Storied Amish Company Adopts Robotics – And Remains Amish
Some of you might be familiar with the name Pioneer Equipment, the long-running Amish manufacturer of horse-drawn farm tools and wagons, based in Wayne County, Ohio.
For decades, the Wengerd family operated what was the country’s largest producer of horse-powered machinery — serving Plain communities as well as a robust non-Amish market, in America and around the world, in fact.
I haven’t spoken with them in awhile, but have always had a fond spot for the Wengerds, who were supportive of me in various ways when I was writing and releasing my Amish business book well over a decade ago. For all I’ve observed they have always run a very impressive business.
I was aware that Pioneer was no longer operating – at least under that name – but didn’t know the whole story. A profile in Fortune.com explains what happened – and the somewhat surprising direction the family has taken the company in recent years.
In 2023, they made a difficult and significant change: they exited the horse-drawn equipment market entirely, retiring the Pioneer name and shifting their focus to a new venture now known as Flextur.
I imagine that had to be difficult at least on an emotional level, as the company identity was, at least to outside observers, tightly entwined with the concept of innovative horse-drawn implements.
In which direction did they go? From the story in Fortune:
But three years ago, the company undertook a corporate transformation.
Once devoted to making horse-drawn plows and other implements for traditional Amish and Mennonite farmers, this factory now builds machinery, steel parts, and fixtures for a much broader clientele: aerospace firms, petroleum operations and equipment manufacturers that you likely haven’t heard of, and larger companies, like La-Z-Boy, that you have.
More on why and how they made the change:
“The handwriting was on the wall,” Wengerd said. “We had another consultant who told us, ‘You guys need a bigger sandbox.’” To the Wengerd family, the future of selling into the Amish ag market—especially after the economic shock of the 2020 pandemic—looked grim.
So, the company leaned in to selling its line of welding products to other manufacturers. It began taking on increasing amounts of design and fabrication work for companies that had nothing to do with agriculture.
Finally, in 2023, Pioneer retired its brand name and auctioned off its agricultural inventory, along with the rights to continue manufacturing its horse-drawn product lines.
“We had a lot of people in the industry that were just shocked,” Wengerd said. “This was what we did for 40 years… That was our DNA. It was almost a cultural thing: ‘Those are the plow guys, right?’”
“ A lot of the customers that we had were dear friends to us,” he added. “They slept in our home, and they visited us, and they shared their hearts with us.”
It appears there were several factors that entered the picture – including the relative decline in Amish farming – not only locally but in general.
They had other opportunities calling to them as well, from the sound of it. For years they had been selling their popular flexible manufacturing fixtures, for one.
This was a nice passage, about a key employee:
“I’m basically working for a different company,” said Larry Weaver, Flextur’s lead engineer, when asked about the transformation. “It’s just the same ownership.”
Like most of Flextur’s Amish employees, Weaver ended his formal schooling in the eighth grade. He’s been working for the family-owned company for more than 30 years, and he taught himself computer-aided design on the job.
He wears a studious-looking pair of square browline glasses, but has the thick beard and thicker forearms of an Amishman who hasn’t strayed too far from fieldwork.
Weaver grew up farming alongside nine siblings. He now lives on a farm across the road from the Flextur factory. Traditional agriculture is his first love, and Weaver said some of his most satisfying design challenges came from making horse-drawn machinery with modern materials.
But the horse-drawn-farming market wasn’t going to keep Flextur’s 55 employees prospering into the next decade.
“We would not be doing well as a company if we never made any change,” Weaver said. “We would not be here anymore.”
While I’m sure there is some nostalgia, to say the least, for the traditional horse-drawn equipment model, for business purposes the change had to be made. It also seems to have enabled the company to continue growing.
When I was spending time with the them in the late 2000s, they had around 30 employees; the 2019 profile pegged them at 40, and now they are at 55. Of course, number of employees is not the only measure of a company’s growth trajectory.
The Amish & Robotics?
As far as the arguably most attention-getting aspect of this story – robotics – that has been a part of the company operations for around seven years now.
The intro to the story paints the picture – full of the delightful high-tech and low-tech contrasts that are obvious hooks for these kinds of stories:
Every weekday morning, a 53-year-old tradesman drives his horse and buggy through the heart of Ohio Amish country to begin his workday in a factory full of robots.
Emanuel Hershberger—Manny to his friends—has an iron handshake, a bushy chin-strap beard, and the burly shoulders of a man who spends his downtime tending a 40-acre farm without mechanized equipment. But that’s at home.
At work, Hershberger parks the buggy and horse in a barn behind the factory. After clocking in, he operates a $170,000 computer-controlled metalworking lathe that looks like it’s borrowed from the engineering deck of the starship Enterprise.
As you’d expect, it wasn’t in every Amish employee’s background to know something about computers. But the Amish are big on practical learning – and that doesn’t only apply to things like farming and carpentry skills:
“I didn’t grow up with computers,” Hershberger told Fortune as he tapped keys on the machine’s control board. At first, he said, the bosses asked someone more tech-savvy to set up the programming before he cut metal parts on the lathe.
“I didn’t like that,” he said, recalling that he told a supervisor, “I’ll run it, but I want training. I don’t want to halfway or almost know how.”
“Now I’m comfortable setting it up and shutting it down. I can edit a program,” he said, adjusting his plastic safety glasses. “I can fly it and land it.”
The story paints a picture of robotics throughout the production floor:
At the next workstation, an Amish colleague in goggles presses a power buffer against a new steel lawn-mower part, fresh off a robotic welding table. The robot beside him is welding an identical piece, casting blooms of sparks as it swivels over the work.
A few paces away, a bearded technician in plain-front trousers and black suspenders types commands into a keypad that controls yet another robotic welder.
It’s a neat example – on the more extreme end in some sense – of how Amish people can operate in a modern, high-tech work world, but retain their identity and religious values.
Another similar, though more industry-wide example might be the story of the Amish working in RV factories of northern Indiana.
Competing while staying Amish
This is a story about how an Amish-founded, Amish-owned, and Amish-run company can adopt technology to compete in a 21st century market – yet keep a firm hold on the core “Amish values” that are integral to their identity as well as their prior business success.
Not all Amish companies are going to follow this same evolution – or even most of them. But the larger players who are more plugged into non-Amish markets – and also growth-minded – are apt to take similar paths.
And in terms of adopting technology such as computerized manufacturing, a good number have done likewise – though maybe not to the same scale or visibility as the former Pioneer Equipment, now Flextur.
New Life
We used plenty of their equipment on our little farm. We did have a horse cart break in half and that lead to our favorite horse breaking a leg, but they made it right with us. Having zero insurance, Pioneer paid for our horse.
Then we took that money and bought a new pony wagon from them. It lasted for two decades and we gave a million rides in it. Pioneer was fine product, many people tried to copy it, and that may have lead to their demise as well.
Glad to see they are prospering with the new direction and manufacturing processess.