Adhering to a strict religious doctrine that resists new technology, Amish farmers here spent decades largely eschewing industrial farming practices that have become common around the United States.

But the community has recently become splintered by an industrial farm alliance between one of the area’s leading Amish farming families and JBS Foods, the world’s largest beef producer. 

Over the last two years, JBS has forged a partnership to establish a mammoth vertically-integrated cattle feeding operation that confines more than 100,000 male calves and steers in large concrete, steel and vinyl-covered feeding barns. The barns also generate thousands of tons of solid manure each day.

Prompted by persistent complaints of odor and water contamination, regulators from the Ohio Agriculture Department and the state Environmental Protection Agency investigated earlier this year and cited nine farms for manure mismanagement. The agencies also issued fines to three farms for failing to secure proper operating permits.  

The cited farms, most owned by the Schmucker family, are close to each other in Williams County, Ohio. Inspectors from the two state agencies found uncontained manure running off big waste piles and out of barns, and draining into streams and wetlands. Inspectors took water samples that contained high concentrations of nitrogen ammonia, a contaminant of manure. 

Processing power: 1,400 cattle daily at JBS

Number of cattle: Over 100,000 male calves and steers in the operation.

Cattle weight: Calves fed until they weigh 600–700 pounds.

Slaughter capacity: JBS processing plant handling 1,400 cattle daily.

Manure pollution documented

The state findings were consistent with those observed by residents who’ve watched as Amish farmers piled manure in huge mounds and spread it on farm fields as fertilizer. Some have taken their own water samples that confirmed it polluted streams, lakes and the St. Joseph River. 

The widespread contamination caused a deepening schism within the community, which was unfamiliar with such immense agricultural industrialization and the subsequent environmental contamination. 

Neither Noah Schmucker Jr., the leader of the Amish farm community, nor JBS executives agreed to be interviewed for this report. Executives of Wagler and Associates, an Indiana construction company heavily involved in building the feeding barns, also declined to be interviewed. 

When asked about the concerns, Ohio Department of Agriculture Director Brian Baldridge said in an email message the agency would continue to “engage with all property owners to ensure they are following Ohio laws and rules.”

The civic restiveness here is part of a growing national movement protesting the public health and environmental consequences of wastes produced by confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) that produce most of the nation’s milk, meat and eggs. 

Almost everywhere they operate, discharges of manure and other wastes from CAFOs are a primary source of water pollution, according to state and federal assessments. Phosphorus from hog, dairy and poultry CAFOs have been linked to annual toxic algal blooms in Lake Erie, Chesapeake Bay, Lake Champlain and other iconic American waters. 

The tide of nitrates from CAFO waste in Mississippi River Basin states is a major cause of the expansive dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. Last summer, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency sued three big dairies to control manure wastes contaminating groundwater in Washington state. The EPA has also directed state authorities to halt pollution from CAFO waste in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Oregon. 

California critics put the issue to a vote in this month’s general election, seeking to make Sonoma County the first in the nation to ban CAFOs, also called “factory farms.” Farm and business interests mounted stiff opposition and 85% of voters opposed it. 

“Steuben County has 101 lakes. It’s our legacy. It’s our bread and butter, our tourism dollars. It’s our heritage,” said Susan Catterall, a mother of five who lives in Hamilton and is a leader of the environmental coalition opposing the growing cattle sector. 

“It’s being spoiled. We’ve got farms polluting our county with an unbelievable amount of manure.”

Trends fostering the partnership

Driving the new industry’s development are economic factors and limits on environmental oversight that extend well beyond this corner of three states. According to the operation’s business plan, which became public last year, Amish farms are raising male crossbred calves born to Holstein cows from dairies in neighboring states and sired from same-sex semen of Angus bulls. 

Around 3,000 calves arrive weekly and are fed for several months until weighing 600 to 700 pounds. After being fattened at a finishing feed yard, the cattle arrive at a JBS processing plant in Plainwell, where an average of 1,400 cattle are slaughtered daily. Animals with 51% or more black hides can be marketed by JBS as higher priced certified “choice” and “prime” Angus beef.

In developing a reliable source of beef that is much closer than JBS’s suppliers in the West, the company is also competing with Walmart and other corporate beef producers to perfect practices that are weakening the nation’s range-fed cattle sector. 

“Vertical integration is eliminating competition in the industry,” said Bill Bullard, a former rancher in South Dakota and chief executive of R-CALF USA, an independent cattlemen’s trade association. “A vertically-integrated system needs fewer farmers. That’s why we wiped out 90% of all the hog producers just since 1980, and why we’ve wiped out 89% of the dairy producers.

The unseen cost of expansion

Manure production: 7 million pounds (3,500 tons) of manure daily.

Number of farms cited: 9 Amish farms cited for manure management violations.

Water contamination: High levels of nitrates, phosphorus, and E-coli found in streams and lakes.

EPA actions: Lawsuits and directives for CAFO waste management in states like Washington, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Oregon.

Lost independent operations: 107,000 independent beef cattle operations lost in 5 years.

“The cattle industry is really the last frontier,” he added. “We still have approximately 20% of cattle still marketed in an open competitive cash market or spot market. What’s at risk here is that these vertically-integrated systems are going to extinguish the cash market in the cattle industry. Just in the last five years, we’ve lost nearly 107,000 independent beef cattle operations. They’re dropping like flies.”

