Berlin, Ohio- 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.

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."