But some of these farmers do not follow cues to help foster the show’s central fantasy. Season 2’s cast included a millennial horse roper called Farmer Ty — older than the other men, with gunmetal gray hair and a Rob Lowe jaw. During a round of speed dating, he found himself paired with a New York real estate agent. “Does it bring you peace?” she asked him, with a look of desperation in her eyes. He blinked back at her. “The country? Does it bring me peace? You know, I wouldn’t say that it brings me peace. I think it’s — I’m in a peaceful place. Just as much as, for you, being able to get out brings you peace, the city brings me excitement.” She decided to go home, farmerless, later that episode.
There may be a deep appeal to the idea of frolicking through fields, but the fact remains that American agriculture is, by all accounts, really hard — stressful, economically precarious and hard on the body. For decades, urban consumers like me have grazed on cheap produce, largely oblivious to the reality: the squeezing of family farming by massive agribusiness concerns, the fact that the average age of farmers is now pushing 60, the fact that farmers are as much as 3.5 times more likely than the general population to die by suicide. At the moment, their hard work is being made even harder by trade wars and changing conditions for immigrant laborers, which — however farmers might feel about those developments — does not make for blissful, family-friendly simplicity; it makes for high-stakes gaming-out of commodities prices and tariff rates.
“Farmer Wants a Wife” is at its most compelling in the rare moments it allows its bachelors to get real about this. In brief cutaways, they allude to the pressure and loneliness of life on the farm or the family tragedies that forced them to step up and work. You sense in them a keen awareness that the world is happy to milk farmers for their symbolic value but less interested in the reality of who they are. This gap in expectations is what sets the show’s courting experiment up for failure. Even when one of the farmers does fall in love, there is still a lot his farmhand has to learn — something beyond the mess and sweat of a three-week field trip.
That film, “The Egg and I,” was based on a memoir written by the actual Betty MacDonald. What didn’t make it into the film — or the memoir, for that matter — was that Betty and Bob lived on their farm for only four years, their marriage plagued by Bob’s drinking and physical abuse; after that, they divorced. Years later, Betty tried to reckon with the feverish allure of farm life. “Why in God’s name does everyone want to go into the chicken business?” she wrote. Was it because people’s lives were “shadowed by the fear of being fired — of not having enough money to buy food and shelter for their loved ones,” and by comparison “the chicken business seems haloed with permanency”? But the chicken business has changed; it’s our American fantasy of the simple life that is always the same.
Jane Ackermann is a research editor at the magazine.
Source photographs for illustration above: Fox; Fox, via Getty Images; Kseniya Abramova/iStockphoto, via Getty Images.
