Farmer Ty Has a Surprising TV Past

Farmer Wants a Wife Season 2 isn’t Ty Ferrell‘s first rodeo. The 42-year-old team roper and farmer from Sikeston, Missouri has starred in a TV show before, it was just short-lived.

Unlike his three co-stars in the Fox reality dating series, airing Thursdays at 9/8c, Ty wasn’t a stranger to working with film crews. He tells TV Insider he worked with a “fairly large crew” on a pilot that he and his ex-wife, Sarah Ferrell (with whom he shares a daughter), filmed called Small Town Big Style around 10 years ago.

“It was a big production,” he says. “We were in a house remodeling it for a week.” Three cameras followed them as they remodeled the home. The pilot was filmed in 2014 and featured Ty’s mother, Frannie Ferrell, who accompanied the couple as they renovated a kitchen and dining space in a house in Sikeston, Missouri. Sikeston local news outlet Standard Democrat reported on the film crew’s arrival when the pilot was made in November 2014. The episode aired in 2015 on the cable channel FYI.

The crew on that show was “almost like the same type of crew that was at the house” for Farmer Wants a Wife Season 2 production. In the series, four farmers are grouped with eight women. After three are eliminated from each group, the farmers have the daters stay at their respective homes on their farms, located all over the U.S. Filming in his hometown familiar territory for Ty, but there were some key differences between these two shows.

“It’s a consuming process with all the good emotions,” Ty says. “You’re worn out, you’re tired, you’re exhausted, but you wake up the next day and you’re like, all right, what are we going to do today? You have to totally kind of let go. You really don’t have any control. You have the days that are going to happen, but it’s like, OK, what are we going to do today? And that was a big difference.”

Ty previously told TV Insider he was looking for a fellow parent he could connect with through this dating experiment, but he understood that asking a mother to leave her kids behind for a stretch of time may not be feasible. But a willingness to become a step-mother to his daughter is important for the farmer.