This week another group of farmers and their partners will finally be able to exhale. After months of keeping quiet about who they chose - and who chose them - the Farmer Wants a Wife season finale is airing over two parts, and the secret is out.
Will Simpson knows that feeling well. His season screened in 2022, and the five months between the end of filming and the moment it aired tested his patience and the good old-fashioned community grape vine.
"It was a pretty poorly kept secret locally," he said on stage at the Victorian Farmers Federation Agribusiness Dinner in Ballarat recently. He revealed in conversation with host Kirsten Diprose that he had missed Jess Cova so much after filming stopped he drove up to Queensland to collect her.
They tried to protect the secret, with Jess even playing for the local netball team under a pseudonym to keep up the ruse.
"Jess Smith... I think it was. Jess Simpson, wouldn't have been much better," Will laughed.
From rumours flying to pillows flying, when the show finally aired, the new couple was put to the strange and unusual test of watching him simultaneously date the women on the show.
"Things went boom in the lounge room, because pillows got thrown across the room," he said. "That was probably one of the testing times in our relationship, but we got through."
And they did. Will Simpson, a fifth-generation Mallee farmer from Berriwillock, near Sea Lake, and Jess, a mental health nurse who has just finished her master's degree, are now planning their October wedding, and navigating the challenge of transplanting a Queensland girl to flat, dry country.
"She came off the Toowoomba Ranges, so she had rolling green hills and rain and lots of nice things, and cattle, and nice views, and great sunsets," Will said. "And then she comes to the Mallee in February ... she's like, 'Why is it all dead?'"
The path to finding love in front of a national audience was less deliberate and more forced upon him. Will was mid-round at the Sea Lake golf course on a Sunday afternoon when a mate spotted the Farmer Wants a Wife casting call on Facebook and, without telling him, submitted his number.
"About 10 minutes later I got a phone call. So we're all on the golf green with the speakerphone on, and they're all laughing, carrying on. That's how it started."
He said no the first year. They called back, spoke to his older sisters, and it snowballed from there.
Once on the show, Will says he was deliberate about how he represented himself, his family, and his community, even when that put him at odds with producers.
"I was quite disciplined with staying the route that I wanted to stay," he said. "I had disagreements with the producers and the angles and the direction that I was trying to take things."
He'd hoped the platform would amplify his local community but a lot of it didn't make the cut.
Away from the cameras, Will has been a full-time farmer for the past six years. He runs a broad-acre cropping and sheep operation alongside his father Jamie - mostly wheat, barley, lentils and canola, plus trade lambs and first-cross ewe breeding. The farm has been in the family for five generations, and he is now pushing it in a more deliberate business direction: diversifying, planning infrastructure, and thinking about drought-proofing.
"We know the good years won't last, and drought will come regardless of where you are or how long you've had good years," he said. "So prepping ourselves for that, setting ourselves up, giving ourselves security moving forwards."
It's a long-term mindset. He bought a header last year with a 30-year horizon in mind.
Efficiency sits at the centre of how he thinks about the business, and that extends to how and where he buys stock. AuctionsPlus became part of the picture during COVID, when physical sales weren't an option, and it has stayed that way.
"Having that flexibility now is really, really cool," he told this writer on the sidelines of the VFF conference. "It gives you a lot more opportunity looking interstate for stock, machinery, or whatever it is that you're looking for. It's just another additive to what we were already doing - and efficiency is our number one thing that we're trying to improve in our family business. So it just makes things more efficient."
Before farming full time, Will trained and worked as a social worker, a direction nudged by Birchip Cropping Group Chief Executive Fiona Best, who was also in the Ballarat audience that evening. He credits that background with shaping how he thinks about communication, both on and off the farm.
"People traditionally, farmers traditionally, would hold their problems, or their issues, or their mistakes close to their chest," he said. "But I think things are changing a lot, because if you face an issue, most likely one of your mates or your neighbours face that same issue, and you can lean on them."
That openness extends to his social media presence, where a following that skews largely urban sends him genuine questions about what's happening in the paddock. Will sees it as an opportunity rather than a distraction, a chance to advocate for agriculture, mental health, and rural communities to people who might never otherwise encounter them.
"It's a bit unusual for Jess and I," he said. "We just think we're normal people, and we don't know why people are interested in our lives, but they are."
On the question of whether he'd recommend Farmer Wants a Wife to other farmers, Will doesn't rush to an answer.
"I always say yes and no," he said. "Yes, in a sense, it can give you an opportunity to meet someone you'll never cross paths with, like Jess and I did, and no, at the same time, if you're not ready, if you're not in the right headspace, if you're not in the position to be willing to meet someone... I would say no."
The family conversation that preceded his decision to go on was lengthy and serious, covering how it could affect the farm, the family, and their personal lives.
For what it's worth, Jess had her own moment of commitment before they'd even met properly. When producers approached her in the initial stages and suggested she consider moving to a different farmer's queue, because Will's line was so long, she held her ground.
"She stood fast," he said. "Yeah, I'm grateful for that."
The wedding is planned for October, cutting it close with some haymaking plans. And with harvest closing in soon after, it will be another testing but rewarding time for Will and Jess.
"Wedding, harvest, honeymoon is the plan," Will said, grinning. "It'll be all pretty tight."