How do Amish people generally make money? I know there are markets that sell Amish goods to non-Amish, but there must be more to their income than that.
I live in Lancaster PA and most Amish can't afford the farm land here anymore (its become housing and malls) and have moved west. Lots of Amish now work in the trades (construction/electrical/roofing/etc.) Someone picks them up and takes them to their job sites. Their general low standard of living (no car payments or electronics budgets) allow for that to be a very solid income for most.
By "moved west" I presume you just mean farther west into the state, rather than the west coast? I'm from near Mercer, PA and I haven't noticed any decline in the number of buggies on the roads near there.
A lot have moved west of the mountains but they have also pushed into Ohio, Indiana and Iowa. There are still plenty around but the model of buying a farm for each new couple to run and start their own family isn't tenable with the real estate prices around here and the declining number of farms period.
It is quite a shame as Lancaster County is some of the world's best farmland/top soil and we've paved it all. :(
The article quotes ~$8,000 for a new buggy, plus a horse which although they produce themselves has to be fed and cared for. That to me sounds in the ballpark of the cost of owning a decent used car.
"A lot of people will get 20 or 30 years out of a buggy before they do any major rebuilding of it." They tend to get a lot more use out of them and even then, they are rebuilt and given to their kids for far less than another new buggy.
Obviously, there will be some who buy new more frequently, but that goes directly against their way of life (to not seek the material things of this world) and is not that common.
They're good farmers, self-finance and produce a lot of skilled trade stuff.
The big secret to small time farming is that if you don't have to pay for lots of shit like tractors, etc, you can make money the old fashioned way. Not having car payments, cable tv, etc helps too.
Also, many groups are loaded because they've sold land that's been swallowed up by suburban sprawl.
They also tend to pool and share resources, so an expensive piece of equipment isn't purchased by every farmer in an area, but shared between them. What we'd call a more modern farm has enormous redundancy in equipment ownership in the same local area, which makes it really hard for them to get into a profitable state.
When I was in college, someone hired a team of Amish to build a car stereo shop across the street. It was quite fascinating to watch. They built it using techniques you normally see when building a barn. They sunk a whole series of posts into the ground. They were all different lengths. It made no sense when you looked at it, no apparent rhyme nor reason to it.
They poured a slab around the posts (well, the concrete company did), and then they got out their chainsaws and started cutting the tops off the posts and leveling them to each other. They attached cross members, and out of the chaos emerged the superstructure of the building. It went up fast. When they were done you would never know it wasn't built using traditional methods.