As a ballerina, ; ; you are associated with many things. Elegance, grace, poise, but a term not often associated enough, strength. I learned to be strong. ; ; And despite what some people think, ; ; that strength never leaves you. It prepares you. The stage is different, but the strength is the same.
; Hannah Neeleman, known to her 9 million followers as Ballerina Farm, milks cows, gives birth without pain relief, and breastfeeds at Beauty Patch. Is this an empowering new model of womanhood or a hammer blow for feminism? ; Let’s run away together to a small town and live on a farm.
Sounds like the plot to every Hallmark movie and romance book. And from Hannah Neeleman’s Instagram page, it looks like the plot to Ballerina Farm. ; It was down a long track, and it sort of perched between these grass meadows. It’s like kind of overwhelmingly beautiful. You can’t believe that you can wake up and look at that every morning.
; But the things are not always what they appear. ; There’s a reason why our grandmothers left the farms and got jobs and used birth control because it looks really good on screen, but it is a terrible way to live. ; Hannah Neeleman has been called many things. A tradwife who’s been forced to live out the homesteading image by her husband, Daniel Neeleman.
A Mormon influencer mommy blogger. But how did Hannah create such a popular social media page and such a successful farm and brand? ; Really what drove us to start our own business is this hybrid of working together as a couple and also doing something that we can involve the children. ; Hannah’s husband, Daniel Neelman, is the heir to a $400 million fortune, but Hannah herself only dreamed of being a ballerina when they first met.
; Even when I first started dancing, I felt like dance was a part of me. It was a part of who I was. It was a part of who I was meant to be. ; But, when she married Daniel, they moved away from the big city and she gave up her dreams of dancing professionally as the two of them started a farm together. Hannah has been credited as one of the influencers who popularized the tradwife image and homesteading lifestyle with her Ballerina Farms social media accounts and brand.
; Tradwives are a huge phenomena on social media and none more than Hannah Neelman, who is uh also known as Ballerina Farm. She boasts 9 million followers on Instagram. She is absolutely massive there documenting her life on a Utah farm with no less than eight children. ; The Ballerina Farm brand projects an image of humble, self-sufficient rural living.
But, behind the facade, Hannah Neelman is more of a girlboss stereotype running a multi-million dollar corporate brand. ; Just a quick, but important reminder here, that Ballerina Farm is a brand that sells you things. And we deserve to know things about brands. We deserve to know their morals and their ethics. We deserve that because we’re giving them our money.
; On top of that, Ballerina Farm portrays an odd image of what farming really is juxtaposed with the brutal modern realities of farming. ; Over the last month, farmers from across America have been raising the alarm that they are in deep manure. Record agricultural debt combined with disruptive trade wars, financial consolidation of farmland, inclement weather conditions, the cutting of federal programs, increased input costs, and low market prices are combining to make most of these businesses completely unviable. This is in addition to the
problems that the industry isn’t allowed to talk about too loudly. ; Ballerina Farm, more than anything, is a representation of capitalism in the modern digital age and how influencers are using social media branding to sell a compelling story and ultimately sell their products. Most recently, the Ballerina Farm brand faced a huge controversy over raw milk as they halted their raw milk sales after samples failed health tests.
Both Hannah and Daniel got on camera to try and salvage the situation. ; Does Ballerina Farm currently sell raw milk? ; No. ; When did you stop selling raw milk? ; In August of 2025. ; Why did Ballerina Farm stop selling raw milk? ; Dan and I are extremely good at taking on too much too many projects at once. ; And Daniel is now trying to rebrand his tarnished public image.
; They just want to live their life as authentically. They support other women. They’re just living their lives because ultimately, the name for this career choice is influencer. It’s not actually just that you’re simply living your life. ; Ballerina Farm is a pretty standard sort of trad wifey TikTok.
; Wow, there’s been a lot of talk about raw milk this this past week and I said well ; Sounds like that is kind of where things fell down for Melanie. ; He had to do some genuinely predatory and stalker shit. ; willing to take no for an answer. Honestly, it doesn’t feel like much of a love story at all.
; He is the heir to a $400 fortune and his dad started JetBlue. ; After he makes you give up your dream life you had as a ballerina and doesn’t even let you have a dance studio so the kids can have a place to do school work when there’s a whole house for them to do that. ; Every few months, there seems to be something to do with whatever the hell is going on in that house.
; So grim. It’s fucking awful. I know I keep getting ahead of myself here, but God, it just gets so much worse. ; ; Hannah Neuman grew up in a Mormon family of nine children in Springville, Utah. ; She grew up in Utah, quite nearby, in a sort of lower middle class Mormon family.
