Finding Honeybunches Among the Oats

By Dan Morgan, The Washington Post
Wednesday, February 14, 2007 5:40 PM CST

Amy Portschy, 23, was a Nebraska schoolteacher who easily got dates with “city slickers” but wanted the country life she’d known on her parents’ farm.

Erik Schlimmer, 28, was a corn and soybean farmer from rural South Dakota, too overworked and removed from civilization to play the dating game.

That was before they found each other last year on FarmersOnly.com. Now a July wedding is planned.

You won’t find much deep cleavage or many bare midriffs on FO, as its known around farm country. That’s the whole point. “You don’t have to be a farmer to be on FarmersOnly.com, but you do have to have the good old-fashioned traditional values of America’s Heartland,” says Jerry Miller, an Ohio advertising executive with farming clients who founded the site in 2005.

It appeals to people in wide open spaces, where populations are thinning and there’s a real hankering for mates who want more than a sex partner. Judging by the postings on FO, the modern ideal is a long-term comrade with a shared love of cold winters, blistering summers, lonely roads, crops and animals.

That means “Farmers, Ranchers, Ag Students, Cowboys, Cowgirls, Animal Lovers, Nature Lovers, Country Folks & Wannabes,” as the Web site explains.

FarmersOnly.com boasts about its successes in its “Barnyard Buzz” feature:

”Just wanted you to know that I met my wife Anna on FarmersOnly. Yup — just got herself hitched up to a cattle rancher and mechanical inventor-type in Douglas, Wyoming! We married Sept. 20th. I don’t need to tell you about meeting people on other dating sites that “liked me” but had no desire to live rurally! THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU!!! Anna even loves my dog!”

— Darrin and Anna@

”I live in a very rural, country area — beautiful, but rural — where it is very hard to meet someone who isn’t your relative or that you haven’t known your whole life. I just want to say “Thank you” for this site.

Wish me luck!

— Darla@

My fiance, Nicholas, and I met on Farmersonly.com. I was moving to his area to begin a career with the Farm Bureau and his profile caught my eye. We e-mailed for over a month, talked on the phone and then met. On May 12, he proposed to me in the middle of a sugar cane field in Belle Glade, Florida. We are planning a country wedding in my hometown in Alabama and are so excited about our life together. Have a blessed day!

— Kiley@

I’ve been involved with farming in one sort of way or another for 34 years. I’ve never found a lady that would consider farming or even living in the country so your site is more than a blessing to a guy like myself. I just can not believe there are such beautiful ladies out there wanting to farm or ranch in some way. What a great site and again thank you. — Ross@

I met my fiance Adam, who is a rancher from Weskan, KS, on FarmersOnly. We are very excited about our relationship and are planning a June 9th wedding on his ranch next summer. Please know that your website is mentioned everytime we are asked how we met!

— Christine.@

Amy Portschy, whose home town is McCook, Neb., says she didn’t need an online dating service to get dates. But after she and a friend signed up, she was surprised by the people she met online — especially by Erik. Something struck a chord. She grew up on her parents’ dry-land wheat farm, and she still helped out there on weekends. She didn’t want to end up in a town or city.

After a few months of trading e-mails, she said, Amy took the bull by the horns. She drove 800 miles to Volga, S.D., spent the night in a motel and met Erik for breakfast.

They hit if off. She toured his farm. He visited her in Nebraska and saw her dad’s beef cattle. Then last fall, right before harvest time, he paid a surprise visit to her middle-school classroom in McCook and proposed. Word spread and other teachers snapped pictures.

Such happy endings have been legion in the two-year history of FarmersOnly.com.

FO’s founder Miller is pleased with its success — but not surprised.

“Let’s face it: How many new people do you meet working on a farm all day?” he asks.

“City folks just don’t get it.”

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