'I'm a real-life farmer "wag" and hate-watch Farmer Wants a Wife every year for this reason.'

Imagine this… you're married to a farmer.  

You've just wrangled your kids to bed for the 38th night on your own because it's "planting" season or "harvesting" season or… Tuesday. 

Your house is in shambles, but you've got nothing left in your tank to deal with it right now.  Finally, there is quiet. And you can exhale. 

It's at this precise moment you hear those iconic words emanate from the TV you hadn't even realised was on… 

Tonight, on Farmer Wants a Wife.

Watch: Here's the official trailer for Farmer Wants A Wife. Post continues below.

Your heart picks up its pace, jolting you back to semi-consciousness. Goosebumps prickle your skin. You lean forward, like you're literally being sucked into the TV. Before you are montages of farmers, all around Australia, wooing their potential wives on sunset picnics followed by cheeky rolls in the hay. 

You want to scream at the TV. You want to march onto Farmer bloody Corey's farm yourself and give him a piece of your mind. But you can't make a noise or leave the house because… ironically, you're a prisoner in your own home married to a farmer. So, you do the next best thing.  

You grab for your phone and hit up the other farmers' wives group chat because you just know they're hate watching in the next farm over.

Full confession — I'm a born and raised city chick. When I got my first teaching post out in country Queensland, I carried with me a very specific fantasy: that I might fall in love with a farmer.

The closest I ever got was sharing a swag at a B&S ball with a beautiful farmer named Don. He took me on a date and talked about his mum the whole time. A gentleman. But alas — no sparks.

Needless to say, I've always wondered what it's really like for the girls who did fall in love with farmers. Turns out, the dream, like so many promised by "reality TV", is bulls**t. 

How do I know? Well, recently I went straight to the horse's mouth… so to speak. 

Telling Our Stories to the World (a podcast I co-hosted for Queensland Writers Centre) is all about the real stories of regional women (the stuff no one puts on screen with swoony music and a glowy filter.)

I interviewed this chick — Hamey Hayllor. She's the real deal. Thousands of acres of farmland, two kids, a businesswoman in her own right, and a life that looks absolutely nothing like a Farmer Wants a Wife montage.

Hamey Hayllor with her family. Image: Supplied.

She also hate-watches the show every season, as do her fellow farmer WAGS. 

"Farmer Wants a Wife is bulls**t," Hamey told me, sitting by the pool while one kid swam and the other was at piano lessons. You see, that's the thing about these farmers' wives – they got s**t on, so lots of these interviews took place in precious pockets of… "free time" … if that's what you could call it.

Now Hamey had a lot of reasons as to why her and the WAGS hate watch FWAW, but let's start with the romance. The golden-hour picnics. The frolicking side by side on horseback. The propaganda.

"You watch these shows, and it's like date nights and everything looking pretty," Hamey said. "Sure, that's how it looked when we were dating… but procreating with a farmer is very different to dating a farmer. That's what I really want to tell these chicks on these shows."

Hamey went on to detail a 'date night offer' she'd received from husband, Dan, literally the day before. 

"He asked if I wanted to come check a ditch that might pop. I said, 'how long will it take?' He goes, 'four hours.' Now I'm talking four hours on a tractor in the dark with mosquitoes. It's a no thank you from me."

Then there's the togetherness fantasy. The show makes it look like couples are running farms side by side in matching Akubra hats. In reality? Hamey tried working on the farm with her husband Dan. That lasted two days.

"I can put a fence back together, and he'll just bulldoze it down," she laughed. "Taking orders from my partner? That was never going to work."

Image: Supplied.

Instead, she built her own empire Physical Fix, a gym that started as a way to make friends and turned into one of Dalby's most beloved community hubs. Because farming wives don't fade into the background. They muck in, whether it's on the farm or with their own careers, which are often needed to supplement household income. 

The other thing you don't see on FWAW is the logistics of love on the land.

"The thing with farming is that it's very weather-dependent. Which is just the way it is. But when the kids were little," Hamey said, "if I didn't make the effort to take dinner out to the paddock, Dan wouldn't see them. So yeah, you could call that a date night. Me and the kids in pyjamas, piling into the tractor and delivering dinner to Dan in the paddock."

So, perhaps a more accurate title for the show might be… Farmer wants a wife who will take care of children alone and Uber Eats dinner to him. Slightly less catchy but definitely more accurate. 

And then there's the risk. The anxiety. The knowing that months of work can disappear in a single storm. "That happened to us at Christmas," she said. "Dan was on the planter. Three hours later, hail wiped it all out. Just sticks." She paused. "I reckon they should host the cotton conference at the casino. Because farming? It's gambling."

Image: Supplied.

It has to be said, Hamey says all of this while laughing. She actually loves her life on the farm — as did all the women I interviewed. They raise kids who are free-range in the best possible way, riding motorbikes and stripping down to undies the second they get home from school. They juggle school runs and their own careers and the kind of au pairs who write love letters to their husbands (yes, really).

They build community. The kind that doesn't get filmed but does get you through.

"You want change? Change it," Hamey said. "You want community? Go out and make it."

So yes, she hate-watches Farmer Wants a Wife. Not because she doesn't believe in love. But because she knows what real love looks like—and it's better. It's just makes for a messier montage. 

Want to hear more from Hamey? Listen to her episode on Telling Our Stories to the World.

Still curious about Farmer Wants A Wife? Dive into more of our coverage — the good, the glossy, and the downright questionable.

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• We need to talk about the two Toms on Farmer Wants A Wife.

• This spicy Farmer Wants A Wife update confirms Farmer Thomas' fate.

Feature: Supplied.