BONN (dpa) – Fritz the farmer sings the praises of his “adonis-like body, browned by the country air”, while hobby farmer Arne is looking for a gal “who loves rural life, has soft hands and strong arms”.
Then there’s Peter, a shepherd, who is looking for a “girl who is standing firmly on her own two feet in life and is not afraid of working on a sheep farm or of driving a tractor-trailer”.
Fritz, Arne and Peter are all out looking for their dream woman – via the Internet, using the website “www.landflirt.de” specially tailored to helping farmers.
More and more farmers are discovering that the personal computer is not only there to help them run their farms or work out their subsidy payments, but also to help them find a partner.
“Landflirt”, complete with chatroom, forum, and personal want ads, has been in existence for about a year.
“Initially we did not have the nerve to put the idea into action. But in the meantime we are the most frequently-visited website in the entire farming sector,” said Christine Weyhofen of the site’s operator, the Raiffeisen.com. The site gets about 90,000 hits every month.
Weyhofen said that farmers in general don’t have problems finding a partner, but she concedes that “naturally, given the amount of work involved in running a farm, there is a shortage of free time”.
Michael Retmann, the online editor for “landflirt”, agrees. “In the city, you can go to the taverns in the evening in order to get to know some women. But you can’t do this as much out in the country.”
Even though an advert on the website costs 10 marks (4.90 dollars) a month, the “landflirt” site has 3,500 ads. Most are from people between 20 and 30 years old. Some, Weyhofen proudly reports, have found their dream partner with the site.
Men are the predominant users. While there are 2,841 ads under the “he is looking for her” category, there are just 829 the other way around.
“But we were surprised that one-third of the personal ads were from women,” Retmann said. “We had expected 10 per cent at most.”
Very often, the women placing ads are looking for men who own horses. But sometimes their inclination towards a farm has more profound reasons. For example, a woman calling herself Hannah, said she liked men who wear “checkered shirts”.
Lately, with the made cow and foot-and-mouth controversies, a woman seeking a farmer wrote: “Please, no animal husbandry.”
The boom for the “landflirt” website appears all the more remarkable given the fact that fewer and fewer people in Germany want to live on a farm. Each year, about 13,000 farms, most of them small ones, are given up. From 1999 to 2000 the number of farms sank from 432,000 in Germany to 421,000, according to government figures.
“There are fewer and fewer farms which are bieng taken over by the succeeding generation,” admits Dirk Detlefsen, national chairman of the German Farm Youth organisation. He says this is partly due to the farm sector’s image problem.
“The kind of idyll which we see in children’s books no longer exists,” he says about farming.
On average, a German farm is about 50 hectares in size. But online editor Retmann says there is no danger that a future farmer’s bride will have to work too hard on the farm. “Most of the men are first looking for somebody for their heart, and then for the farm.”