The JBS-Amish partnership is ominous for other reasons. Most of the country’s beef cattle are still raised on pasture, where manure is spread across the land and has time to incorporate into soil. The U.S. population of Amish is now nearly 400,000 and growing most rapidly in the Great Lakes states, according to the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College.  The model JBS has established here could readily be embraced by entrepreneurial Amish communities in other states. JBS also has beef processing plants in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and Souderton, Pennsylvania. 

Industrial-scale manure management: A growing threat to water quality 

The consequences for water quality could be dire. As the operators of any large corporate dairy, hog or poultry operation know, one of the most challenging facets of confining large numbers of farm animals is managing manure. Using standard U.S. Department of Agriculture measurements of manure produced by calves (60 pounds per day) and growing cattle (75 pounds), the Amish cattle farms here produce roughly 7 million pounds — 3,500 tons — of manure daily. 

In states that support large industrialized livestock and poultry sectors, including Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, North Carolina, and Missouri, concentrated feeding operations are major polluters. Water samples collected by the Steuben County Lakes Council and the Williams County Alliance, two environmental groups, show persistently high concentrations of nitrates, phosphorus and dangerous E-coli bacteria in streams and lakes in the region that encompass the St. Joseph River watershed. The river serves Fort Wayne, Indiana, with its drinking water and drains into the Maumee River, the primary source of the pollutants that cause a mammoth annual toxic algae bloom in Lake Erie. The groups also tracked the contamination upstream to the headwaters of Fish Creek and Black Creek. Both flow through the Amish cattle farms. 

Shifting landscape: Great Lakes growth

The U.S. Amish population, with nearly 400,000 now, has experienced rapid growth in the Great Lakes states.

The situation outrages Sandy Bihn, executive director of Lake Erie Waterkeeper, who has worked for decades with multiple groups to cure the lake’s annual toxic bloom. 

“How is it possible to let 100,000 animals, and all the nitrates and phosphorus that they produce, come into the watershed that we’re investing millions and millions of dollars, if not billions of dollars, to protect?” Bihn said. “This just shows how meat and JBS are able to control the system.”

While the buggies, beards and plain dress still help to identify Amish farmers in the Williams County region, there is nothing characteristically Amish about the vertically integrated, industrial scale, scientifically advanced calf and cattle production system that has quickly evolved here. 

The financial advantage is plain for the Schmuckers and the other Amish farmers. The most labor-intensive aspect of the Amish cattle operation is feeding and caring for calves. Amish families are often large, with plenty of hands available for the work. Latino laborers are also employed to help with animal care and operate the skidders that push manure out of the barns. Business appears lucrative as area farmland often ranges from $14,000 to $20,000 an acre, according to county records.

Permit plans for large-scale farming ignite tensions

The civic confrontation between the Amish and the neighboring communities started in December 2023 when Noah Schmucker and Wagler and Associates sought a permit to build a $10 million feeding facility for 8,000 calves and cattle in Steuben County. It was the first time the scale of the operation and JBS’s involvement was publicly revealed. 

Schmucker flatly stated at the hearing that if the county refused the permit, he would just build smaller feeding barns that evaded county and state permitting requirements. Ohio does not require a permit unless a barn houses more than 1,000 animals. Indiana’s limit is 300.

Hundreds of residents, many of them owners of lakeside homes, protested both options, fearing water pollution from manure. The county rejected the permit, prompting Schmucker to proceed with subdividing land and construction.

Evidence of the industry’s presence, and its profitability, is everywhere now around Edon, Ohio. Dozens of large cattle-feeding barns have already been built, each costing $130,000 or more, and many others are under construction. Trucks hauling calves and cattle crowd the highways and the narrow dirt farm-to-market roads. New Amish homes are under construction. Manure piles rest out in the open like sleeping beasts beside confinement barns. Trucks loaded with manure head for dumping sites. The entire region’s scent is an invisible and noxious veil of cattle wastes. 

Big dollars, big builds

Barn construction costs: $130,000+ per barn.

Feeding facility cost: $10 million proposed build.

Land prices: $14,000–$20,000 per acre in Edon, Ohio.

Following persistent complaints from residents of pollution and odor, state environmental and agriculture authorities in the three states have inspected many of the Amish farms. Michigan authorities last year directed a calf-feeding operation to halt the flow of manure draining into a stream that fed a nearby lake. Last year, inspectors from Indiana’s Agriculture Department inspected a Steuben County farm and found that it was in compliance with state rules. 

The Ohio Environmental Protection Agency cited nine Amish farms for violations of manure management regulations in August and set a Sept. 1 deadline for fixing them, which the farms met. Last April, Ohio authorities discovered several feeding sites where the number of cattle exceeded 1,000 animals, and the farms have since come into compliance. The state also ordered the largest mounds of manure, some towering two and three stories tall, to be removed. 

The Ohio Agriculture Department issued $20,000 in fines to three Amish farms for failing to acquire the proper state permits. 

Ohio’s toughest enforcement since 1999

$20,000 in fines for permit violations.

Most aggressive farm pollution enforcement since 1999 in Ohio.

Ohio’s action reflects the limited reach of state environmental law to control agricultural contamination. Though modest, the state’s enforcement is the most aggressive against farm pollution since 1999, when Ohio cited an egg farm for fouling water with chicken litter. 

Not yet clear is whether it will have any effect on water quality. 

“What’s happening is that JBS is taking advantage of lesser (state) environmental requirements and just simply exploiting the situation,” said Bullard, the South Dakota rancher and executive.

The New Lede published a version of this article on Nov. 8, 2024. 

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