A woman prepares a snack for her family while her youngest child, an eight-month-old named Mabel Mae, looks on from her high chair. She pours milk into a Dutch oven from a glass jar almost as big as the baby girl beside her, heats it to 60 degrees Fahrenheit, and mixes in citric acid. Off to the side, a blonde girl in a pink dress—Frances, age six, the woman’s fourth child and eldest daughter—tends to her baby sister. The woman checks the milk’s temperature, lets it sit until it congeals. She slices the curd into half-inch cubes, stirs it into a runny mixture, adds salt. Black rubber gloves materialize on her hands, and she plunges them into the pot, picking up the cheese she’s made out of almost nothing, forming it into a ball, stretching it as if it were saltwater taffy.
Then she dusts the wooden countertop before her with flour, and a bowl of risen dough appears miraculously. She forms it into two baguettes and puts those in the oven too. All the while, her children cycle in and out of frame. The girls help roll the dough, play with the whisk, and nibble at the cheese once it’s ready. But mostly they watch, thumbs in mouths, as their mother works. The boys do nothing. The woman never looks up from her task, never stains her white T-shirt, and never appears flustered, not even when the kids shriek in the background or when her long braid unravels down her back.
In the end, her labor yields one single large sandwich. She takes the first bite. The second is for her husband, absent until this moment; the third is for one of their sons. Just like its preparation, the consumption of the meatball sub was a family effort. The couple in this video, Hannah and Daniel Neeleman, live on a 328-acre ranch in Kamas, Utah, with their seven children. The milk used to make the mozzarella came from one of their dairy cows, the ground beef from their herd of Angus cattle, the eggs from their chicken coop, and the basil from their garden. Hannah milks the cows, and Daniel raises the animals, while their sons and daughters help out with farm chores and collect the eggs every morning. Daniel butchers the meat, and Hannah cooks it. The family always eats together.
The Neelemans want you to know that you, too, can live like this. In fact, they’ll give you the tools. Their ranch, Ballerina Farm, is so named because Hannah is a Juilliard-trained ballerina who danced in New York City in another life, the one that came before the babies and the homestead, and she still dances at every opportunity: in the barn after a long day of chores, in the living room of her century-old farmhouse, in the pasture surrounded by cows and sagebrush. The Neelemans sell not only direct-to-consumer meat but also the cookware Hannah uses in her own kitchen and the aprons she dons to protect her clothing from stains. Ballerina Farm fans can buy a baggie of dehydrated sourdough starter named Willa ($18), a white oak cutting board ($87), a bench scraper ($15), a wooden farm whisk ($16) or spatula ($17), a Ballerina Farm-branded cast-iron skillet ($39), and ground beef from cows raised by the ballerina herself ($110 for ten pounds or $220 for twenty, divided into vacuum-sealed one-pound bags “for easy thawing and quick meals”). The cooking videos Hannah posts weekly for her over twelve million followers on Instagram and TikTok are advertisements for these wares, and for her life—some assembly required, husband and children not included.
Country Life
This is the story the Neelemans tell: they grew up “city kids,” Hannah in Utah and Daniel in Connecticut. They met in college and got engaged after just three weeks. Hannah always wanted to be a mother and claims she was the first pregnant Juilliard undergraduate “in modern history.” After graduation, the family moved to Brazil for Daniel’s job. While visiting a ranch there, Daniel decided he wanted to give up his corporate career and become a farmer. They returned to the United States, spent three years looking for farmland until they found the right place in 2017, and lived there for a little over a year before outgrowing it and moving to their current ranch. Now, they run a family farm that they built from the ground up. The children ride horses and four-wheelers, wear cowboy hats and prairie dresses. They go to church on Sundays. Hannah and Daniel dance in the fields and the barn together, and they’re all the best of friends.
These are the details the Neelemans leave out: Daniel’s father is an airline tycoon who, among other things, founded JetBlue and oversaw the privatization of TAP Air, formerly owned and operated by the Portuguese government. Daniel’s first job, the one for which he moved his young family to Brazil, was the directorship of a home security company called Vigzul, also founded by the elder Neeleman. When the family moved back to the States so Daniel could fulfill his dream of becoming a hog farmer while attending business school at the University of Utah, he retained his seat on the board of another security company. This isn’t exactly unusual; small farmers increasingly struggle to make ends meet, and as of 2017, 56 percent of farmers held primary, nonagricultural jobs. What is unusual is the type of job Daniel has held.
