The Amish Farm Probably Isn't Organic. Bill Gates Still Thinks We Should Learn From It.

Picture an Amish farmer walking behind a team of horses in Pennsylvania. No tractor, no GPS, no screen in the cab. You'd assume the farm is organic.

Probably not. A 2013 paper by two College of Wooster researchers puts it bluntly: the large majority of Amish aren't full-time farmers, and those who do farm typically use conventional, chemical-intensive methods. The horses don't make the crop organic.

What the Amish do have is a long habit of deciding which technology to let in. And in October 2026, Bill Gates, the man who put a computer on every desk, suggested a lot of us may end up doing the same.

What Gates actually said

Gates spent 70 minutes on The Verge's Decoder podcast with Nilay Patel in October. Most of it was about AI risk. The food came in late.

Unless the world chooses to massively slow down or stop, he said, we will have robots that can build houses, grow food and do surgery, and human labour won't be necessary for most goods and services. He put that about 20 years out, "a reasonably safe number", though he said he could be wrong. His worry is the transition, with its winners, losers and a lot of disruption. On the far side he sees cheap houses, cures that wouldn't otherwise happen, and possibly no shortages at all.

Which leaves the obvious question of what anyone does with their days. Gates said that's for younger people to answer, then offered a starting point: "You could literally say, 'Let's be like the Amish and let's only use AI for certain things.'"

He'd already given the idea a name. In an essay published on 26 August, he proposed "Human Reserved": work machines could do, but that we decide to keep for people anyway. He likes the phrase because it makes him think of nature reserves, places where we could put buildings and roads but choose not to because the loss would be too great. It came partly from watching the caregivers who looked after his father through Alzheimer's. They always knew when he was hungry, even when he couldn't say so, and Gates says no robot could or should have done that job.

On Decoder he named the likely candidates: childcare, food preparation, art and sport, kept human even though the AI could do them better. He'd tried with Claude to push the reserved share up to 40% of the labour market, and couldn't get close without artificially holding the AI back. Hence his conclusion: "We may need to develop the taste to actually not use technology to its maximum." A lot of humanity, he thinks, may choose not to live at the technological frontier.

Odd thing to hear from the Windows guy. Not wrong, though.

The novel that saw it coming

Aldous Huxley got there first. Brave New World, published in 1932, imagines a World State run on the principles of Henry Ford's assembly line: mass production, sameness, predictability and disposable consumer goods. Citizens are bred into castes and conditioned from birth to like their place. Leftover unhappiness gets a dose of soma, and the whole arrangement is justified by one word: stability.

Neil Postman later put the difference between Huxley and Orwell neatly. Orwell feared that what we hate would ruin us. Huxley feared it would be what we love. That's the kind of danger Gates is describing. Nobody will force the robots on us. We'll take them because they're cheaper and easier.

In 1946 Huxley wrote a new foreword, and it's the part most people miss. If he rewrote the book, he said, he'd give the Savage a third option. Not the World State, not the reservation, but a community in between, with decentralised economics, co-operative politics, and science and technology used "as though, like the Sabbath, they had been made for man". Machines adapted to people, rather than people adapted to machines.

The Amish have been living a version of that for generations.

How the Amish decide

They don't reject everything invented after the horse. Elizabethtown College's Amish Studies site describes their use of technology as selective. Televisions and personal computers are out. Batteries, solar power, shop tools, gas grills and some farm equipment are in, and Amish mechanics build their own machines to fit the rules. Many hire non-Amish drivers but won't own a car. From outside that looks like hypocrisy. The reasoning is that cars, by bringing greater mobility, would pull the community apart.

Lindsay Ems spent three years studying Amish settlements in Indiana and wrote it up for the MIT Press Reader in July 2026. The leaders she spoke to worried that new technology would weaken the sense of purpose people felt in their communities, with smartphones and social media the specific fear.

Her best example is the black-box phone: a landline handset wired to a box that connects to the cell network, powered from a car's cigarette lighter. One prototype sat in a plywood box so construction crews could take it on the road. Spoken calls only, no texting, no internet, shared by the whole crew, and deliberately awkward to carry. Apple won't be launching one.

Ems's conclusion is that the Amish don't care much what a technology is. They care what adopting it would do to the people around them. She's also clear it isn't a utopia. Children get relatively little formal schooling, medicine is limited, gender roles are strictly enforced, and the shunning of excommunicated members can be devastating.

The organic paradox

Back to that Wooster paper. Matthew Mariola and David McConnell were studying an Amish organic farming cooperative in northeast Ohio, and they found going certified organic was a pragmatic decision, driven by worry about what losing their farming heritage would do to Amish life. It wasn't easy. The co-op had to meet external certification standards in a culture wary of bureaucracy, and find buyers without using the Amish name in its marketing.

Think about that for a second. A people famously wary of outside rules signed up for an outside rulebook, paperwork and all, because it protected the thing they wanted to keep. That's Huxley's third option in a field in Ohio: the system serving the way of life, not the other way round.

It cuts the other way too. Most Amish farms aren't certified organic, and a certified organic grower can run a tractor, a laptop and drip irrigation. Certification is about inputs and practices, not how old the machinery looks. A horse tells you nothing about what was sprayed.

Closer to home

Food systems drift towards sameness for ordinary commercial reasons. In Southland, Robert and Robyn Guyton have spent around forty years rescuing apple varieties from old orchards, and put their count at more than 400. The supermarket sells about six, bred for sweetness, crunch, colour and storage, and most of them licensed assets with owners. Nothing wrong with that. But an apple variety is a clone, and if nobody grafts it, it dies with the last tree. One gene pool has revenue behind it. The other has a couple in Riverton with secateurs.

Some New Zealanders already buy on different terms. In a CSA, or community supported agriculture scheme, you back a single farm for a season, pay up front, share the risk, and eat whatever that land produces each week. The Real Food Map lists 128 organic shops, farm gates, markets and growers across the country. None of it is anti-technology. These growers run vans, websites and spreadsheets, and a small grower could use AI to plan rotations or sell direct.

What we keep

Gates named food preparation as something we might keep human. Growing it, he expects the robots to take. In his essay he says agriculture is where he sees AI having its fastest impact in low-income countries, and his foundation is already using it for better seeds, livestock genetics and weather forecasts for farmers in Africa.

So picture the end point, where machines grow, pick, process, cook and deliver almost everything we eat. Do you still grow tomatoes? Nobody with a backyard vegetable patch is trying to beat a commercial glasshouse on cost. They do it for the watching, the picking and the eating. Same with sourdough, a home orchard, or dinner from scratch. It takes time and it goes wrong, and that's half the point.

That only stays possible if the alternatives are still there: the organic grower, the heritage orchard, the box scheme, the market stall. They stay there because people buy from them.

Huxley spent 1932 imagining the machine world and 1946 wishing he'd written the way out. Gates is now describing the machine world as a forecast. The way out hasn't changed: decide what the machines are for, and keep the rest for ourselves.

Some of the rest is already growing in Riverton.

Before you go

If you want more say in where your food comes from, start with the Real Food Map or the guide to organic box schemes and CSAs.

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