John Esh on Amish Life & Cheese (Video)
If you caught the “Is Amish Life Hard?” post of a couple weeks ago, that was an excerpt of a longer conversation with John Esh.
Today I’m sharing the full video of our talk. John is an Amishman living in the Nittany Valley community of Centre County, Pennsylvania. Goot Essa is John’s company.
For about the first half of this 27-minute conversation, we discuss Amish life and his community. In the second part, we talk about his cheese and food business, including the best & hardest part of running his business, favorite cheeses, and a discussion of cheese caves and why they’re important. John doesn’t appear in the video itself, just his voice, but I use some visuals as stand-ins.
Here is John’s answer to my question about his favorite part & hardest part of running his business:
John Esh: My favorite is getting to meet some really nice people out there. There’s some really nice people out there in this world. And this business allows me to get out there and meet these people and learn from them. There’s some really good people out there, really nice. And I love that part of the job.
The hardest part of the business is balancing the work, family, travel. That’s probably the biggest challenge that I have is finding that balance where I’m here for my family and yet delivering for the business what the business needs. So that’s been quite a challenge.
I’ve been a farmer all my life from 10 years on and to learn how to get into marketing, how to get into sales, how to work with a labor force, a lot of challenges that come with that and finding that balance of juggling everything is probably the hardest part that I have. Been blessed with a really good team here. That helps tremendously.
And if you were thinking about picking up a gift basket for the holidays, Goot Essa is running a 10% off deal until the end of today (December 11). You can browse those baskets here. I really enjoyed the talk with John, and I hope you do too.
Transcript of video
I live in the community Goot Essa services, know some of their employees, and my best friends are within the Old Order Amish community there. I think what came to me immediately was this being a video. My friends would love to read about this interview but, as you know, they do not watch videos and I can’t find anywhere that I can print the material out. If you are able to provide a transcript, I would really appreciate it- and so would they! I enjoy your materials so much that it seems a shame that the very people you love so much can’t experience the same things I can via your videos.