Reflections on Life from an Old Order Amish Magazine

LNP 2/26/23

In the summer of 2016, Robert Alexander wrote two brief essays for the Amish monthly magazine Family Life. He wondered how Amish farmers could continue to thrive as land prices rise and commodity prices fall. “Unless we make some changes in our attitude, we may be seeing the sun setting on our culture,” Alexander wrote. With Amish population doubling every 18 to 20 years and if the number of Amish farms remains the same, he explained, the percentage of Amish farmers will be halved in two decades.

“At that rate, it will take only another fifty years in some communities until only 2 percent of us will be farmers,” he estimated. “That is the same as in the American population as a whole. If that isn’t where we want to go, we will have to very consciously do something about it. And soon.”

The Amish purchase nearly every available farm in many of their settlements, including Lancaster County. They migrate to newer settlements. They are spreading out across the country. But will that be enough? Alexander posed but did not answer his question. No one can answer it definitively. But it is instructive that a problem that plagues society in general — increasing population, diminishing agricultural land — concerns an Amish writer looking half a century into the future.

Family Life is filled with such musings about farming, marriage, aging and other essential subjects. Since 1968, Pathways Publishers in Ontario, Canada, has printed

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