She was one of nine ; ; and she was home-schooled. ; As is common for most ballet dancers, Hannah started dancing ballet at a young age and when Hannah was only 14 years old, she attended Juilliard School, which is a highly performing arts school for their summer ballet program. Summer programs are something ballet dancers often do to receive training from prestigious schools from a very young age, especially schools or professional companies they’d like to get into when they’re older.
Two years later, Hannah received a scholarship to Brigham Young’s University’s theater ballet program at the age of 16 years old. Hannah was at least able to stay close to home while receiving professional training as a ballet dancer. And unfortunately, this is often the reality of ballet. Ballet careers end at a fairly young age, so most start dancing very young, traveling young, and training professionally, and receiving lifelong injuries at a young age from overworking themselves.
I grew up dancing, and for a period of time, I wanted to join a company. While of course, this is certainly not always the case, what ended up changing my mind is that I saw some people in my dance studio accomplish that dream and end up having a very terrible experience. Someone I knew developed osteoporosis in their late 20s, their late 20s.
From what I can recall, the pay for being a professional ballet dancer is awful, abysmal, considering most people start dancing from the age of like four. Nevertheless, a lot of people pursue ballet because of their undying passion, and it seems that Hannah was the same. She finished her university ballet studies at Juilliard in New York City.
Growing up, Hannah’s parents owned a flower shop called the Right Flower Farm, farm likely being a keyword. Hannah’s parents owned a business based on a flower farm in Utah, a flower farm, which sounds kind of lovely, actually. So, that was the environment she was kind of accustomed to from her childhood. ; for today is you can’t move a mountain unless you start with the shovel.
; ; One of the two locations for the first two Ballerina Farm pop-ups was in Hannah’s parents flower shop 7 years ago. Once Hannah started the Ballerina Farm brand, she sold her parents flowers on the site through a flower subscription box. Hannah also advertised her parents flowers on the Ballerina Farm TikTok.
; Hello everyone. I just got my just got my flowers box. Let me just open that. All right. ; It also seems like Hannah tried to create a Ballerina Farms Flowers brand where she would sell flowers, but it never really took off. There used to be a Ballerina Farms Flowers.com, but the link currently redirects to the Right Flower Box website.
On the about page of the Right Flower Farm website, the site talks about how all of the Wright children, Hannah included, grew up in the shop, worked there, and now have their own non-flower businesses. Though it would be really cool if they all just continued having more flower farms. I think we need more flower farms in the world.
Something very bizarre that I ended up stumbling upon during this video making process was Hannah’s sister, Mica Wright Perry, who has the Instagram account Vintage versus Vogue. Now, her business is really beautiful. She makes these gorgeous ball gowns with flowers that seems like an homage to her parents’ business of having this flower farm.
She is also very Mormon with just so so so many children. And I just happened to click on these posts and found out that there was a time in which Mica was pregnant at the same time as her young daughter. POV: You’re pregnant with your mom. My mom and I are living a dream. We’re both pregnant with baby girls.
She’s 32 weeks and counting down to the days to meet her little one. I’m 22 weeks and just starting to feel those first flutter kicks. It almost seems like Hannah and Daniel were inspired by Hannah’s parents and wanted to create a similar family and business for themselves, but they could have never done it with such scale, such a massive farm bringing in so much money without Daniel’s multi-millionaire parents.
Hannah was still getting her BFA and dancing at Juilliard when she first met Daniel. She was home for Thanksgiving break when they met at a college basketball game. ; Just got the kids to bed. Got our chairs set up for question time. So, we met at the basketball game. It was during Thanksgiving break.
I was going to school in New York, and Daniel was going to school in Utah. So, we kind of like switched thoughts. So, I went home I went back to school the following weekend. ; I was instantly smitten, but it took Hannah longer to realize that we were soulmates. So, we didn’t see each other for 6 months after the first night we met.
; Mhm. ; Daniel was studying at BYU. After they first met, Daniel continued to pursue Hannah, but she didn’t yet give him a chance. They did stay in contact. ; ready to go. I was like, “Okay.” ; He was like, ; “Sign me up.” ; He He called me the next day like, “Let’s go out.” ; “Let’s go out.
” And I was thinking like, I let’s get married, you know, that’s what I was thinking. And but she wouldn’t go on a date with me for 6 months. ; It wasn’t until Daniel found out that Hannah was flying back to New York City from Salt Lake City with JetBlue Airlines when they really started talking. One day, she mentioned to Daniel that she was getting the 5-hour flight from Salt Lake City to New York back to Juilliard.
