So, with large families and a shrinking land base, the Amish have to make a living without enough acreage to do so by traditional means. Many do so with small factory/craft work — furniture, etc. Others, modern industrial animal production, which has a small land footprint.

Comment by H. Houlahan — January 12, 2010

Excellent points all, Heather.

Without the religious aspect, the Capay Valley — and indeed much of central California — faces similar pressure. It’s astonishing to see how much top-rate farmland has been developed here. And even sadder when you realized that many of the homes in new subdivisions and storefronts in new stripmalls are now empty, with homeowners foreclosed on and businesses closed for lack of customers when the homeowners were evicted.

Comment by Gina Spadafori — January 11, 2010 @ 3:58 pm

I know that 20 years ago, young Amish families of Lancaster County were having to outbid developers for the farms their parents were selling. This resulted in 60+ year mortgages on land “worth” 100’s of dollars per square foot, to support 2-3 generations and multiple families of Amish living on it at the same time.

I’m sure Capay Valley is the standard they aspire to.

Thanks for that. Very interesting.

Most — perhaps not all — of the Amish/Mennonite puppymillers are also farming. They know about being diversified.

One reason Lancaster County got so infamous so fast was the encroachment of high-dollar gentrified sprawl and tourist-trap crap that made farmland prohibitively expensive. The most productive un-irrigated farmland in the WORLD is being paved over for outlet malls for the shopping pleasure of tourists who were originally drawn by the bucolic landscape created by those same Amish.

So, with large families and a shrinking land base, the Amish have to make a living without enough acreage to do so by traditional means. Many do so with small factory/craft work — furniture, etc. Others, modern industrial animal production, which has a small land footprint.

(When things get crowded like this, another thing Amish communities do is split, with some members moving to new areas where land is cheap. But in Lancaster, it’s not just a matter of the farming population outgrowing the available farmland — the farmland is actually going away, crowding out any possibility of a traditional community of the same scale as existed before.)

A broiler shed produces more money stuffed full of schnoodles than it does crammed with Cornish cross. Consumers only pay .89/pound for chicken. One pup sold to a broker brings a couple hundred; sold direct to a tourist, up to a thousand or so. A productive bitch of a breed or mix in fad demand can gross the miller $10,000 in a year, after costing a few hundred to purchase and less than that to feed. Can you think of any other kind of livestock that can do that?

The Amish, like all other puppymillers, responded to market forces when they got into puppymilling, and it will take new market forces (and effective humane laws applied to that market) to get them out. I’d like to see effective regulation that protects farmland as a treasured resource as another curb on “the market.”

I think the transfer of breeding stock to millers in Ohio has already begun. Ohio seems more interested in demonizing pit bulls than in dealing with its humane issues, so that looks to work out well. I live much closer to the mill areas of Ohio than I do to Lancaster County, so I’ll be seeing plenty more of those pups — many of them sold at “puppy fairs” held on weekends just over the border — in the coming years.

On a negative note, I wonder if other states will increase their puppy mill volume to make up the slack. States with more lax laws.

I met some of the folks from the Governor’s task force last summer at an animal law seminar. It was so interesting to hear how they worked with various groups in order to get something passed that would, if not please everyone, at least infuriate fewer people. For example, deciding that “60” was the magic number of annual dog sales for making a breeding operation commercial or not.

Thanks for that link.

“Nearly four out of every 10 commercial kennels in Pennsylvania told the state they would be closed by the end of December.”

Yahoo!

The Philly Dawg states that “the PSPCA - which removed nearly 400 cats from the 28-acre property, and spent hundreds of thousands caring for them”.

“Hundreds of thousands of dollars” sounds like an awful lot of money to take care of 400 cats. Oops. Make that 240 cats, because 150 of the 390 live cats seized were euthanized.

If those numbers are right - that’s about a thousand dollars per cat…

http://www.latimes.com/news/na.....2235.story