During these past 3 years, he has become addicted to email and its many variations: mailing lists, chats, forums and one-on-one exchanges with people all over the world. He says his experience with the Net made him realize that a new tool had emerged which could "level the playing field" for rural communities. Rural residents can work from their home and farmers can sell farm-direct to a world-wide network.

He created Farmer's Market Online, in June 1995, as a way for people to meet farmers and buy directly from them and for the farmers to converse with their customers. He wanted a place where producers and fans of home-grown fresh foods can mingle, shop, and share information with each other. The online market started out as an email newsletter to offer a forum much like a real-life open air market.

To achieve this feeling, he and his wife, Sandra, filled the weekly mailing with news, commentary, reviews and helpful tips, along with "booths" where vendors would display their wares in a 45-word advertisements. There were vendors in five categories – farm produce, specialty food, crafts, livestock and books. The newsletter was distributed to about 100 email subscribers.

Half year later, Michael developed a web site on his AOL service. He spent about two weeks reading up on HTML programming and it took him another couple of weeks to actually develop the site. He became a web developer and programmer while he continued his career as a freelance journalist. Now the web site has expanded to over 80 pages and he uses the Micrsoft Frontpage web design software package to help create and edit the web pages.

The Farmer's Market Online email distribution list has grown to 2,000 subscribers and the site gets another 8,000 additional visitors each month. The exposure of the site has spread through word of mouth and mentions in magazines like Country Journal and Cooking Light. As a professional writer, Michael wrote several press releases to spread the word.

He would also occasionally post in other mailing lists and newsgroups related to food, gardening and farming. The Online Market was often posted in the famous food site EGG (Electronic Gourmet Guide) and was listed in AOL's web café. As a subscriber, Michael is able to get 2 megabytes disk space to feature his web site through AOL.

There are now many online food emporiums; the unique difference about Farmer's Market Online is that the shoppers are buying directly from the actual producers of the goods. The market does not act as a middleman and Michael does not feature any booths which wholesale or distribute other producers' products. With the exception of sponsors, all booths' offerings are grown or made by the sellers, which are all small family farms and businesses.

The affiliated Outrider online bookstore carry dozens of books on the topics of gardening, farming and nature, and these books are the only products Michael and Sandra actually sells. For everything else that they showcase on the site, the shoppers are dealing with and buying directly from the farmer and craftsperson. It truly is an opportunity to buy "home grown" goodies direct from the farm. These goodies range from 15 flavors of fudge to Kobei beef to exotic olives to handmade jam, and emu oil, to name just a few things!

Michael thinks the best thing about being an online market is the flexibility. "With a web site, you can continually update prices and inventory, and notify your customers via email, all in the same afternoon. Compared to the work of publishing a catalog, the Web is a breeze." His advice to someone going online is: "Think of your online business as interactive mail order. Most of the same guidelines for postal mail order still apply – you identify a market, gather inventory, assemble a mailing list of likely customers, prepare and execute a promotion package."

Farmer's Market Online attracts its booth participants the same way it does with its shoppers audience. Small farmers and craftspeople read or hear about the market and recognize that they would get more visitors being featured in the Online Market, rather than as an independent site with one unique, specialty product. And the reasonable price of $4 - $20 per month can't be beat.

To offer fresh content and keep the traffic coming, Michael and Sandra update the site every week with new material from their weekly email distribution. There are regular updates of cooking and gardening TV shows and online chats, along with new recipes and many other changing features related to fresh food, good eating, and folksy appreciation of farm life and nature. Next year, they hope to have enough time to grow and sell their own garden specialty, fingerling potatoes and burgundy beans!

To get on their email distribution and sample the goodies in the booths, visit Farmer's Market Online.