Because city folk just don't get it

July 20, 2006 1:42 PM

Farmers across the US are increasingly isolated and work brutally long hours. It can be pretty hard to get a date when you work sixteen hour days and live in the middle of nowhere. Happily, now there is farmersonly.com, a dating site for "farmers, ranchers, country folks" and the people who want to love them. As one patron explains, "I don't want to baby-sit some city boy who is afraid of stepping in poop."
posted by onlyconnect (26 comments total)

Finally! A place to find a woman with huge...tracts...of...land!!
posted by Floydd at 1:49 PM on July 20, 2006

How ironic. I once was a writer for a dairy trade publication. Though I myself was a Big City boy, I enjoyed visiting the farms...

During one visit, I was standing near a stall, and a cow just leaned over and started licking my arm (covered by a windbreaker...details, details). For whatever reason I didn't even flinch, didn't move, and didn't really care that I had a two-foot tongue slurping on my arm. As the farmer I was interviewing kept talking and I kept taking notes, I saw a clear look of amusement come across his face as he must have thought man, what is this idiot doing?

And NOW I know what "this idiot" was doing. I was simply preparing to meet, 12 years later, that farm-gal who ain't bothered by nobody steppin' in a little ploppa poop.
posted by diastematic at 1:50 PM on July 20, 2006

sure beats mail order
posted by caddis at 1:50 PM on July 20, 2006

More accurately, straightfarmersonly.com
posted by Nelson at 2:09 PM on July 20, 2006

NPR story.
posted by yerfatma at 2:18 PM on July 20, 2006

To each his/her own. Speaking of niche markets, there is
NoLongerLonely.com for those with mental illnesses.
posted by sk381 at 2:29 PM on July 20, 2006

Now let's see you drop them pants...
posted by stinkycheese at 2:38 PM on July 20, 2006

Hrm.. registered through domainsbyproxy. Damn.
There are quite a few niche dating sites out there these days. My favorite (not really) is Date A Hero. Although it's sad how they conveniently left us EMS workers off. No respect, I tell ya!

I wonder if all of these profiles are legit or if they're "bait profiles." Or, if they're simply pulling their database from $other_dating_site that the same parent company owns.

Either way, it's kind of a cute gimmick.
posted by drstein at 3:24 PM on July 20, 2006

LittlePeopleMeet (a subsidiary of PeopleMeet.com) is available for midgets, and them that want to fuck midgets.
posted by jonson at 4:25 PM on July 20, 2006

diastematic: Your story intrigues me. Can you please clarify?
posted by hoborg at 6:29 PM on July 20, 2006

"I don't want to baby-sit some city boy who is afraid of stepping in poop."

Aw, that's ok honey. Good for you, because, see, we don't want to babysit some paranoid, wide-eye, purse-clenching country girl terrified of everyone on the train she doesn't know. Among other things.

(Coming from a boy who spent plenty of time working around and often in animals feces growing up on chicken farm. Nothing will help you determine your own personality like one good fall as a child into the foul ammonia-smelling pile of chicken waste. I live in a city now. And I'm planning on living in cites for the rest of my life, thank you very much.)
posted by smallerdemon at 7:07 PM on July 20, 2006

Now let's see you drop them pants...

*looks around nervously*

Drop? I...I mean, what's this all about?
posted by Gamblor at 7:17 PM on July 20, 2006

Incidentally, a google image search for deliverance yields this gem.
posted by Gamblor at 7:23 PM on July 20, 2006

smallerdemon: just chickens? Aw, you pansy. Wait until you're running through a field and you trip and land head first in a fresh cow pie. :)

And who knows, the country girl might be the one that is packing a .357 Magnum in her purse - and she can plink a beer can off a stump at 100 yards. ;-)
posted by drstein at 10:21 PM on July 20, 2006

An elegant epigram of Serendib says that 'two elephants cannot be tied to one post.'

The glimmer in this gem is as obvious -- and subtle -- as he who hears it.

Lifelong sarong and sari wearers among you, who have actually seen two elephants tied to one post know damn well that they will soon wander off with that post. It's only a matter of time before they happen to pull together or happen to pull opposite -- the post survives neither event.

This lesson is portable.

Many see our world's rising tide of human woes, think it all through, and blame global capitalism.

Capital is widely respected and regarded; it is influential and omnipresent; it is slippery, solvent, and super sexy. Like water, it gets into everything. It can rinse away blood. It can feed millions. It can drown millions.

