Wanted: Farm Wife. No Experience Necessary

Episode 2 of The Bachelor aired last night. From the looks of social media today no one seems to be holding out much hope that a future farm wife will be found in this mix of girls.

I can’t bring myself to watch. Last night’s big competition was a bikini tractor race. Really? That inspiration had to have come straight from a bad country music video.

However, because I won’t watch, I’ll keep my judgments to myself. After all I know firsthand that a farmer’s daughter is not qualification enough to be a good farm wife. Case in point: My first field meal was delivered to the wrong field. If the neighbor would have stopped, he would have gotten My Farmer’s dinner.

Plenty of farmers, farm women, farmer’s wives, and agriculture advocates are self-proclaimed city girls. Dawn founded the Facebook page, City Life to Farm Life & Wife. She describes it as “a support group and community for women who left, or dream of leaving the city to live on a farm.”

Many transformed city girls write of the challenges of moving to a place where pizza is not delivered, Starbucks doesn’t exist and shopping happens online with the help of Amazon Prime.

In her Dear John Letter to the City, Mischa at Accidental Farm Wife, wrote, “. . . Country is teaching me, though, that I do not need to be dependent on convenience. I am a planner. With a little organization, I can still have all that I need and want. And I’m finding, I want and need less than I thought. I appreciate what I have, and most importantly, who I have.”

And that is a big piece of the happy life puzzle. It isn’t the farmer or the farm that begets happiness, but the person with which you share it . . . even if said person challenges you once in a while.

Jenny Rourich of Prairie Californian counsels farmer’s wives to go with the flow in her 10 Ways Marrying A Farmer Will Change Your Life. She points out that dates will involve combines and dinners may be served late and cold.

Tamara says the same on her blog page, Loving Life As The Rancher’s Wife, describing dates that involved cows and calves.

Bloggers Lori at Life at Crooked Branch Ranch and Barbara at Farm Barbie, both write how they never, ever expected their lives to be settled on a ranch and a farm, but love brought them and keeps them there.

When Rhonda at Iowa Meets Maui went off to college in Iowa, her father could see her future . . . falling in love with a pig farmer and slopping hogs. To that end she wrote herself a note, “I will not slop hogs ever.” You know how that story ends.

Erin Brennaman, one of the new Faces of Farming & Ranching for the U.S. Farmers & Ranchers Alliance grew up in the suburbs of Chicago and said she didn’t understand why her college boyfriend abandoned the campus scene on the weekends. Then she went home with him one weekend and sorted hogs. Now, Erin is sharing the farm story on a national stage as a spokesperson for a national agriculture organization.

The book “Would You Marry A Farmer?” from the Irish Farmerette might be a fitting shower gift for Prince Farming’s new bride. “A humorous yet relatively realistic look at what marriage to a farmer is like. Do you think farmers are a good catch? You will know whether a farmer is the right partner for you once you’ve read this – and you will know how to find one, how to train him and how to stay married to him.”

We could all probably read that book.

As is evidence though, a country background isn’t needed for a person to fall in love with the people, the animals and the land of farm living. Maybe Prince Farming will find his future wife in this strange social experiment. Maybe one day she will write, as these ladies have, about their transition from city lights to country life, and be as passionate about agriculture as a born and raised farm gal can be.

So post the ad: