Ballerina Farm is Ready to Reintroduce Herself

Here are the things Hannah Neeleman, who goes by the name Ballerina Farm online, wants to discuss.

First, she is the mother of eight children and she loves it. In a time where the difficulty of American parenthood is at the forefront of the cultural conversation, Neeleman genuinely finds joy in raising her kids, a joy she tells me that she wants to publicly exude in order to inspire, not shame, other parents.

Second, she is a business owner. An entrepreneur raised by entrepreneurs, Neeleman gets the most animated when she discusses the working farm that she and her husband, Daniel, built from scratch over the past several years. In 2017, the couple bought property in rural Utah and started a business selling meat, baked goods, and homeware, and it is flourishing (the brand declined to share exact numbers). Its popularity is largely due to Neeleman’s wild success on social media; she’s amassed nearly 20 million followers across platforms like TikTok and Instagram, making an upper-echelon influencer by any measure. The ranch’s brand is intertwined with the one Neeleman has built around her persona; even the name, Ballerina Farm, is an homage to her former life as a Juilliard-trained dancer.

What Neeleman isn’t interested in talking about? What everybody else thinks about her. Rather, what critics online—the very vocal, very impassioned critics—think about her lifestyle, her brand, and what, ultimately she’s trying to say. As her popularity has grown, to many Neeleman has become the ultimate symbol of a certain type of woman. She’s often described as a “trad wife,” a type of influencer who seeks to promote so-called traditional values of family and homemaking in order to advance a conservative agenda.

There are two ways of viewing Neeleman’s content. You can take it at face value, swiping through the images of chickens and cows and pigs and blonde children in prairie dresses and cowboy hats without thinking too hard about it. You can see Neeleman making bread or butter from scratch and think, looks good! You can see posts of Neeleman competing in a beauty pageant for married women mere days after giving birth and think, go girl! And you can watch her videos of her home births and not extrapolate any feelings about your own birth or how you choose to parent.

Then, there’s the second way. You can watch Neeleman look endlessly happy, ethereal even, while raising eight children and it can make you feel bad, like an inadequate mother for frequently getting frustrated by your kids. You can watch her in the pageant and feel outraged that she dare act like looking so hot postpartum is something anyone should aspire too. And you can watch her devotion to her Mormon faith and her lifestyle and think to yourself, is something nefarious happening here? Am I being brainwashed through this beautiful woman and her gorgeous kids and her bucolic life into believing in a right-wing campaign to bring back the cult of domesticity?

Neeleman, though, sees her life as more nuanced.

“I come from a very traditional Christian upbringing, and I remember having my first baby and being like, ‘I’m going to take him to work with me. I am going to keep dancing,’” she tells me, alluding to the fact that she had her first son, Henry, shortly before graduating from Juilliard. “His first three years were in the ballet studio with me, and it was amazing. He was so fun to have in there. I was like, I’m just going to keep trucking along. And it was very unconventional in a way to a lot of people around me.”

This light pushback is as close as Neeleman will get to addressing those who obsess over her so-called trad wife persona, or the fact that, for some, she has become a cultural lightning rod. She and her social media presence had been a pet obsession among online motherhood writers for years when her first real newspaper profile—in the The Times of London of all places—came out in July. The piece went viral and led to more eyes on—and critique of—Neeleman and her brand. The story painted Neeleman as a submissive, perhaps overwhelmed wife to a husband chasing his personal dream of running a ranch and having a large family.

Though Neeleman through her representative declined to answer specific questions about the story, its implications clearly bothered her. Since then, Neeleman has launched, if not a rebranding, a reintroduction. She posted a video decrying how she was portrayed in the article and updated her website to share a new story of the brand, one in which her contributions to the business are centered. And she’s agreed to a smattering of interviews: with Glamour , with The New York Times, and controversially, with the right-wing women’s publication Evie, which featured her on their cover this week. The cover feature—which hasn’t yet been released—seemed to many of her detractors to be proof: Neeleman’s purpose all along was to spread a conservative, Christian agenda to the masses. (A rep for Neeleman tells me that she has done interviews with a wide variety of media. “We believe that the Ballerina Farm message can inspire many and we hope our message and mission resonates with different audiences and readers,” she says).

Neeleman’s core values as she describes them are much simpler.