Why Ballerina Farm’s public-facing origin story obscures the Neeleman family wealth isn’t difficult to understand. It’s much harder to convince ordinary people to buy into a lifestyle when they know it has been funded by airline millions, especially if that lifestyle champions simplicity and frugality. When, in 2018, a fan asked Hannah how her family could afford their farm life, she provided a technically honest answer that nonetheless obscured the whole truth: “I’m full-time farm, but Daniel still has a job,” she wrote. “We are working towards both of us being full-time farm.” Another follower thanked Hannah for showing him that it could be done. “Really encouraging to read this! My wife, three-year-old son and I are going into our fifth year of production and have rented land up until this point,” he wrote. “Great financially and for starting our business, but we are ready for our own land. We want to be able to farm exactly how we like, but also have something we can pass down to our children or to another young passionate farming couple when we’re old and gray.”
If we can do it, Ballerina Farm’s posts imply, then so can you.
Domestic Bliss
The word tradwife—a portmanteau of traditional wife that refers to women who eschew feminist values in favor of homemaking, child-rearing, and other conventional domestic pursuits—is not part of the Ballerina Farm lexicon, but Hannah Neeleman is its platonic ideal. She is a dutiful wife and mother; a talented cook; blonde, beautiful, and modest; and thin despite having delivered nearly a child a year for a decade, all but one of whom were born at home. She is willing to follow her husband wherever his career takes him, even if that means giving up her own; she is willing to support his passions, even if that means trading her pointe shoes for cowboy boots. She not only takes care of the children but protects them from anything that could corrupt their bodies, minds, and souls: their meals are cooked from scratch with farm-fresh ingredients, their schooling is conducted on the ranch. Unlike many of their imitators, however, Ballerina Farm’s content is not explicitly political, for good reason. Any public proclamation of the Neelemans’ beliefs, whatever they may be, would surely alienate a portion of their audience. But the words Hannah does use to describe her lifestyle are a clarion call to those who know what to listen for: living off the land is “natural,” sourdough bread is a “God-given marvel,” and the hogs they raise are “real heritage pork, the way great grandma remembers it.”
Hannah doesn’t have to call herself a tradwife because she already is one. As such, Ballerina Farm has become the lodestar for those still aspiring to establish an aesthetically pleasing—and, ideally, monetized—pastoral existence. Most of her acolytes are less subtle about their politics, which they assume Hannah shares. (...)
Take Gwen the Milkmaid, a Canadian “ASMRtist” and wellness-influencer-turned-tradposter. “Pov: you used to be a pro-abortion, anti-marriage, lesbian ‘feminist,’” reads the caption on a TikTok post of her rehydrating sourdough starter, “but now you’re getting married to your fav man on earth, love serving him, and can’t wait to make babies.” Like Hannah, Gwen is blonde, posts videos of herself cooking and frolicking in prairie dresses, and emphasizes the difference between her old life and the new one she has built for herself—or, rather, the life she hopes to have built, someday. In one video, Gwen asks God “why I don’t have a fifty-acre farm, seven children, forty chickens and five jersey cows yet.” Lacking a multimillionaire father-in-law, or a dairy cow of her own, she’s forced to churn store-bought cream into homemade butter. Gwen’s videos turn the subtext of Ballerina Farm’s videos into text, as if to compensate for the ranch she lacks: Gwen is proudly antigovernment, antivaccine, and anti-birth control. (...)
A month later, the magazine published a treatise on tradwives by Gina Florio, a personal trainer who moonlights as manager to Candace Owens, a conservative commentator whose BLEXIT foundation urged Black people to abandon the Democratic Party. (Owens has also promoted Ballerina Farm on Instagram. Hannah, for her part, reposted the endorsement and later deleted it.) Like Gwen the Milkmaid, Florio is a reformed liberal who wrote for Teen Vogue and PopSugar before she “left the left.” Tradwives, she argues, are superior to “the shrieking, blue-haired protester who wants on-demand abortion and supports the ‘free the nipple’ movement.” She describes Ballerina Farm as the example on which conservative women should model their lives: “The children are blonde and seemingly well-mannered. The father herds cattle in a cowboy hat. And the mother is impossibly beautiful as she milks cows in her overalls, loose braids, and zero makeup.” This is all in contrast to “the average twenty-five-year-old woman” who “lacks basic domestic skills, serially dates multiple men, and loudly opposes manners and decorum.”
