Associated Press
09-14-07
Love crops up
By Caryn Rousseau
Associated Press
Just a few years ago, Amanda Szymanik was living in rural Chana, Ill., on a farm.
In high school she was involved in her local 4-H Club. She wanted to keep living in the country, but not by herself.
More than 400 miles away, in Ashland, Ohio, Scott Harbaugh Jr. was thinking much the same thing. He grew up on a farm, worked on farms (mostly dairy) and wanted his own farm one day, but not by himself.
With less than 2 percent of the nation’s population living on farms, though, it’s getting harder for young people to meet — and fall in love — with other farmers.
‘‘Just a lot of people, they’re not interested in the farming part of living out in the country,’’ Szymanik says.
Paul Lasley, a rural sociologist at Iowa State University , says that, historically, farm families started when boy met girl from within communities that were relatively nearby.
Because of the lack of transportation and the rural isolation, people dated those around them.
The dating scene changed, though, after World War II, he says.
The number of farms declined and the size of farm families declined,’’ Lasley says.
“So ... the number of marriageable or eligible young men or women declined.’’
Faced with such problems, Szymanik, 22, and Harbaugh, 26, stopped looking in the towns around their homes and instead logged onto a dating Web site.
They picked FarmersOnly.com, a Web site for ‘‘Farmers, Ranchers, Ag Students,
Cowboys, Cowgirls, Animal Lovers, Nature Lover s, Country Folks & Wannabes.’’
‘‘A guy on my site impresses by standing next to his John Deere tractor,’’ says founder Jerry Miller.
(The Gazette first reported on this Web site in December 2005, and there were
470 Iowans registered on the site at that time. Miller says there are now 1,586

Iowans: 796 women and 790 men.) Finding someone who was interested in farming was a top priority for Szymanik.
‘‘I thought, ‘Let me just try this and see what happens.’ Sure enough, look how lucky I got,’’ she says.
Now, after e-mailing and sending pictures via the Internet and meeting in person,
Harbaugh and Szymanik are getting married. He has relocated all his farming equipment to Illinois. They hope to start a grain and beef operation together.
‘‘It’s hard finding anybody that wants a life-long commitment of having a farm,’’
Harbaugh says. ‘‘I’ve dated people that thought they wanted it, but then, when they actually see what’s entailed to it — the debt and the struggles, it’s up and down, you don’t make much money — ... they shy away from it then.’’
It was a dream to find Szymanik, he says. ‘‘Amanda fit me just perfect,’’ he says.
‘‘We’ve got all the same interests.’’
No surprise that two farm-loving people found love on the Internet, Lasley says, because now young farmers are looking online.
‘‘This is another way to sort of overcome that isolation that many people in the farming community feel,’’ Lasley says.
People living in rural areas are about as likely as their suburban counterparts to have tried online dat ing, and they’re not far behind urbanites, says Mary Madden, a senior researcher at the Pew Internet and American Life Project in Washington.
Madden says the method still raises eyebrows in less-populated areas, though.
‘‘Rural Internet users are a harder sell,’’ Madden says.
There are complicating factors, Madden says. Rural areas have lagged in
Internet access, and people living in rural areas are less likely to know others who have tried online dating.
It seems to have worked well for Szymanik and Harbaugh.
“We both want to raise cows,’’ she says. ‘‘. . . Living out in the country is the main thing, because that’s what we both want.’’