“I hope that people, after they watch our content, are motivated and inspired to create something, whether that’s in the kitchen, whether that’s a business, or they’re not as scared of motherhood as they used to be,” she says. “I feel like family, food, and hard work are the three pillars that we’re always going back to.”

Whether you think of Neeleman as a trad wife or not, one thing’s for certain: her story is overwhelmingly American. After all, how else can you describe a husband and wife heading out to the land and trying their hand at entrepreneurial success through farming?

The way Neeleman tells it, becoming business owners is in her and her husband’s blood. Her parents together ran a flower shop, their nine children raised working alongside each other. Her husband is also one of nine, and his father, David Neeleman, is the founder of JetBlue and WestJet among other airlines (the fact that David Neeleman is worth $400 million is one that many of the couple’s critics trot out as evidence that their lives are less “bootstrap” than they portray online). But Neeleman tells me her father-in-law, as well as her own parents, served most crucially as an example of how to blend entrepreneurial spirit and family life.

“Daniel’s dad is such an incredible business owner, and he founded multiple airlines, but yet he’s at every grandkid’s football game, and family is his core,” she says. “He just loves seeing all of us start our own businesses and get dirty.”

After graduating from Juilliard, Neeleman says, both she and her husband were working and raising their young son. They were barely seeing each other, and Neeleman started to reflect on her own childhood. She says she’s the one who proposed a family business.

“I came from a family where my parents work together,” she says. “So I’m like, ‘Daniel, we have to find our thing. I want to build a business together. I want to start my own business. I want to do it with you so that we can work together.’ And he was probably taken aback by the idea, but he was like, ‘okay, let’s find something.’”

A few years later, Neeleman’s husband got a job at a startup security firm in Brazil and the couple relocated. She taught dance, and on the weekends they fell in love with visiting “farm hotels,” small businesses that host guests and allow them to feed animals and eat farm-to-table food. It was then the couple had the idea for their business: a small family farm. And Neeleman knew just how to market it.

“It was always my intention once we started our little farm to share it on social media and share our products with the customers there because it was going to be hard for us to do anything else,” she says. “We had to go direct to consumer.”

Neeleman began following a woman on Instagram named Mary Heffernan, who ran an account called @fivemarys. Heffernan and her husband had left their lives in Silicon Valley to start their own ranch in rural California, and had turned it into a thriving business with the help of social media. Neeleman saw a blueprint.

“I’m like, okay, I’m going to follow her business model,” she says. “I reached out to her and I was like, ‘Hey, tell me your ways.’ And she actually put together a course. I was her first student learning how to sell your farm goods direct to consumer.” Neeleman even ended up flying out to Heffernan’s ranch more than once for coaching.

When the Neeleman’s officially launched Ballerina Farm in 2017, it wasn’t an overnight success. Neeleman had changed her personal account to their business account, and at first only had a few hundred followers of mostly friends and family. Instagram Stories had just launched, and so Neeleman experimented with them. Soon, she felt she had a niche.

“I really utilized them,” she says. “I posted our journey of what it was like to be first-generation farmers knowing nothing and this drastic lifestyle change.”

Despite the fact that Neeleman is now often criticized for presenting a whitewashed or curated view of her life, she thinks her early success was due to the opposite.

“I think people just loved the rawness, the realness. And I tried to share the story as much as I could,” she says.

The next year, Ballerina Farm Instagram got a substantial influx of followers due to an achingly real event. A wildfire wiped out much of their property, buildings, and killed some of their animals, an event Neeleman describes as “traumatic.” She filmed and shared it all.

“I felt the desire to share the story of what was going on with our little community and people really rallied behind us,” she says. “Our account grew to 14,000, which felt huge for me during that experience, just everyone sharing and talking about it. And so that was a big moment for us.”

But how did she then grow her account to millions? Even Neeleman isn’t sure.

“I don’t know how everything else happened…the rest just kind of snowballed into where we are now,” she says.

I had to wonder if Ballerina Farm, the persona, is also something that had snowballed. I followed Neeleman’s Instagram account sometime during the pandemic—don’t ask me exactly when—and she had around 300,000 followers at the time. I followed her for the same reason I had also followed Five Marys a few years earlier, for a glimpse into a lifestyle that was enticingly different from my own.

