No electricity. No cars. Only hard work. For two years I infiltrated Amish society to learn the secrets of their butter trade.
My ancestors were dairy farmers in northern Wisconsin for generations. Everyday we spent hours in the field milking the cows to prepare our regionally famous butter (some readers may have had the privilege of tasting the Butter Face brand). It was through this upbringing that I learned the butter industry and within time married and started my own butter trade.
For years my homestead profited from our butter trade. However, after several years Amish neighbors moved in next door. From that moment on my sales dropped. My once booming online marketplace now fruitless – and only the Amish to blame.
In northern Wisconsin we have a local saying, “If you can’t beat them, join them”. And that’s exactly what I did. Kissing my husband and children goodbye, I vowed to return only after I learned the secrets of what made their butter so.
The Operation
I walked over to my local Amish church to join their society. After several attempts to communicate, I pulled out my smartphone to help bridge the gap between my English and their Pennsylvania Dutch. No sooner had I unlocked my phone did the bishop shriek “Nein!” and slap my phone out of my hand. I knew I had become one of the Amish.
For the first year I started on laundry duty. I never got the chance to work on the butter, but each night I would taste it with a hearty slice of sourdough. Oh so close yet oh so far. On Christmas day I finally built up the courage to ask for a transition to butter duty. “Ja klar” responded Frau Stoltzfus. Finally I would get firsthand experience of what made the signature Amish butter so.
The Butter Trade
After years of undercover infiltration, what was the secret? Was it the creaminess of their milk, a secret salt ratio, or perhaps specialized equipment? No. It was just pure hard work.
So naturally I resisted. Rather than spend hours each day at a butter churn, I feigned a wrist injury and watched from a distance. Besides, I needed to get a bird’s eye view of the process if I was going to replicate this to grow my own Wisconsin butter empire.
For 14 hours a day I patiently watched as the buttermaids took turns grinding away at gallons of buttermilk to turn it into semi-soft gold. Hands covered in calluses still bled by the end of the day, only to be bandaged to repeat the grind the next day. These folks gave all they had to the churn, and I was at once both humbled and baffled.
Almost a year later, I was in the middle of an avid daydreaming session when I had an epiphany. What these folks did by hand for 14 hours, a Black and Decker drill could do in 30 minutes. Plus, there was no risk of inadvertently bleeding into the butter and ruining the entire batch (deep despair and sadness could only begin to describe the disappointment on the faces of the Amish buttermaids when they realized they needed to toss a batch after 12 hours of grueling churning).
Needless to say, I immediately stormed out of the barn (accidentally tossing my bonnet right into a newly finished batch of butter, whoops!) and never looked back.
The Return
After 2 years living with the Amish I did my best to integrate myself back into modern society. But as I soon found out, the world had moved on without me. My husband remarried, taking our sons to live with his new wife in Minnesota. Apple had just released the iPhone 9, rendering my iPhone 8 all but obsolete. But the butter industry was still the same. With all the butter secrets I had learned from the Amish butter trade, I knew I was ready to start my butter empire.
