Solar panels find a home with Amish

A drive through the rolling hills of this Holmes County farming community 80 miles south of Cleveland delights the senses with smells of farm manure and sawmill resins mingling with limestone dust rising from the roads.

Amish farmers work the fields with horse-drawn plows while their beef cattle and milk cows slowly graze nearby pastures. Women tend laundry on sagging clotheslines as their toddlers play with wooden toys.

Weaving around horse-drawn buggies, a visitor might miss the sight that seems out of place here - a technology that most Americans only dream about - solar panels.

Designed to turn photons into electrons, the purple-black panels have sprung up in the last five years on the roofs of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Amish homes, barns and greenhouses.

Though still resisted by a few hard-line Amish denominations, this technology that NASA relies on for its most advanced spacecraft is being heartily embraced by more and more of the plain-spoken folk. They view it as a safe alternative to lighting their homes with natural gas, white gasoline or kerosene.

Organic dairy, beef and chicken farmer Owen Nisley on County Road 600 near Charm, describes solar as natural as nature itself - "no different from my cows eating the grass that has captured the sun's energy."

Nisley's solar panels generate about 500 watts of power.

"The initial setup was very expensive," he said, "but we love the solar, even in the winter when there are a lot of dark days."

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