She didn’t realize his dad owned the airline. So, Daniel was like, “I’m on that same flight.” She says, “I remember checking in and them saying, ‘You’re 5A and you’re 5B.'” I just thought, “No way, that’s crazy.” Daniel smiles, “I made a call.” He had pulled strings at JetBlue, and so began their first date.
Daniel was able to do this because his dad owns JetBlue as well as multiple other airlines. Daniel Neelman is the heir to an airline founder businessman. He’s the son of David Neelman, who founded five airlines. ; Daniel’s a father founded JetBlue Airlines among some others. They grew up in Connecticut, and his father commuted into New York every day.
But he did not have a single animal growing up. He dreamt He really dreamt of this extreme life as a small pioneering American farmer wearing a cowboy hat and denims. ; The Neeleman family is also Mormon. David Neeleman, Daniel’s dad, co-founded his first airline at the age of 25. He sold this first airline at the age of 33 to Southwest Airlines, and he’s founded five airlines overall.
Multiple sources report online that David Neeleman’s net worth is about $400 million. Because of this, Daniel grew up very privileged and wealthy. His childhood home had over 20 rooms, including an indoor basketball court and a 24-seat home theater. The home was custom-built for him and his family.
Ultimately, it seems like Daniel got whatever he wanted growing up, and as an adult, that pattern never really changed. He went to BYU as most Utah Mormons do, and his life was laid out for him, his rich family helping him along the way. When Daniel met Hannah, she was the picture-perfect Mormon wife, and he decided she was the person he wanted to marry.
So, he did everything within his power, using his father’s money and influence to make it happen. Eventually, Hannah said yes to getting engaged after only 3 weeks of dating. ; Back then, I thought we should date for a year before marriage. She continues, “So, I could finish school and whatever.” And Daniel was like, “It’s not going to work.
We’ve got to get married now.” Girl, I feel like that man knew you were going to be great, and Mhm. ; According to a Times article and a blog post from Hannah, she wanted to finish college first while dating Daniel. At the time, she had about a year left, but Daniel had other plans ; ; and decided they were going to get married as soon as possible.
; Were you ready to get married as quickly as Daniel was? ; No. In fact, I was kind of like, maybe we should just date a year, you know, and I finish school and whatever, and ; ; Daniel was like, “It’s not going work, you know, like we got to get married now.” ; And so we dated for a month, we got engaged, and we were married a month later.
; So after about 2 months of dating in 2011, they got married. And 3 months after marriage, Hannah was pregnant with her first child. ; So she was doing her final year at Juilliard, pregnant. She was apparently the first Juilliard student in modern history to be pregnant with a baby. ; 3 months after marriage, after they’ve known each other for how long? After they got married only 2 months after they started dating, 3 months later, they’re pregnant? Imagine, you meet someone, you start dating, and then 5 months later, you’re married and with a
kid on the way. ; ; Within that time, how much did they really know about each other? Their shared thoughts on raising children, sharing a home. It was almost like Daniel just decided that now was the time he wanted to get married and start a family. Hannah was the person he decided on, so he was going to speed run the entire thing.
; Daniel said that he saw her and just thought, “Yep, she’s going to be my wife.” ; Which does feel very dehumanizing. Did he view Hannah as an equal human with equal say? Having settled back in New York City, Hannah has said in media interviews that she was certain that they were going to stay and live in the city even after having had children.
; Even when I first started dancing, I felt like dance was a part of me. It was a part of who I was, it was a part of who I was meant to be. ; ; And then later on, as I became a mother, I felt that same connection to this calling that that it’s a part of me. It’s who I was meant to be.
I really feel like I was meant to be a mother. ; During this time Daniel kept having the idea that a life in the city wasn’t what he wanted. Shortly after graduating Hannah gave birth to her first child and they moved back to Utah so Daniel could finish his BA in history at BYU. While according to reports Daniel was the person who pushed the quick marriage and moved back to Utah, the underlying aspect of all of this is the Mormon religion and how often it encourages relationships exactly like Hannah and Daniel’s.
; Do we go to church? ; Yeah, we go to church. We go to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Some people know it as the Mormon Church. We’re Christians. So that’s what we do on Sundays. Go to church. ; A Pew Research Center study from 2015 found that Mormons are more likely to be married and have kids than any other religious group.
In a 2025 report from the Pew Research Center, Mormons said more than any other religious group that children were best off when the mother stays home to take care of them. This begs the question, what has been normalized in Mormon culture which looks different to internet onlookers? ; Kevin’s for five nights of We like tracked Hannah’s phone out here to the dumpster.
