He cautions would-be subscribers they won’t “find people caught up in the corporate rat race.”“That’s what’s nice about this site,” Miller said.
Now, one that launched to cater to the kind of people who grow crops—Farmers Only.com—has reached a milestone.
Jerry Miller, a marketing executive who founded the site in 2005 after a divorced farm owner complained to him about a lack of like-minded people in her dating pool, says it has more than 200,000 subscribers."She said, 'I'm afraid I'm not going to meet anybody new—I know everybody in town,'" Miller recalled in a recent interview with Yahoo News.
’”Another Farmers subscriber named Kylie posted her testimonial on the website: “My fiancé, Nicholas, and I met on in early December 2005…We've been together ever since. I've met my match, thanks to your site.”'Down-to-earth people are different'Miller, a 60-year-old who’s been happily married for 35 years and has three children, said he was working in agricultural marketing and got the idea for Farmers when a friend who had gotten divorced was complaining she couldn’t find a like-minded mate.“She said she’d tried online dating but the guys she met couldn’t relate to the rural lifestyle of a farmer,” Miller said.
We are planning a country wedding in my hometown in Alabama and are so excited about our life together. “I said, ‘There’s got to be a site for farmers.’ I started searching for her and there wasn’t anything.
I found it’s a serious problem in rural areas where everybody knows everybody and, with the amount of hours people are working, they don’t have chance to socialize.
I put together Farmers Only and all of a sudden it took off.
There was such a big need, it took off like crazy.”Miller said the company receives emails daily from people who met on the site and are getting married.
Gober estimates about two couples from the site are marrying nationwide per week and that number is climbing.
Miller said in rural areas, people can live in nearby small towns and never meet.“You never know if your perfect match is 15 or 20 miles away, but you’ll never cross paths,” he said.
“You might be in a small community and the next stop down the road there’s somebody you’re really compatible with but you never go to same functions.”He said the site is not only for farmers but for people who love the outdoors, animals and a slower pace of living.
Or the animated American Gothic couple saying, (him) “We used to be lonely…” (then her) “until we met on Farmers Only.”Perhaps it’s the homespun feel of the commercial that has been airing across Alabama in recent months, but the initial reaction from viewers is typically: “We’ll see posts (on social media) where people say, ‘I didn’t think it was real but I checked out the site and it is real,’” said Jerry Miller of Ohio, founder of the dating site for farmers and “down-to-earth” people.
And its purpose is right there in its slogan: “City Folks Just Don’t Get It.”Miller said the site, which he founded in 2005, has more than doubled in membership in the past year, reaching “well over” 1 million subscribers nationwide.
Farmers spokesman Michael Gober said he can’t release specific numbers for Alabama but there are more than 50,000 subscribers statewide.“It’s strong in Alabama,” Miller said.