amish paradise

A while ago I came upon a paper out of Ohio State in the Journal of Extension about making enterprise budgets for Amish Farms. I didn't have a chance to read when I found it, so I saved it to my desktop to read later. Later turned out to be yesterday.

Many extension offices put out enterprise budgets. They are basically the average costs and returns for growing some particular crop. It takes Z man hours to grow an acre of corn. It costs X to grow an acre of corn. The return on that acre will be Y - or whatever. But, as you might imagine, Amish farmers using different equipment on a much smaller scale have fairly different enterprise budgets.

The whole paper is here: http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:aH1xwLCyEOsJ:sustainableag.osu.edu/education/documents/AmishFarmEconomicssep05_000.doc+amish+farm+economics&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESjqzukd3tiVzyT-Swrvfz1Rp0NkruGV9l16PmpJOa7BKp7Rzr9p-kv2UK8t3Nq67f8q0DtUoQlFkVNifBnyGDtcQ6_Ffu84rn6dkSYFeLSsQWVu3MdYkV8dusMwxfGMIyTlthWL&sig=AHIEtbRAukyue3wnlAVNGqzuB_kDe9W-Nw and is a great read. The paper notes that the returns on 100 horse powered acres of corn, hay and small grains are significantly higher than those same crops produced in a conventional manner. Also, the paper recognizes that while horses went out of vogue about 100 years ago with the rest of the country, Amish farms are one of the fastest growing sectors of the agricultural industry and that the Amish continue to establish new farms at a time when more and more farms are going under.