WAUSAU, Wis. (AP)—As a 52-year-old divorced farmer, Frank Cook said he had little time left after caring for his cows, hogs, crops and children to find a date.

So he has become one of more than 600 farmers, agribusiness workers or other people with rural backgrounds who look for friends and lovers through Singles in Agriculture, a nearly two-year-old nonprofit group based in Wisconsin.

“Farm people are special people. They’re busy and they don’t have time to go to things,” Cook said in a telephone interview Friday. “It’s hard to find someone when you’re on the farm.”

Cook, who runs a 1,000-acre dairy, hog, corn and soybean farm in Baraboo, is vice president of Singles in Agriculture.

The group, which has members in just about every state and Canada, schedules outings such as a campout in Missouri or a boat trip in the Wisconsin Dells and keeps a list of singles with rural backgrounds.

It does not emphasize making matches or pushing people to the altar, but some of its members have married each other, said Marcella Gahm, 49, the group’s president.

She met Marlyn Gahm, a 53-year-old beef cattle and grain farmer from Pearl City, Ill., through the group, and they were married last June.

After the death of her first husband on the couple’s Staceyville, Iowa, farm in 1979, Gahm said she was like many farm widows who find themselves in a small, rural town without many single people their age.

Most of her friends were still married. They invited her to dinner or dances but Gahm said she felt like “the odd one out.”

She helped start Singles in Agriculture when 23 farmers who had written to one another through a farm magazine gathered in Peoria, Ill., in June 1986.

The group’s members must be either working in agriculture or have farmed in the past or have grown up on a farm. It includes farmers who lost their farms during tough financial times and now have other jobs, as well as secretaries who grew up on farms, Gahm said.

The group’s members range from the early 20s to 77. Most are from the Midwest—Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska and Iowa—but there are members in several other states, she said.

“I think the (agriculture) person needs someone who is more willing to give than anyone can imagine,” said Gahm.

“You can have a date all set and if something happens with the livestock or the weather changes, you have to cancel it.”