Column "Agricultural" television

What Real Farmers Think of “Farmer Wants a Wife”

By Sharon Fisher, 5-09-08

	The supposed hottie farmer

More farm, not so many huge tracts of land.

That’s the consensus of the real farmers who are watching “Farmer Wants a Wife,” the most recent variant of the so-called reality shows that pit a number of potential mates against each other while the searcher gradually winnows them out based on a series of tests.

At least, among those real farmers who have a satellite dish or time to watch tv during spring planting season. “Do we *have* to look at the girls?” complained one.

This show, on CW on Wednesdays at 8 pm here in Idaho but 9 pm in other places, features a pulchritudinous 30something alleged farmer living in Missouri who decides he wants a city girl as a wife. Now, why he made this decision is never quite stated—why not just pick a country girl in the first place?—though to be fair his mom was apparently a city girl, who moved to the country “because I fell in love with a farmer.” Awww.

So the ten 20something girls—from places such as Dallas, LA, and New York—run around the farm in miniskirts and four-inch stiletto heels, squealing louder than the pigs at tasks such as capturing chickens, milking goats, spray-painting cows, shoveling manure (with brand-new shovels into brand-new wheelbarrows), and, horror of horrors, playing Bingo at the VFW hall.

“I just love elderly people!” chirped one girl at the latter event, which rapidly eliminated her from consideration—after she’d only survived the first week by having the bachelor farmer designate her the ‘bad cop’ who would help bring out the worst in the rest of the girls. Though the bingo players weren’t nearly as indignant about that as at the assumption from one of the girls that they must all be Republicans.

It isn’t clear whether the farmer is legit. Some people on homesteading chat boards discussing the show swear they’ve seen him as a model or an actor. It’s been suggested that the sumptuous farmhouse in which the girls are housed—and yes, the girls were assured, it does have flush toilets—is actually a bed-and-breakfast. And while he did putt-putt up to the girls in his tractor, shirtless, like a combination Kenny Chesney/Craig Morgan song (drawing more squeals), where was his farmer’s tan?

(According to Missouri newspapers, he is indeed a legitimate farmer—whose family received more than $600,000 in farm subsidies between 1995 and 2006—but the farm on which the show is set is rented because his own farm is insufficiently picturesque.)

Next week, the eight girls remaining reportedly will have tractor races (which, it was announced this week, will also be a new event in this year’s Kuna Days, the first weekend in August). Future episodes, presumably, will pit the girls against each other in farm wife tasks such as butchering and eviscerating a chicken, canning 100 quarts of tomatoes in an un-air-conditioned kitchen in August, and reaching inside a laboring cow up to the shoulder in order to turn around an unborn calf.

(And hey, CW, when you want to do the distaff side, I’m all ready. I’ve got some holes that need to be dug for a fence, the roof needs reshingling, and I could use some help cleaning out the chicken coop—plus I’m sure the ladies at Grange pinochle night are ready to help me check the guys out. And a word to the wise: While some of them may indeed be elderly—as one of them says, “I don’t even buy green bananas”—any one of them can kick a city boy’s ass.)

Meanwhile, this week featured a *genuine* farming reality show, the Ag Expo at Kuna High School. This biannual event enabled young kids from more than 30 area schools to find out where their food comes from, as they were efficiently shuttled by smiling Kuna FFA members from tractor exhibits to large and small livestock to hayrides—where they were exhorted to sing loudly or the driver pulling the ride would stop.

I tried to lead the kids in singing “Farmer in the Dell”—the source of the line ‘the farmer takes a wife’—only to find that none of the kids knew it.

Full disclosure: Sharon Fisher is a candidate for the Idaho Legislature, District 21.

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