Then suddenly, it felt like Ballerina Farm was everywhere. Not only had her following exploded, she was being cited in the media on both the left and the right as a figure of importance. She was praised as “pro-life” by Catholic News Agency for saying in a 2023 pageant she felt motherhood was empowering, she was given a glowing write-up in the aforementioned Evie. Yet other mothers—on Reddit, on TikTok, and especially on Substack—said that the way she portrays her life—with kids who behave, her apparent happiness and fulfillment—is harmful. As one TikToker put it, when moms in the “trenches” see her content, it makes them feel bad. It makes them feel like they’re doing something wrong.

In many ways, the persona of Ballerina Farm has become an outlet for the stress, ennui, and dissatisfaction of American motherhood. And with the rise of the “trad wife” and “soft life” trends—real online movements targeted at young women encouraging them to return to a time of patriarchal submission—her lifestyle only seems that much more threatening.

But the interesting thing about Neeleman is that from her perspective, she isn’t the “queen of the trad wives,” as the Times of London writer put it. She sees herself as a working mother, a person who was raised very traditionally who is, in her own way, breaking from a mold.

“For me to have the label of a traditional woman, I’m kinda like, I don’t know if I identify with that,” she told the Times of London (she declined to discuss the term with me).

Neeleman says the things that she values the most about her life are the things that, to her, make her less traditional. She’s working full-time, flexing her creativity in a way that’s personally satisfying.

“I love sitting down at the end of a day and editing videos,” she says. “I love editing my cooking reels. I love putting together stories in a way that I feel like is cohesive and beautiful and hopefully educational. That to me is just really fun.”

Another plus of owning her business with her husband, she says, is they are able both to be active parents.

“We definitely share the mantle of parenthood together, which I love,” she says.

Neeleman also gets fulfilment out of inspiring people through her content, and sharing the values she cares about. So, I ask her, what are those values, exactly?

Many of the ones she cites can be described as traditional, sure, depending on your point of view. Neeleman wants to inspire people to know where their food comes from and to be self-reliant. She loves to hear that she’s convinced others to buy their own farm animals or make more of their own food.

“There’s so many people who we run into when we’re traveling or out that are like, I just bought my first milk cow,” she says. “…Many of my followers live in New York City or in Paris, and they’re like, I have a sourdough starter in my apartment now.”

She’s also passionate about portraying a version of motherhood that leads with joy. As a scared new mom, she says she would have felt inspired to see a woman who genuinely got fulfillment out of her kids, and she wants to be that example.

“I think parenthood can get overwhelming and scary very quickly,” she says.. “I was in that position when we were pregnant with our first and being like, how do we navigate it? [So] I hope that the little snippets we share are encouraging to people who are making that journey into parenthood.”

Sure, she says, motherhood can be challenging. But she wants to focus on the good.

“Parenthood is hard, but what is meaningful in life that isn’t hard?” she says. “College is hard. College is hard. Having a career is hard. Running your own business is hard. It’s all hard, but we do it because there’s purpose in it. And so parenthood is hard, but it’s so awesome to see these little humans just grow and figure out things and teach us things and become the leaders of tomorrow.”

Her oldest son is now 12, and that’s also provided perspective.

“I think at the beginning of my motherhood journey, it just felt like it was never going to end,” she says. “I remember having my first and being like, oh my gosh…it felt so huge. And then they become just these responsible humans so quickly that you’re like, Oh, they don’t need me anymore. I want moms to realize how precious and beautiful that short time is with their children, and to just bask in it and enjoy it and learn from those little kiddos.”

Is embracing the joy in motherhood an inherently political message? In our extremely polarized country, maybe. But Neeleman is looking forward. She doesn’t want to dwell on all the things people write about her, or that profile, or the ways her content may or may not have been misconstrued.

Instead, she’s focusing on the things that make her happy, like the followers that share their versions of her recipes or the sourdough bread they made with her kit. Both she and Daniel, she says, are dedicated to growing their business and following their passions and hobbies, like fitness and cheese making. For Neeleman, that’s what it’s all about.

“Pushing ourselves as individuals is key,” she says. “Keep pushing yourself, keep inspiring yourself. You just have to keep going, keep moving, keep going upwards.”