An Ism is most anything writ large, writ larger than life itself. Ideology is love of an idea. Ideology of every sort is Ism, is an idea taken to be larger than life itself.

An Ism will not blink or bend if polar bears are drowning, or babies are bleeding. That's merely life -- here is an eternal Idea. We must stay the course.

Capital is money. Money is debt. Usury on debt is the fuel of global capitalism. We extract compound interest from the beating hearts of human lives on every continent and island nowadays. Human sweat congeals into capital instruments that will burn reliably over measured fiscal periods.

Some of us have our lives. Some of us have basis points in other human lives.

When debt creation and servicing becomes our global culture and condition, we are pursuing Global Capital Ism. When that Idea of perpetually increasing debt service is larger than human life itself, when polar bears are drowning and babies are bleeding, we have tied two elephants to one post.

The post is civilization, the maypole, the base agreement between people that we will not kill each another on sight, that we will leave one another's daughters and property alone in exchange for the same treatment. The post is the promise that people from one valley will not raid the fields of people in the next valley.

The post is the sum of how far we have come since our ancestors drew buffaloes and birds on the cave walls of rural France.

We've come all the way to Consumer Man, whose idea larger than life is to get more, to live better than well, and to see that the kids all get even further along the Capital Highway, at any and all collateral damage. Why? Because it's all good. Because it's super sexy to have the best and be the best. Elvis is in the building, baby. Hoo-yah!

This is one elephant tugging at the post.

The billions of bug-eaten bastards digging in the dirt all over the world, the filthy and filched in the factories and fisheries and foundries, the various victims of capitalism's conquests who sometimes in death or crisis join the infinitesimally small percentage of human beings to ever have their picture taken -- this faceless multitude is the other elephant tugging at the post.

There are so many people without anything at all. Just the day, and hunger, and the children. So unbelievably many with nothing but that. Human minds do not really count as high as the number of people scratching for edible things around the globe. A billion -- is just a word to the human mind. Two billion -- is just two words.

But all those lowly lives, and billions more living scarcely above their level, are tugging opposite to Consumer Man, who wants to own everything and run everything. When he comes to collect sweat from them they know not his language or his trade or his tools but they do know they have less when he leaves than they had before. Because he bought basis points in their lives.

He bought their government, he bought their laws, he bought their resources, he bought their property, he bought their lives.

Their sweat builds empires in far off countries. Their sweat congeals into debt instruments and derivatives and Dow Jones daily averages. What gave Consumer Man possession of their sweat is as much a mystery to them as where their lives will go from here. Consumer Man neither knows nor cares. His world does not work that way.

Most of the human race will never -- ever -- under any circumstances enjoy a tenth of what Consumer Man takes for granted and throws away. There is not enough planet to supply that standard of living for all of us, and not enough environment to hold the garbage. We would need several more Earths to reach that level. Global consumer civilization isn't going to happen with these numbers. Ever.

So we have two elephants, and you cannot leave two elephants tied to one post. If you do, you must watch them all night and all day, keeping them from tugging together or tugging opposite, keeping them from wandering off with the maypole.

The rich and the poor could tug all together, and wander off with this civilization grounded in debt servicing. They could cease all usury of human lives, and everyone could have somewhat of the Earth's available bounty, but not at any and all collateral cost to human creatures living and yet to live. The American lifestyle could become, actually, negotiable.

The rich and the poor could tug opposites, wandering off with the maypole shattered and broken, with no one's daughters or harvest safe anymore. Start tossing nukes around, and Consumer Man will be drawing buffaloes and birds on the walls of caves. We'll try again. We'll start over. Maybe we'll share this time.

One planet spinning through space. One global civilization based on debt servicing, based on the few harvesting from the many. Two elephants tied to that maypole, that civilization.

The sun will come up in an hour. I'll be in my fields, getting the work done before the heat arrives. I can't think of a billion, but I can think of one mother or one father somewhere waking up to the day, and hunger, and the children. I can think about elephants, farm fields, playing stink finger with Southern girls who wear no panties on moon filled hot august nights...

I don't want this war, and I don't want this civilization. Can we reboot?
posted by Unregistered User at 3:25 AM on July 21, 2006

1. That was... that was beautiful, man.
2. Shine on, you crazy diamond.
3. ...
4. Profit!
posted by Slithy_Tove at 3:43 AM on July 21, 2006

Wow...Unregistered User has taken way too much medication, or not nearly enough.

