Love blooms on dating website for farmers Tied to the land and with few nearby options to meet people, rural dwellers are able to find a nation of candidates online

Sullivan family members Grace (left), 3, Rebekah, 40, Ruth, 1, and Ken, 44, pray at lunch, as they do daily at home on their 100-year-old almond farm in Orland (Glenn County). Ken is a fourth-generation grower. Sullivan family members Grace (left), 3, Rebekah, 40, Ruth, 1, and Ken, 44, pray at lunch, as they do daily at home on their 100-year-old almond farm in Orland (Glenn County). Ken is a fourth-generation grower. Photo: Leah Millis, The Chronicle Photo: Leah Millis, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 22 Caption Close Love blooms on dating website for farmers 1 / 22 Back to Gallery

"Save a horse, try a cowboy," writes Cowboy019019, an organic farmer from Amador County who wants to meet a country lady to cuddle with and help raise alpacas in the Sierra foothills.

Farmer870457 is no hillbilly, "but I can probably shoe a horse if I had to." The Mendocino County man is looking for laid-back love without drama.

For these rural dwellers, most often farmers and ranchers who have to travel hours to meet a single person with whom they are not related, finding love could be as elusive as searching for a needle in a haystack. That's why Jerry Miller founded FarmersOnly.com, an online dating service for agricultural types - or anyone with dreams of living in the boondocks and being a cowboy or a cowgirl. Because, according to the FarmersOnly slogan, "City folks just don't get it."

People like Cowboy019019 and Farmer870457 are using the website to find mates who understand the rural lifestyle; especially the sunup-till-sundown workdays of a farmer or rancher and how isolating the lifestyle can be. They're still looking.

But other FarmersOnly members hit pay dirt after only a few shovels. An almond farmer in Orland (Glenn County) had to travel all the way to Idaho in cyberspace to meet the love of his life. They are now married with two children, living on his family's orchard. A Washington dairy farmer popped the question in Ferndale (Humboldt County) last month after meeting his soul mate, another dairy farmer, on the site.

When Miller created FarmersOnly in 2005, most of the areas he wanted to target - farmland in the Midwest - didn't have Internet service, he said.

"Now we have people plowing their fields while looking for a date on their smartphones," Miller said, adding that the site has more than a million members, including many who have recently signed on from Northern California. Basic membership is free, allowing users to look at profiles and send "flirts." But in order to use the private messaging feature, a premium package is necessary, costing $21.95 a month.

Connecting lonely hearts

The seed for the Ohio company got planted while Miller, an agriculture marketing consultant, traveled the country, meeting a lot of lonely people.

"One day I was talking to a farm girl who'd just gotten divorced," said Miller, 60, who has been married for 35 years and met his wife in college. "She said, 'Jerry, I'm afraid I'm never going to meet anyone else.' "

She lived in a small town where she knew everyone, he said. When she tried online dating, the men didn't have a clue.

"They'd want her to drive into the city to meet for a cup of coffee at 9 p.m.," he said. "By 9 p.m. she was fast asleep because she had to get up at 5 in the morning to feed the animals."

Her story gave Miller the idea. He went home, Googled "online dating services" and found plenty. But none were for farmers. He told his wife about his plan.

"She thought I was nuts," he said. "All my friends thought I was nuts."

But the more he talked to farmers and ranchers, the more he saw the need - and a prime business opportunity.

"I talked to a rancher in Montana who said there was one tavern in town," Miller said. "Any night of the week you could walk into that honky-tonk and find 50 single guys and one waitress."

At first he had just a couple thousand subscribers. A few small newspapers, and even the Farmers' Almanac, picked up on the story, giving the company a brief second wind. But the technology was still fairly new to rural residents, Miller said.

Booming membership

So the company stumbled along for a few more years until Wi-Fi became more widespread. But after the first FarmersOnly television commercial went viral on YouTube, membership boomed. Now Miller has 13 employees, including an office near Fresno.

Ken Sullivan, a 44-year-old Orland almond grower, met his wife, Rebekah, on the site in 2008. The self-described "quiet" farmer was having trouble meeting anyone and wanted to date a woman with an agricultural background who was Christian. His brother gave him a push and put his profile on the site. At the time, Sullivan didn't have a computer, so his brother was the middleman, which wasn't working. Even Sullivan's beekeeper tried to set him up with his daughter, but when he described her former boyfriends, Sullivan got intimidated.

"They all sounded so exciting," he said. "And I'm not."

Finally Sullivan broke down and got a computer. But it was harvest time, so he wrote on his profile that he couldn't respond to e-mails.

"But I couldn't stay off it," he said. And suddenly he saw his dream girl, who called herself Christianaglover online. She was a native of Idaho who was looking for a man as steady and reliable as her Uncle Howard.

"Uncle Howard is a farmer," Rebekah Sullivan said. "And he's the most amazing man I've ever known. He is trustworthy and hardworking. He always has the best-looking fields around - not a weed in them. After looking for love in all the wrong places, I thought I could find a man as wonderful as Uncle Howard on FarmersOnly."

While Sullivan didn't think of himself as interesting, Christianaglover sure did. Their first phone conversation lasted four hours. After that they e-mailed each other every day until they got married a year later. Rebekah Sullivan, now 40, moved to California, where her husband is the fourth generation to run the family's 100-year-old farm. Two months after their wedding, she participated in her first harvest. They have two girls, one 3 years old and the other 18 months.

'It felt so natural'

The Sullivans aren't the only ones to meet their match on the site.

Meagan Hill, 23, has lived on her grandfather's dairy farm in Ferndale all her life. She's known every boy in town since childhood.

"They're like my brothers," she said.

So when her mother joined FarmersOnly a year ago, she suggested that Hill do the same. A month later she met Paul Deck, a 29-year-old dairy farmer from Monroe, Wash.

"He's very invested in his family's dairy and doesn't get out much," Hill said.

Having grown up with dairymen, she knew the drill. They e-mailed, texted and talked on the phone for six months before meeting in person. Then, Hill said, it was like "wow."

"It felt so natural," she said. "Everything just fell into place. We were like magnets that drew each other."

For a year they did the long-distance thing, visiting once a month. In late December, Deck flew to Humboldt County. He took Hill to her favorite restaurant in Eureka and had the staff write, "Will you marry me?" on the back of a to-go box.

She said yes, and they're planning a fall wedding.

But it will have to wait until after the corn is harvested.