AGRICULTURE is an increasingly dicey career choice for the Amish of northeastern Ohio. "You can't make a living on the farming anymore," said Eli Miller, an Amish resident of Kidron, Ohio. "There's more money in the furniture shops."
There's also more money in Mr. Miller's chosen profession, assembling nonelectric gadgets for Lehman's, a company in Kidron that calls itself "the world's largest purveyor of historical technology."
Among Mr. Miller's contributions to Lehman's extensive catalog, few are more popular than the Old-Fashioned Corn Planter, a favorite among consumers who romanticize Amish simplicity.
The corn planter resembles a divining rod, except that there is a metal box, called the hopper, bolted to one prong. A user presses the planter's trowel-like tip into the soil, then squeezes the handles together. This action forces back a slide mechanism at the base of the hopper, uncovering a small hole; at this point, gravity takes over, and a few seeds (which don't have to be corn) plop to earth.
Emptying the hopper of its one-and-a-half-pound payload is laborious and time-consuming — but, of course, the minimalism is exactly the point.
Lehman's has offered the corn planters "on and off as long as I remember," said Galen Lehman, the company's president; its catalog also includes products like kerosene-powered refrigerators and one-legged milking stools. Until six years ago, the corn planters were made by a local artisan who, like Mr. Miller, had realized that the community's economic future lay in crafts, not cream. When he retired, however, his son did the math and concluded that the profit margin on the corn planter was too measly to justify continued production.
Rather than drop the corn planter from Lehman's lineup, Mr. Lehman asked Mr. Miller, the head of the company's shop, to take over the product's assembly. Mr. Miller learned from the retiring artisan the secrets of corn-planter construction, like how to rivet the steel spade onto the bottom.
A few changes were also made to the original design, to maximize the product's rustic charm — the prongs, for example, are now painted "gardener green" instead of bright orange.
"I usually build 50 at a time," Mr. Miller said. "I'd basically say, with waiting for the paint to dry and everything, it's two and a half days at least before I can get them in boxes ready to ship." He doesn't test every planter, though he will select a few at random and check to make sure the hopper's slide pulls back in a fluid motion.
Mr. Lehman said he had no concern that he would be "slaughtered by Wal-Mart" in the manual corn-planter market, contending that the relatively low demand was unlikely to spur the retailing Goliath to offer a version. He estimated that his company last year sold about 200 of the planters, priced at $49.95, exclusively through its Web site (lehmans.com), catalog and store in Kidron.
That sales figure qualifies the product as a solid performer by Lehman's standards. Mr. Lehman says the planter has found favor among gardeners who idealize the Amish, and among elderly people who can no longer bend down to sow seeds. The planter has not, however, sold well among the dwindling population of Amish farmers.
"A farmer," Mr. Lehman said, "is going to have a horse-drawn implement." Far more popular among this demographic are products like Lehman's kerosene-powered egg incubator.
No matter how much they admire Amish ways, consumers from the world of television and automobiles are unlikely to start raising their own chickens.