THE AMISH ANSWER

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Those horses provide other benefits. For instance, they don't compact the soil the way tractors do. Amish farmers who buy tractored farms find that the soil doesn't loosen back up until after three years of farming with horses. And Oberlin College researchers found that the Amish horse-worked farmland absorbs and holds almost seven times more water than conventional no-till fields.

True, a diversified, low-chemical livestock-and-crops farm requires more labor per acre than do today's monoculture spreads. But that's not a problem for the Amish, because they are successful breeders of the most vital farm crop of all: future farmers. The children in their typically large families all learn to help-little Katie was right out there at 5:30 in the morning washing and stripping udders. Children quit their Amish schools after the eighth grade and work on the family farm until they marry. And many of the children do stay in farming when they mature. Both Jonathan and Ruth planned to.

Likewise, Amish farmers help each other out. They join together to thrash each other's wheat or to get in a sick neighbor's hay. The community as a whole esteems farming as the most valued occupation; they feel that being close to the land is being close to God. (Amos, opening a screen door to let a bumblebee out, said, "You can feel the Creator in nature. You see his handiwork.")

Indeed, the real backbone of Amish agriculture is religion. Wendell Berry calls it "Christian agriculture, formed upon the understanding that it is sinful for people to misuse or destroy what they did not make." John Hostetler, author of Amish Society, points out that "soil has a spiritual significance for the Amish because God created it in the Garden of Eden. Man's first duty is to dress the garden, to till it and manage it as a good steward. Second, man is to keep the garden, protect it from exploitation." And Yoder told me, at once both lightly and earnestly, "It helps you act ecologically if you know you're going to hell if you don't."

What does all this mean to the larger American society? For one thing, that small-scale family farming can still work. Yoder grosses over $40,000 from 65 tillable acres, working steadily but by no means fanatically: I saw him take two naps in one day. Likewise, the Amish as a whole are doing fine. Their population in the U.S. has tripled (to 100,000) in the last 35 years. So chemical agribiz, with its environmentally destructive side effects, is not the only way to go.

The Amish also demonstrate-in vivid, day-today living-the premise upon which this four-part series has been based: that spiritual motivation can, indeed, lead to positive ecological acts.

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