber, bracelets, rugs, and quilt; build chairs builds raised wood gardens.

One new family has planted a hay and corn crop and is specializing in building kitchen cabinets. Their cabinet work is already sold for months ahead.

Few Amish families depend only on farming for their income in 2021. Many families are having difficulty remaining “people of the land.” America has become a Corporate Nation and an expensive nation, which has put pressure on the plain people.

More Amish people are working in jobs outside of the community. More Amish people are getting interested in leisure, lay, traveling, and shopping, all earmarks of the industrial, not the Amish, lifestyle.

Moise and Barbara – both members of the Old Amish sect – are determined not to go that route, although they are sometimes more flexible than some of their more conservative peers.

Many of the Amish sects are experiencing with cell phones, computers, even electricity. The conservative Amish sects – Moise belongs to one – are hanging on to the old ways.

They seem to be succeeding.

There are also lots of customers and tourists heading north to Lake George, Vermont, and the Adirondacks (all of them drive by Moise’s farm on the way). Moses told me God led him here and showed him his future.

I asked Moise the other day if he could have found a farm as big and well located as his today, just two years after he bought it. “No,” he said, “I don’t believe I could have.”

Nothing is more surprising to me – or more impressive – than to see how Moise and his family have adapted to the changes in Amish and American life.

They have responded to those changes without bowing to them or being overwhelmed by them.

Moise has transformed a decaying, brown, and abandoned old farm into a bustling, and yes, modern agricultural operation.

The farm was brown a year ago, now it is green and vibrant, row after row of crops, small hills of rocks that they and their horses pulled out of the ground. They will be used for foundations and ground into concrete.

In a community grieving from the loss of so many family farms, this is an enormous boost.

Moise had his priorities setHe and his wife and children are still living in the temporary barn they built, patient and willing to wait until the end of the year until a small Army of Amish will arrive to help him build a barn and permanent home.

Moise stays true to all of the sacred traditions of the Ordnung, but he also does what he has to do to survive, and I believe, to prosper. He doesn’t curse, he won’t lie, he wastes nothing and buys nothing he doesn’t need, he judges no one and welcomes everyone.

He works hard every daylight minute of the day. He rests a bit on Saturdays – and has some Amish fun –  and prays on Sundays.

The irrigation work that Mosie did by himself in a couple of summer days would have cost me $10,000 or $20,000 to build and required tractors,  plumbers, excavators, engineers, and some laborers. I know; I did some of that work on the first Bedlam Farm.

It was an engineering task finished with an engineer’s skill, and yes, he knows the cost and width of every single nail that he hammers.

I can’t imagine how one man can do all of that that work in so short a time.

He uses no electricity, owns no trucks or automobiles,  has no tractors, socializes only within his community, is an elder in his church, a father to 13 children,  a husband to his wife, a steward of 200 acres and keeps invasive technologies and “monster machines” away from his family.

All the irrigation system cost Moise was a wagon full of tubes and settings.

The money he earns from selling his vegetables and fruit, and baked goods will go a long way towards keeping his family secure and his faith intact.

To me, his irrigation system speaks of vision, savvy,  the power of hard work, and an underlying faith.

That is the true foundation of his work. God will watch over him.

So far, so good.