A couple of years ago, we and the family of our youngest daughter took a trip south from Minneapolis to visit a cluster of Amish greenhouses. Both my wife and daughter Kim are big flower gardeners and this seemed like it would be a fun outing. As is my practice, I wrote a blog post about this outing.
Most of the posts I write draw some immediate attention. This is probably because each post generates a tweet. After a week or so, most of my posts seldom are visited again. This was not the case with the post about the visit to the Amish greenhouses. On occasion, I explore the data generated by my posts and I saw that the greenhouse post was probably the most popular post I have written.
I mentioned this to my daughter and she remarked that this is probably because the post comes up as one of the first search results when you look up Amish greenhouse Minnesota. She was looking for a map to identify the stops we might make on our venture and there I was. Evidently, I happened on a search topic that few have written about.
Of all the content I have posted on one of my blogs since 2002, this is probably the first time I have made the first page of the search results let alone the top hit.
Now that we can travel, yesterday we visited the Amish greenhouses again. Since I may have found the secret to social media success, I thought I would try again.
The greenhouses have evidently become a reasonable business for the Amish people and the tendency to purchase farms near each other and to collaboratively take on business ventures (many farms with greenhouses), they have identified a niche. There is nothing unusual about the greenhouses unless it is the use of wood furnaces to heat the structures and the somewhat lower prices which do draw crowds.
Like many ethnic groups any of us do not know well, we probably harbor some stereotypes about these folks. I grew up on a farm and I talked with a kid last visit who wanted to be able to purchase 80 acres to have a farm of his own. This is a very small farm within the scale of modern farming, but the Amish can somehow make it work. I have assumed that the use of horses and farming equipment suited to “horse power” was a way they ran a more economical approach. I noticed something interested in one of our stops. The farm seemed to have all new equipment.
The equipment was all new, but suited to using horses. I saw the company responsible for the equipment, Pioneer Equipment, and searched for them online. It turns out there is a company manufacturing farm equipment for this niche market. Capitalism has more facets than one might assume. This may be an ideal example of a small business not on main street.
A couple of stereotypical Amish country photos to end the post.
A map of “green house” country.
