Investigating Amish attitudes toward farm safety and the well-being of their children

• By Michael Long/LNP | LancasterOnline

So far this year, LNP | LancasterOnline has reported three fatal farm accidents. All of the victims were children or teenagers, and all were buried in Amish cemeteries.

Levi Stoltzfus, 4, died in West Hempfield Township after he was struck by a piece of farm equipment that was moving hay bales.

Aaron Stoltzfus, 18, died after he was run over by a wagon at his home in Eden Township.

Samuel Yoder, 5, died when he was hit in the head by a heavy pipe that fell from a mule-drawn wagon at a farm in Little Britain Township.

Do reports like these indicate the Amish care less about farm safety and, in particular, the safety of their children? People who know the Amish and work with them on safety initiatives say that is far from the case.

Amish attitudes toward safety

A member of the Pennsylvania Amish Safety Committee — a five-member, exclusively Amish board that promotes safety measures in and around Amish farms — was unequivocal in voicing how the community feels about its children.

“We all care about our children,” he said.

LNP | LancasterOnline granted anonymity for the man over concerns about protecting the privacy of the Amish community, which does not regularly engage with outside media.

Because the Amish own more than half the farms in Lancaster County, and because most of the people on those farms are children (Amish parents typically have six to eight children), young Amish are statistically the most likely to die in farm accidents here.

Moreover, Amish boys and girls attend school only through eighth grade, so they spend most of their teenage years working, often on a family farm. An allowance for agriculture in U.S. child labor laws lets children as young as 12 work long hours around dangerous equipment.

Recognizing the hazards inherent in their lifestyle, the Lancaster County-based committee meets monthly from January through October to address safety concerns and raise awareness about new safety initiatives. The committee member who spoke to LNP | LancasterOnline said they regularly discuss four main safety components: workplace safety and Occupational Safety and Health Administration guidelines, fire and water hazards, buggy and highway safety, and farm and home safety.

The man said his community has responded positively to the committee’s messages of safety, but some generational changes in the culture present new challenges, especially in the realm of farm and home safety.

According to the most recent Amish census data from the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College, more than 44,000 adults and children live in the 257 church districts that make up the Lancaster Amish settlement, and in many of those districts, the use of power equipment is now permissible.

“When I was a boy, my dad didn’t have a tractor or skid loader or forklift, so it wasn’t quite as dangerous. He would take us out (on horse-drawn wagons) to bale hay and to haul in corn, and that mentality a lot of us still have,” the safety committee member said.

Riding along with Dad to do chores has long been a core practice among the Amish, he said, but more powerful equipment makes that bonding and learning experience more dangerous for children. Trying to change attitudes around that practice has been difficult.

“That has been a tough call,” the Amish man said. “But we are working very hard to educate people that children can be taught to run away when the forklift starts, when the skid loader starts (rather than running toward them for a ride).”

The Amish, he said, are perpetually trying to balance the need for safety with the need to preserve and nurture their agrarian culture.

Help from outside the community

For more than a decade, a growing consortium of health and safety professionals has been meeting regularly with the Amish committee to help plan and execute specific safety initiatives. Partners include Penn Medicine Lancaster General Health, WellSpan Health, Penn State Extension, Hershey Medical Center, state police and more.

The first big initiative the consortium helped to push through was the production and installation of covers for hay holes, which are holes in the floors of barns through which farmers drop hay bales for their cattle below, and through which farm children can fall.

Another initiative popularized the wearing of reflective vests for Amish people rollerblading and riding scooters and bikes along roads.

Today, the consortium is helping to address some of the dangers of new technology on Amish farms.

“The Amish community is putting backup cameras on their skid loaders” said Kimberly Nunemaker, who coordinates education programming for the Pennsylvania Division of the American Trauma Society, a consortium partner.

The society provides backup cameras to farm families who need to have children under the age of 15 living or working on the farm. Skid loaders have low rear visibility, and over the last four years, the society has installed more than 150 backup cameras in Lancaster County.

Another consortium partner, the pediatric trauma program at Penn State Health Children’s Hospital in Hershey, focuses on educational outreach in the Plain community, which includes Amish and Old Order Mennonites.

Jen Lau, who manages the pediatric trauma program, said her team works with Amish in and out of the hospital. When a family brings in a child with an injury — typically a child has fallen, or been backed over or kicked by a horse — a trauma nurse will spend time with the family and educate them on best practices for safety on the farm.

“Kids do things that are developmentally appropriate: They climb, they explore. Those are things kids do by nature. On a farm, that’s an inherently riskier place to be. So when you take that developmentally appropriate thing a child does in that setting, it does take some extra attention to make sure they’re safe.”

Three members of Lau’s team dedicate themselves entirely to community outreach. They work to identify trends in child trauma and match them with strategies for prevention.

The team has done a lot of work, for instance, with poison control, talking to farmers about how they can store pesticides and other farm chemicals so children won’t mistake them for something ingestible.

For the most part, Lau said, the Plain families they’ve worked with have been collegial and invested in improving safety practices on the farm, but changing behaviors doesn’t always happen overnight.

Risk versus reward

Most of the sources interviewed reiterated a common theme: Not all people approach safety the same way, even in a community as tightly knit by religious faith as the Amish community. Some people will proactively make sure their children stay out of harm’s way, and others might be more lackadaisical.

For those in the Plain community who blatantly disregard safety measures, the Lancaster County District Attorney’s Office has shown that prosecution, while rare, is an option.

Christopher Hoover Martin, 29, of Ephrata, is awaiting trial on child endangerment charges after he put a 3-year-old girl in a horse-drawn cart that didn’t have safety equipment in October 2022. She fell out and was run over by another trailer in a tobacco field. The girl died.

In 2019, Alvin Beiler, 41, of Salisbury Township, was sentenced to 6 to 23 months in prison on charges of endangering the welfare of a child after he started a feed mixer while his 4-year-old son was inside, killing him.

But Steve Nolt, director of the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College, said the vast majority of Amish embrace the work of the safety committee and want to take measures to ensure the well-being of their children.

“The nuclear family is a very important unit in Amish society,” Nolt said. “Amish parents believe they have a divine responsibility to raise their children in a way that will prepare them for adulthood. In that sense, it’s not really different than almost anyone else’s view of childhood; it’s more that there’s a different view of the adulthood they’re aiming at.”

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Amish people know the risks involved in farm labor, Nolt said, not just for children but for adults. But they value the family farm and they value the work and the cultural bonds built through their labors. Eliminating those risks would eliminate key aspects of their culture, so they look instead to balance those risks with caution.

To those who think children should not be invested in inherently hazardous farm labor, Nolt points to a common activity in the modern world: high school football.

On any given Friday in October in Lancaster County, entire towns gather around the gridiron to watch their teams battle, and an ambulance parks close by each of those contests. The modern world acknowledges the potential risks for injury in football, but as a society believes football is important for high school kids, for their identity, Nolt said.

Nolt’s colleague, Elizabethtown College sociology professor Conrad Kanagy, puts a finer point on that argument.

Kanagy, who teaches courses on Amish life and culture, spends time with his students contrasting Amish ways with the ways of modern society, and he recognizes distinct benefits to the Amish approach.

“While there might be more risks if they’re at home with their father and mother in a farm family, the Amish would see the advantages outweighing the risks simply because they’re able to socialize their own children, rather than someone else doing that,” Kanagy said.

In modern society, young people can struggle with a deep sense of fragmentation, Kanagy said. They lack the sense of belonging and groundedness that an Amish upbringing can provide. Kids grapple with drug abuse and the deleterious effects of social media.

“Which society is creating greater risk for their children?” he said.