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Photograph by Joseph Viles, courtesy of The CW Network, LLC

It’s a concept that has “Semi-Manufactured Culture-Clash Hi-larity!” written all over it: 10 Manolo-wearing Big City Babes spend a month on a farm, splitting their time between pitching hay and pitching woo with the Hunky Farmer who calls it home—all with the hope of becoming his Small Town Bride! They’ll whine about their chipped nails and pit stains, he’ll shake his head from atop a tractor and call them pampered prima donnas, and there’ll be nightly catfights in the barn!

Or not. But you can bet that’s what TV studio execs were thinking when they dreamed up Farmer Wants a Wife, the Green Acres–style reality show that filmed at a Portage des Sioux farm last summer and debuted on the CW on April 30. The titular farmer, 30-year-old Matt Neustadt, was the prom king at Orchard Farm High School—of course, it was a class of 59—but since then, life on the farm hasn’t exactly been conducive to a love life. “There really isn’t any opportunity to meet someone in the middle of a 100-acre cornfield,” he says. (And it’s a safe bet that any woman he did stumble upon in the middle of a 100-acre cornfield might not be relationship material.)

Neustadt, who beat out five other farmers from across the country for the privilege of putting the girly-girls to work on his 2,000-acre spread, is cagey about details, but he did let slip what might be the biggest twist of the eight-week series: “The gals did an awesome job.” So much for any “hay fever” jokes …