for selling his wares and began conducting business from his two-bedroom apartment in Tucson.
It was a particularly difficult time to enter the trade. A rise in the popularity of meteorites meant that the business was flooded with would-be dealers who all reveled in the romance of the freewheeling rock hunter who could make a living finding and selling stones that fell out of the sky. On the other side were the well-established dealers who had years more experience and knowledge of meteorites and who were determined to protect their own businesses.
It's a cutthroat business, Farmer says, where there is a huge demand for a very small amount of material.
Breaking into the business was difficult, Farmer recalls, but he earned the respect of established dealers by being first on the scene of three high-profile meteorite falls.
"It was a very tiny little village, so everybody heard about the crazy American buying those darn rocks...I sat at the bar just drinking beers and I hadmy scales there and people were lined up."
"So that made a name for me," Farmer said. "The community realized that I was going to do it whether they liked it or not." Plus, Farmer got a hold of some meteorite material that nobody else in the world was selling.
The first two trips didn't pay off immediately, but they earned him the reputation of being a go-getter. A football-size meteorite fell on
"I heard about it in a little note on the Internet. And I took the risk and just flew over there," Farmer explained. He rented a car and drove to the small village in southwest Portugal, and within hours he had cornered the world market on the prized new meteorite.
The rock had fallen several months earlier, and left a small crater where it crashed in the middle of a road. It caused a sensation in Ourique, but except to a few researchers at the University of Lisbon where a sample was sent for testing, nobody knew about the fall.
"It had just never made the news, " Farmer said, "until this little thing came on the Internet about it being classified." Scientists at the university had classified the meteorite -- determined its composition, its type and given it a name. They posted and announcement on the Internet, where Farmer saw it. He was in Portugal the day after reading the very first public mention of the meteorite.
"The people in the town had seen it fall and I think everybody in the town had pieces of it," Farmer recalled. "I actually found one and a half kilos [more than 3 pounds] in the little crater where it landed, that they had just left there. But basically everybody had just taken chunks of it home and broken them up and given them to their friends."
Farmer went into the town tavern, set up his scales on the bar, and spread the word that he would pay for pieces of meteorite.
"It was a very tiny little village, so everybody heard about the crazy American buying those darn rocks," Farmer said. "I was paying anywhere from 50 cents a gram to $2 a gram," (between $15 and $55 per ounce) he said. "I sat at the bar just drinking beers and I had my scales there and people were lined up."
By the end of the day Farmer had spent all his money and had bought almost 9 kilograms (20 pounds) of the Ourique meteorite -- nearly all of what had fallen on the town.
He came home with just $7 and a bag full of rocks.
The investment paid off, though. Having the entire world market of a brand new fall, Farmer had no trouble unloading the material. It became a rock that everybody had to have. From museums to private collectors, everyone wanted a piece.
He traded some pieces with museums for other rare meteorite types, and sold the rest through his website at $10 a gram.
Risky trade, booming business
The Portugal trip indeed paid off, but Farmer cautions that on most excursions he hasn't been so lucky.
The expense for the trip and the chance that he could come home empty-handed make it a risky venture. It also requires an eye to realize what a certain meteorite might be worth.
He sells at some shows in Europe, but most of his business is over the Internet, where he says business has exploded during the past few years. "It's skyrocketed now, it's incredible," Farmer said.
In three years, Farmer's business has grown from making a few hundred dollars in sales a month to approaching $8,000 or $9,000 per month, he says. This February at the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show, Farmer sold an 11-pound (5-kilogram) piece of the Portales Valley meteorite for $30,000. That may have been the most expensive piece of meteorite sold at the show, he said. One of the world's major meteorite collectors purchased it.
The rock was actually the piece Farmer had tried to buy when he went to the fall site in 1998. It had made its way back to him. In December, Farmer got a call from the amateur collector who found the rock.
"He called me up a couple days before Christmas and needed money," Farmer said, "I told him I'd be there the next day with cash. I got it -- for a much lower price than I offered originally."
"Its luck and persistence, you've gotta look, look, look," Farmer says.
This year Farmer has been busier than ever.
He was in Uruguay in January arranging a big purchase. He sped to Canada in March when he heard that pieces of a meteorite that exploded in the sky above the
had been found on the ground. He had no luck because the finder was determined to keep the location a secret, but others in the meteorite community applaud his efforts.
"I say three cheers for Mike Farmer," said renowned meteorite dealer Robert Haag, who has been collecting and trading meteorites for more than 20 years. "He got off his rusty dusty and went and tried, and that's great."
In April, Farmer and Haag teamed up to travel to Africa to try to buy big pieces of a meteorite called Belanga Yanga. It fell in the western part of the continent several months ago. That trip, again, yielded little, Haag said.
Now Farmer is camping in the high deserts of Chile, hoping to find pieces of a meteorite called Imilac, a breathtaking meteorite that is a mix of stone and iron, speckled with beautiful green crystals.
"There's still some goodies to be pulled out of that area, so it's prodding me to go back and look," Farmer said before he left.
Friends and colleagues think Farmer could score some real treasures on this trip.
"It's been a long dry spell for Mike," said Darryl Pitt, while attending a New York meteorite dealer at high-profile natural history auctions. "So he's due."
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