Amish Dedication to Farming and Adoption of Organic Dairy Systems

‘Milk is Milk’: Organic Dairy Adoption Decisions and Bounded Rationality

“…This article only highlights a few bounded rationality issues and information access themes; there are others that could be explored around these ideas. A bounded rationality framework mixed with values and preferences could be used to gain insights into complex farm decision making as was briefly depicted with the Amish communities case study and is discussed further in Brock and Barham, Forthcoming ( [7]). Values can also evolve over time as we saw in dramatic ways in some of the organic farmer stories like Ben Crank's diagnosis of cancer.…”

“…For the Amish in particular, it is more appropriate to discuss decision making on organic dairy adoption at the level of the community. For that discussion we draw on a comparison between two settlements, Cashton and Hillsboro, which will be briefly sketched below but developed in greater detail in another article [7]. In all of the cases, it is important to know that our interviews occurred at a time when the market structure was wide open for those wanting to convert to organic.…”

“…Amish farmers would seem to be particularly well situated to convert to organic considering certain aspects of their operations (small size, labor intensity, low cash inputs). As will be discussed below, the Amish will be helpful to explore a particular type of information satisficing which will be denoted as principled satisficing [7] where values can interact with bounded rationality issues to constrain information gathering by agents [44].…”

“…Given the importance of values and social networks in the organic adoption process for many other non-Amish farmers described in Section 4.1, the contrasting experiences of these two Amish communities make it clear that influences at the community level can also be important in shaping the context for adoption decisions. Principled satisficing may also apply to the broader landscape though perhaps less starkly than within the confines of these two Amish settlements [7]. For example, the emphasis on a high producing herd could be viewed as a value in a sense at the community and individual level which influenced information satisficing about an alternative production system like organic.…”

“…Through in-depth, qualitative interviews, we explored the question of organic adoption within the broader framework of how farming system choice matched farmers' goals and aspirations in four domains: economic, ecological, social, and spiritual (This framework will be denoted by the Greek work ‗oikonomia' which is related to the origins of economics. This oikonomia theme is explored more extensively in Brock and Barham, Forthcoming [7]). This perspective built on the work of other researchers who had found that farmers have diverse economic, social/spiritual and ecological values that motivate them to farm and choose distinctive management systems (e.g., [8,9]).…”