The men of Farmer Wants a Wife Season 2 wanted a change in their lives, and a change is what they got. Not just because they each go on romantic journeys in Season 2 of the Fox reality dating series, returning Thursday, February 1, but also because their farm lives are combined with the world of TV production while filming.
In Farmer Wants a Wife, four farmers are each set up with eight women who are leaving their city lives behind to see if life in rural America is for them. Once there are five women left in each group, they’ll being their stays on the farmers’ homesteads. But farming doesn’t stop just because there’s a camera crew and a cast of women staying at your house.
Brandon Rogers (29), a potato farmer, tells TV Insider he had to learn how to balance filming and farming time when production came to his homestead right as his yearly harvest started. There are no weeks off in this line of work.
“When it’s time to farm, you’ve got to farm. That was the hardest part for me,” he says. “I work all year for this three-week span of harvest. Harvest is chaotic, and then you bring in crew and women and all these different personalities on top of that; that was quite the experience to learn on the fly.”
He’s not complaining. Having the show film during this important season “gives great representation to farming and the potato industry.” There were some growing pains with production, and they had to learn that the weather may force the farmers to take a filming break at times (something they undoubtedly were exposed to in Season 1).
“If it’s hot outside and you let potatoes sit out in the sun for a certain amount of time, they’ll actually pressure crack, and it’s like throwing away 10 grand,” Brandon explains.
Farmer Mitchell Kolinsky (27) is a newcomer to this way of life: “I just purchased my farm the same week that we started filming,” he reveals. But that was part of the appeal of going on the show.
(L-R) Ty Ferrell, Brandon Rogers, Mitchell Kolinsky, and Nathan Smothers in Farmer Wants a Wife Season 2 (Fox)
“We took on such a big leadership role doing this because every day waking up, all the pressure’s on us,” Mitchell says of hosting the cast and crew. “If we wake up and we walk outside and we’re in a bad mood and say, ‘Oh, we got to do this work,’ of course, it’s going to wear off on the girls. We wanted the girls to have a good time.”
Brandon says the farmers won’t “kiss and tell” about their time with the Farmer Wants a Wife Season 2 women, but the four farmers did bond for life through this experience. All four of them signed up for this series in hopes of falling in love.
Farmer Ty Ferrell (at 42, the oldest of the farmers) says, “I was in love before I came to this, and I was definitely in love after with my daughter.” Being divorced himself, he told casting he was interested in finding a woman who has also been married before and has kids, but he acknowledges that asking a mother to take extended time away from her kids may not be doable.
Farmer Nathan Smothers (23, the youngest farmer in the group) says casting did a great job at finding women they’d each connect with.
“All the women, they’re all beautiful. They’re all very intelligent,” Nathan shares. “I think casting did a really good job of taking what we were looking for and presenting those girls to us.”
Here’s what the farmers told casting they were looking for, plus why they signed onto the series in the first place.
Farmer Wants a Wife, Season 2 Premieres Thursday, February 1, 9/8c, Fox
