A lot on Will’s hands

MALLEE farmer Will Simpson has a lot on his hands – he’s lamb marking, he’s pretty sure he’s going to have to do a second fungicide spray over the crops because of stripe rust, and his footy team plays this weekend for a spot in the grand final.

The fourth-generation cropper, with his dad, is running 5500 acres of mostly wheat and barley, with an “outstanding lentil crop” on top of the 500-600 Merinos used in his prime lamb enterprise.

Oh, yes, and in another life, the soon-to-be small screen star is about to become known to the nation as Farmer Will – one of the wannabe husbands in Channel 7’s Farmer Wants a Wife.

The new series starts this Sunday – Father’s Day – and Will says he can’t wait for all his family and friends to see how his “rollercoaster ride” turns out.

However, under contractual pain of exile (or possibly execution), the entrants are banned from leaking anything about the show.

Will, on the other hand, is either the most upbeat cropper in the country, or you can detect a lot of excitement about the show and how he felt it turned out for him.

But Sunday also signals another serious speed bump coming up in his otherwise idyllic life.

Down at the Sea Lake-Nandaly Tigers, our intrepid husband-to-be is in charge of the footy fines at the club – you know the drill, financial penalties for every mention in the local media, bigger penalties for pictures, and so on. But no-one has ever considered multiple TV appearances on a national network.

The boys down at the Tigers are already reaching for their calculators to work out how much the end-of-season trip is going to cost Farmer Will by the time the series wraps up.

Farmer Will, meantime, is desperately trying to insert a ‘no TV’ clause into the footy fines or face financial ruin taking the team on an around the world, all expenses paid holiday.

Will and the Tigers are in this week’s preliminary final after they finished the home and away season in third.

“We’re looking pretty good I reckon, and we’ve had a pretty solid year all round so hopefully we get to the final to meet Birchip,” he said.

Back on the more serious subject of the farm (all the while hoping the boys in the team are joking about fines) Will says changing weather patterns have meant problems, such as the rust, which has previously never been a big issue for them.

“I would normally have expected to spray about now on the odd occasion we might have had rust, but we did a first pass four weeks ago and I am pretty sure we will be giving it a second go very soon,” he explained.

“We also run our small first cross lamb business with the Merino ewes put to with terminal sires, with our wethers turned off at 12 months and ewes at 1.5 years.

“They are run on medic pastures and vetch hay – and then get a run on the stubbles after harvest.”

While he has been watching Farmer since he was a kid, the now 26-year-old describes his time on the show as “amazing” and an experience he absolutely loved.

Although, for a country boy, trying to have that first kiss proved a little intimidating when “this private moment is being done with a TV camera up your nose”.

“The first time that happened I was so nervous, sweating bullets and thinking this was going to be a disaster but the crews and the producers were fantastic and made everything much easier than I anticipated.”

And it took Channel 7 two years to get Will on the show (no, he is not the same Farmer Will as 2021) after he knocked back the first approach – a favour he still owes one of his good ‘mates’.

“He had actually sent in his details but when he got the call out of the blue about coming onto the 2021 show he panicked and said ‘you don’t want me, but I know someone who would be perfect’,” Will said.

“So without me being aware of anything, I got the call to go in last year’s series but for me, at that time, it wasn’t going to work out.

“But they rang again this year and I had given it a lot of thought, and talked to family and friends, so I said yes.”

A decision he now knows was absolutely the right one.

Whether this Mallee cropper gets a wife is still a secret, but when he says it all turned out “really, really well” for him, you have to think it’s going to be worth watching Farmer Will for the next few weeks.