MILLERSBURG, Ohio—In a warehouse outside of this village in Ohio’s Amish Country, Brenton Wengerd walks along aisles of shelves stocked with 700 varieties of seeds that range from fruits, vegetables, and herbs to flowers, ancient grains, and cover crops.
A day earlier, his company—Berlin Seeds—co-hosted the second Food Independence Summit, where gardening and homesteading enthusiasts around the country traveled here to learn about sustainable living.
“Just as the summit’s purpose is to help people become more comfortable and knowledgeable about producing their own food, our mission here is to improve the health of their gardens so they have productive soil and a consistently abundant harvest,” he said.
Berlin Seeds sells seeds to 30,000 Amish and “English” (how the Amish commonly refer to non-Amish people) customers nationwide. Marcus Wengerd, Brenton’s father, owns the business. Brenton manages day-to-day operations—at the age of 21.
“Whatever needs to be done, I guess slap a title on it. I'll do it,” he said with a grin.
Marcus Wengerd, who bought Berlin Seeds a few years ago, is passionate about the healthy lifestyle that homegrown and locally sourced food promotes.
“Seed is the currency of our planet. If we don’t have seed, then we go hungry,” he said.
He instilled entrepreneurialism in his sons, Brenton and Logan, at a young age.
“I hoped that I would get a chance to work with my children, but when Brenton and Logan were young, I wasn’t sure that would happen because there was a time when they really didn’t think that working with dad would be much fun,” Mr. Wengerd said.
“I told them that they would work for me for a year or two, and then they would have to work somewhere else for the same time period so they would know what it was like to not have their dad as their boss. That relieved pressure because they knew that if they didn’t like working in a family business, they could do something else.”
Brenton is the general manager of Berlin Seeds. His father also owns Carlisle Printing, and Logan runs that business.
“Growing up in this community, people are taught to work. They are encouraged to become entrepreneurs,” Brenton Wengerd said. “Here, you either start your own business or find a profession and build upon it. We’re taught that you should earn what you eat with hard work. I think that’s a good principle.”
John Miller, who co-founded the Food Independence Summit with Mr. Wengerd last year, owns Superb Sealing Solutions.
When there was a shortage of canning lids during the COVID-19 pandemic, a few local companies approached Mr. Miller about manufacturing the lids at his facility in Sugarcreek. Superb sold 30 million lids last year.
One day in 2022, Mr. Miller drove past a golf course where there was a micro camping festival.
“Why not have a canning festival?” he thought. Mr. Miller talked to Mr. Wengerd, who expanded the idea to include a summit to “bring together people who grow their own food and show them how to do it—all the way from seed and soil to preservation.”
The intent is to encourage and provide the tools and information to take steps toward discovering the freedom that comes with homegrown and local food, Mr. Wengerd said.
Homegrown food is making a major resurgence, partly because of supply chain disruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic and also because of inflation and uncertainty about the condition of produce and meat found in grocery stores.
Ohio’s Amish Country is the ideal destination for a sustainable living event, Mr. Miller said—but not because of what it’s most known for.
The region includes the second largest community of Amish in the world, behind Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Most of the settlement is located around Holmes County, which has the highest concentration of Amish in any U.S. county. Half of the county’s population is Amish, and many members of closely related denominations—like the Mennonites—reside here, too.
Amish Country is one of Ohio’s most visited tourist areas. Visitors flock here to experience farm attractions and museums and buy a wide assortment of handmade goods and artisan products.
Local stores carry canned fruits and vegetables, and apple butter and preserves. The Guggisberg Cheese Factory in Millersburg, the Holmes County seat, invented Baby Swiss and has a viewing area where guests can see the cheesemaking process.
The Amish and Mennonite Heritage Center in Millersburg has exhibits that explain the culture and religion.
Sugarcreek is home to the Alpine Hills Historical Museum, which displays what is reported to be the World’s Largest Cuckoo Clock.
Bed and breakfasts and historic inns dot the landscape amid meticulously maintained and sprawling farms. Horse-drawn buggies are just as common as automobiles on some of the roads.
Mr. Miller said he appreciates the tourism support and traffic, but what makes this area “perfect” for an event that encourages gardening and homesteading is its heritage.
“We live in a community where homesteading is a way of life. The notion of sustainable living is a deeply entrenched tradition dating back several hundreds of years,” Mr. Miller explained. “This is a community that encourages and embraces entrepreneurial endeavors.
“Take a drive down these roads, and you can find food producers and manufacturers of barns, lumber, tools, and farming supplies as just a few examples. Another benefit of having the summit here is that it brings together people who want to become more proficient at leading a self-sufficient lifestyle, and they can get all the supplies they need with the businesses that are here.”
