Almost 80 years ago, Universal Pictures released a film called “The Egg and I.” It starred Fred MacMurray as Bob MacDonald, a newly decommissioned soldier back in his civilian duds. He tells his new bride, Betty, played by Claudette Colbert, that he engaged in some self-reflection down in his foxhole. War made him think about what’s really important: “the basic things” like “love and food and babies and things growing out of the ground.” So he has decided to quit his job and buy a chicken farm.
When “The Egg and I” came out, in 1947, a carton of eggs cost 55 cents, which is about $8 in today’s money. In the intervening decades, the agrarian dream has held steady, both as a premise for comedies and a very real thread in the American psyche. As of 2025, you can indulge that dream simply by opening your phone: Social media is packed with down-home fantasies featuring agricultural influencers, rural “tradwives” or the swineherds on TikTok. As you sit scrolling in a grimy D.M.V. waiting room, what could make you swoon like an expansive wheat field and miles of open sky?
And on television, you need only tune into Fox’s “Farmer Wants a Wife,” which recently began its third season, to get a fantastically rosy picture of what Bob and Betty MacDonald’s life might look like today. The series follows the contours of a standard reality-TV dating show, but it clearly aims to offer some folksy respite from the California-scented mating rituals that normally populate the genre. It imagines a dreamy alternative to the headaches of urban dating: No apps, no open relationships, no semiprofessional D.J.s. Just a farmer and his spouse. The simple life.
American agriculture is, by all accounts, really hard.
And the premise is simple: Over the course of some three months, four eligible yeoman hunks select potential life partners from among a group of women. The women hail from across the United States, though the major metropolitan areas of Texas seem especially well represented. They are identified by their professions too: This season brings a bounty of nurses and nannies, but also a “chief of staff” (for whom? of what?) and one woman whose job is listed only as “pharmaceuticals.” These contestants move into the men’s homes, on or near one of four farms. There are dates, many of which bear an unusual-for-TV resemblance to normal American courtship. Instead of the helicopter rides and therapy circles of the “Bachelor” franchise, the farmers and their could-be wives picnic in pickup trucks, take in college football games and spend afternoons fishing. They drink beer!
But there is a catch for these women: They have to prove themselves at chorin’. “Farmer Wants a Wife” delights in the spectacle of women with fresh blowouts being goaded into shoveling dung, trying and failing to compete with Eva Gabor’s elegant detachment in old episodes of “Green Acres.” Layered atop the near-constant pop-country music is a secondary soundtrack of squeals and screams as contestants touch a grub for the first time or struggle to mount a horse. According to recaps, when the show first ran, briefly, in the early 2000s, one woman learned of her elimination after a task that involved reaching inside a cow’s rectum.
Predictably, one leitmotif is the women’s disenchantment with “modern men” and city life. The object of their ire is the kind of man who appears in traditional rom-com fare: the metropolitan metrosexual with an email job. Contestants lament the eroding virility they see in guys at home: not protective, not strong, not self-sufficient, not “real men.” They lack what one woman calls the country boy’s “gentle masculine energy.” The show, naturally, works to dramatize this “gentle masculinity” at every opportunity. The farmers are often shirtless, probably to show that they can lift heavy stuff — but they also wistfully recount stories about their grandparents.
And yet most contestants seem less interested in the farmers than what their farms represent: old Bob MacDonald’s “love and food and babies and things growing out of the ground.” The show’s title is very obviously backward. It’s not so much that the farmer wants a wife; it is the prospective wives who desperately want a farmer. They, too, want reminding of MacDonald’s “basic things.” They want to feel the weight of a freshly laid egg in one hand and to know that, below the layers of concrete, we live on a dirty, sturdy earth.
Sometimes the show gets its laughs by puncturing this daydream, subjecting the women to its dirty slapstick of cow rectums and mucking out horse stalls. Sometimes it pulls back its pop-country drumbeat and lets a harp swell, signaling that we are about to meet a gal with real barn-raising potential. She can wear cowboy boots and not look dumb; she tells us that she knows how to handle a saw or skin a fish. Most important, she wants to return to her roots — to plant herself, and any kids she may have, in a dream-world of self-sufficiency and tradition.
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.
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