Listen to the sage words of Jimmy Carter, my friend:

"Just remember you're a living organism on this planet, and you're very safe. You've just taken a heavy drug. Relax, stay inside and listen to some music, Okay? Do you have any Allman Brothers?"
posted by Gamblor at 6:11 AM on July 21, 2006

My oldest brother is a farmer, and he only ever had one girlfriend. Fortunately he was smart enough to marry her, as we certainly would never have gotten him married off otherwise.
posted by orange swan at 6:48 AM on July 21, 2006

drstein, I can only assume that you don't have farm experience if you poo-poo (pardon the pun) smallerdemon's experience with chickenshit.

Chickenshit smells far worse than cow manure and as he mentioned he fell into a pile of it. Considering how most farms have many, many chickens, and each of these chickens actually shit quite a lot for their size, I'm guessing a pile of chickenshit is much larger and viler than a single cowpie. I like the smell of cowshit just find but chickenshit smells really terrible, see smallerdemon's comment on ammonia.

Unless, I suppose, you've had intimate encounters with both forms of waste and really do, for some odd reason, find cowshit more distasteful.
posted by Deathalicious at 7:00 AM on July 21, 2006

Oh, and every single farmer listed in this article is going to get laid so hard they'll be sore for a month.

Anne Giller will be lucky if she walks away with fewer than 100 marriage proposals. And at least ten won't be from 40-50something yuppies who think living on an herb just outside of New York will be really romantic.
posted by Deathalicious at 7:03 AM on July 21, 2006

"There is a lack of time. I have 8 billion children to watch over," Giller [39] says of her many plants and seeds.

Yes, she is quite aware of time running out and sell-by dates.

(And "Site matches single famers"? Bleh.)
posted by pracowity at 7:28 AM on July 21, 2006

Damn, they're all straight.
posted by MotherTucker at 8:40 AM on July 21, 2006

I...I was sort of interested, but then I realized that my life revolves four dollar cups of coffee, taxi cabs, blue suits, high heels, conference rooms and getting ahead at all costs in the corporate world. At all costs!!!
posted by redsparkler at 9:33 AM on July 21, 2006

Speaking of niche markets, there is
NoLongerLonely.com for those with mental illnesses.

Who do a brisk business with everybody except the MPD people, since they're never alone.
posted by jonmc at 12:20 PM on July 21, 2006

well, as a mostly city boy who met a "farmer" on a non-farmer site (it was the come-hither look in her photo that did it), it's been an eye opener. My g/f runs a horse barn, so I have an intimate relationship with horse poo, hay, stepped-on-feet, catching horses in thunderstorms at 4am, etc. Fortunately no experience with chicken poop (and given the above info, I think that kiboshes our thoughts of getting some chickens).

On the plus side, I've built a little bit of muscle, slimmed down slightly (loading a couple wagons of hay in the loft in 90 degree weather will do that for you), and finally have room for my woodshop, dark skies for my telescopes, etc.

It's hard work and not for everyone.
posted by jdfan at 1:29 PM on July 21, 2006

just chickens? Aw, you pansy. Wait until you're running through a field and you trip and land head first in a fresh cow pie. :)

At least a cow pie has some inclination that it's a solid mass, as opposed to... liquigel ammonia. Oh, and it was face first, btw. :)

And who knows, the country girl might be the one that is packing a .357 Magnum in her purse - and she can plink a beer can off a stump at 100 yards. ;-)

Pah! They're rifle and shotgun toters! A country girl wouldn't be caught dead with a .357. That's a pansy city boy's gun. You saw the Dirty Harry movies. *heh heh*

Wow...Unregistered User has taken way too much medication, or not nearly enough.

Or maybe he had exactly the right amount. I'm voting for not enough, though.

Considering how most farms have many, many chickens, and each of these chickens actually shit quite a lot for their size, I'm guessing a pile of chickenshit is much larger and viler than a single cowpie.

Yes. It was a house of caged layer hens. That means several thousand of them. Distinctly one of the most inhumane things you can do to animals honestly. They essentially are in tiny cages laying eggs, eating, drinking, and shitting. They shit through the bottom of the cage. It piles up. High. When you're six, about chest high as it turns out. It's not a little bit of stuff. It's tons of the stuff. To clean one of of these laying houses requires a Bobcat mini-bulldozer to pull the tons of chicken manure out from under the cages. It's then drained off into a "pond" usually located at the end of the houses. It is sometimes sold off to other farmers as fertilizer for crops. From what I have heard, though, pig farming is even worse as far as the resulting waste products. I can't even imagine that, really.
posted by smallerdemon at 2:34 PM on July 21, 2006