Joel Salatin, the owner of Polyface Farm in Virginia, is one of the nation’s foremost authorities on organic farming.
At the summit, he hosted a session that encouraged parents to work with their kids so they will want to work with their parents.
Mr. Salatin said he likes being part of the Food Independence Summit:
“[In Ohio’s Amish country], the traditions ... inspire and motivate children to start and build their own businesses that contribute to the community maintaining a sustainable way of life.
“There is a homesteading tsunami because there is a deep intuitive understanding that society is heading in a way where it is better to be in the country than in the city.
“There is a self-reliant persona in rural regions that doesn’t exist in urban regions where there is unrest and violence. Homesteading and homeschooling are on the rise because of this. Because this lifestyle is new to a lot of people, understanding how to transition is important, and it is a learning process.”
Mr. Salatin attributes the abundance of entrepreneurs and businesses centered around sustainable living in Amish Country to values that instill an appreciation for work, which is what he talked about at the summit.
“Work is not a punishment. Don’t ever make work punishment,” Mr. Salatin added. “Make work exciting and fun. Make it task-oriented, and not time-oriented.
Task-oriented assignments build a respect for work, and complementing that with offering children the freedom to pursue their own interests gives them a chance to succeed and fail and find out who they are, Mr. Salatin said.
The homesteading lifestyle encourages this path, he added, because of the elements required to live off the land and produce homegrown food.
Mr. Salatin’s words resonated with Melissa Renee, a single mom who moved to Ohio from Mississippi five years ago to seek medical care for one of her children. In January, she relocated from suburban Cincinnati and bought a two-acre homestead located next to Amish farmers.
Ms. Renee learned about the Food Independence Summit from her Amish neighbors, who received a bulk order from Berlin Seeds and brought over the event brochure.
“I had been laughing and joking with them that, as a new homesteader, I had no idea what I was doing with adding a dairy cow and trying to figure out how to add chickens to go along with a garden,” she said. “They knew that the summit would be something that would help me with my journey.”
Ms. Renee named her homestead Handwritten Hills. She documents her experience on Facebook, Instagram, and other social media sites. Five generations of her family have farmed, and she learned self-sustainable living skills as a child, but the transition to homesteading as an adult is an adjustment that she hopes others can learn from.
“[The Food Independence Summit] not only taught me a few things I didn’t know, but more importantly, it renewed my spirit [because of] the sense of community among people with a like-minded purpose of providing for their families from the land.”
During a tour of Berlin Seeds, Ms. Renee explained that she saw a lot of her 18-year-old son, Everitt Townsend, in Brenton Wengerd. Like Mr. Wengerd, her son was homeschooled, and is an entrepreneur. Townsend owns E.T. World Productions, a video production and photography business that counts churches, small businesses, and large companies among its clients.
Though she is new to homesteading, Ms. Renee has 20 years of experience as a homeschool mom, and she helps parents new to the process effectively teach their children.
“In many ways, homesteading and homeschooling are similar,” she said. “At an early age, homeschooled children are encouraged to explore what they like, and they discover gifts and talents that they develop because they have the freedom to do that.
“You can put a seed in the ground, but unless there is rich and fertile soil, it won’t grow. You have to create good soil and give it sunlight and proper care,” Ms. Renee said. “You prepare for storms and droughts, and there are times when you don’t have as big of a harvest as you thought.
“In homeschooling, the child is that seed. The child will experience storms and drought, and some seasons will be better than other seasons. That is why a strong root system is important.”
Young adult entrepreneurs such as Mr. Wengerd illustrate the value of that strong root system and the message that Mr. Salatin detailed in his address at the summit, Ms. Renee said.
She brought her two younger sons, who are 13 and 7, so they could see firsthand the influence of homesteaders who are in different stages of the journey they are experiencing at Handwritten Hills and locals such as the Millers and the Wengerds.
“The way of life they are taught gives them a greater sense of identity and a strong work ethic because they have not just learned out of a book. They have identified and grown their interests, and they have gained a lot of hands-on experience and mentorship,” she said. “Everywhere you look around the summit, and around Amish Country, you see people who are carrying on what they learned as children and what generations before them have done.”
Observations like those reflect the realization of expectations in Ohio’s Amish Country, Mr. Wengerd said.
“Whether you are Amish or Mennonite, or not, you are expected to uphold a sense of responsibility when you live here. You are expected to do good, and to make a positive contribution to the community,” he said. “There is a weight of responsibility, and that’s a good thing because that’s how the traditions from past generations are kept alive.”
