La Vonne De Bois gets some unique requests for group tours and events around Holmes County, the largest Amish community in the United States. So when a group asked if they could watch the Amish carve ice blocks out of a pond in the middle of winter, she made it happen.

She found a family that was stocking its icehouse for refrigeration and organized the outing, which was a unique lesson in teamwork. “We brought pizzas and watched them use chain saws and put ladders over the pond so they’d have something to stand on,” she recalls. “They cut the ice in 60-pound blocks, put it on a horse-drawn wagon and took it to an icehouse that was insulated with 24 inches of Styrofoam to store it.”

More common these days, she says, are requests to visit Amish farms and businesses to experience how the community lives and works without electricity. It’s an old-fashioned twist on a new idea taking hold in business today: sustainability.

For example, two Amish-owned furniture businesses, Homestead Furniture and Green Acres Furniture, have built or remodeled their manufacturing facilities to improve workflow and energy efficiency.

For example, heat generated from the machines is redirected to keep rooms warm in other parts of the facility. They’ve also adjusted schedules and employee training so one machine will produce everything that’s needed for the week on day one and then get turned off for the remaining days.

“Both these facilities are run on generators, which complies with Amish requirements but also means they are completely off the power grid,” explains Kurt Kleidon, vice president and general manager of Kleidon and Associates, who handles public relations for the Holmes County Tourism Council. “Many outsiders think that the Amish are opposed to change, but these business owners have found that embracing change in ways that comply with their beliefs is the best way to improve operations.”

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