Amish increasingly make inroads in entrepreneurship

Amish entrepreneurs build furniture, sheds and barbecue grills.
NEW HOLLAND, Pa. (AP) -- The 10 Amish and two non-Amish employees of Country Lane Woodworking assemble and package pressure-treated wooden gazebos inside an unadorned building at an industrial park just south of town, shipping them across the country and even overseas.
Co-owner Jonas Stoltzfus said the business got started on his father's nearby farm about 10 years ago. It is one of hundreds of Amish businesses that have sprung up over the past decade, a trend that is the focus of a new study.
"It's easier to get work in this type of industry, because there's such a big demand for this. And farmland in this area is limited," said Stoltzfus, 28.
Most of the Amish families in southeastern Pennsylvania's Lancaster County were farmers as recently as the 1970s, but over the past 20 years they have branched out and established a variety of enterprises, said Elizabethtown College professor Donald B. Kraybill.
Study of Amish commerce
The new second edition of Kraybill's 1995 book, "Amish Enterprise: From Plows to Profits," was released Monday. It examines how the accelerating spread of Amish entrepreneurship has increasingly drawn them into the mainstream and created unprecedented disposable wealth for some while posing new challenges to the preservation of their traditional way of life.
"In the past, these people were making very small handicraft items in a basement of their house or in the attic of their house. This is really a whole new stage in the development of Amish business," said Kraybill, who has written seven books on Amish life and culture and is senior fellow in the Young Center for the study of Anabaptist and Pietist groups.
The book says the Amish are increasingly turning away from agriculture and looks at marketing strategies Amish businesses have devised to reach a wider customer base for their products despite limited use of technology. They manufacture furniture and storage sheds, make crafts and trinkets for the tourist market, and transform agricultural commodities into consumer products.
"I would say that the development of these businesses is the most significant and the most transformative change that they've experienced in the last century," said Kraybill, co-author with Goshen (Ind.) College history professor Steven M. Nolt.
Increasing numbers
The number of Amish enterprises in Lancaster County rose from about 940 in 1993 to about 1,600 in 2003, and employment within those businesses grew by 85 percent over the same decade, according to the book.
Within the Orlan Business Park that contains Country Lane Woodworking, Amish businesses make backyard sheds, barbecue grills, decking and roof trusses. Delivery trucks dodge horse-drawn buggies on the access road that serves the park, and the bicycle scooters some Amish use to commute to work are parked alongside automobiles belonging to non-Amish employees.
Amish entrepreneurs also have built successful businesses elsewhere -- furniture-making around Wooster, Ohio, sawmills in New York and western Pennsylvania, and masonry and construction around Dover, Del.
Farm work is still predominant in more traditional Amish settlements in Kentucky and Wisconsin, Kraybill said, but in northeastern Indiana, some Amish factory workers build recreational vehicles.
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