How does this happen? ; [crying] ; Here’s what I don’t understand. I don’t understand why everyone is reading this New York Times article and acting all surprised that like Hannah is worn out and that Daniel’s sounds like a jerk and all this stuff. Like, we’ve been watching this for a really long time. There’s a reason why our grandmothers left the farms and got jobs and used birth control because it looks really good on screen, but it is a terrible way to live.
; There was the apron incident where Hannah receives only an egg apron for her birthday from her millionaire husband. ; It was my birthday present from Daniel. I opened the tickets to Greece. ; Where’s it from? ; I don’t know. The boys took it off. ; I took it off. ; It’s from Ukraine. ; So, plane tickets? ; [laughter] ; A hat I can wear in Greece.
; It’s not a hat. ; It’s not? Oh, my egg apron! ; [screaming] ; It has eggs in it. ; Great. Now you can gather eggs. ; So cute. Look, it’s really cute. It’s a cute one. ; That’s the best. You’re welcome. ; Thanks, honey. ; Not for long time. ; There was the viral Times article where Hannah and Daniel share their beliefs on being anti-abortion.
And then, the scariest of all, Daniel says that sometimes Hannah will be so tired from all the work she has to do that she’ll end up bedridden for a week straight. ; Daniel mentioned to me and Paul saying, you know, sometimes she got so exhausted that she can’t get out of bed for a week. You know, she got so ill. ; She says her first three years of marriage were really hard.
We sacrificed a lot, she says. But we did have this vision, this dream. And Daniel interrupts, we still do. What kind of sacrifices, I ask her. Well, I gave up dance, which was hard. You give up a piece of yourself. And Daniel gave up his career ambitions. This is why I love the author of this article.
I look out at the vastness and don’t totally agree. Daniel wanted to live in the great western wilds, so they did. He wanted a farm, so they do. He likes date nights once a week, so they go. They have a babysitter on those evenings. He didn’t want nannies in the house, so there aren’t any. The only space earmarked to be Neelman’s own, a small barn she wanted to convert into a ballet studio, ended up becoming the kids’ schoolroom.
; But Hannah herself has repeatedly admonished this Time’s article, saying essentially that parts of the article were taken out of context and calling her and Daniel co-parents, diaper changers, CEOs, and kitchen cleaners. ; A couple of weeks ago, we had a reporter come into our home to learn more about our family and business.
We thought the interview went really well. Very similar to the dozens of interviews we had done in recent memory. We were taken, however, when we saw the printed article, which shocked us and shocked the world by being an attack on our family and my marriage, portraying me as oppressed, with my husband being the culprit.
This couldn’t be further from the truth. Nothing we said in the interview implied this conclusion, which leads me to believe the angle taken was predetermined. For Daniel and I, our priority in life is God and family. Everything else comes second. The greatest day of my life was when Daniel and I were married 13 years ago.
Together we have built a business from scratch. We’ve brought eight children into this world and have prioritized our marriage all along the way. We are co-parents, co-CEOs, co-diaper changers, kitchen cleaners, and decision makers. We are one, and I love him more today than I did 13 years ago. We have many dreams still to accomplish.
We aren’t done having babies. We are excited for our new farm store to open, and I can’t wait to see what the future holds for the rest of it. But for now, I’m doing what I love most, being a mother, wife, a businesswoman, a farmer, a lover of ; Whether Hannah and Daniel’s relationship was perceived as toxic or not, to Hannah and Daniel, it was normalized.
Hannah had been in Utah on a farm and a part of the Mormon church her entire life. She couldn’t imagine the life of her parents as being abusive. So, she couldn’t imagine the life that she had with Daniel being what commenters and reporters were claiming. Do you think she’s happy? ; Yeah. I do.
I think there’s been a lot of speculation online since. I think she’s very tired. Um I think as is he, and what really struck me is just quite how little time that either of them have for themselves, but I suppose that is parenthood and the little space that she had for herself otherwise. ; Hannah and Daniel being back in Utah, and Hannah having grown up in a small business farm environment, you could see maybe where they were inspired to start a farm.
But there were other factors at play that ended up inspiring them to start Ballerina Farm. One of them being their time living in Brazil. ; So, we are here at the dairy. We’re giving a tour to a Brazilian group that also has a dairy. ; Daniel’s family has a long history in Brazil, starting with Daniel’s grandfather, who traveled to Brazil for his mission, and then decided to move there to work as a journalist.
Daniel’s father, David, was born in Brazil while his father was working there. So, David has dual citizenship. BYU has an interview with three generations of Neelman’s about their legacy in Latin America. With the long history of white colonialism and white saviorism, and missionaries often speaking about traveling to a foreign land and feeling changed by it.
The Nielman’s experience traveling to Brazil is nothing new and also unsurprising, unfortunately. After graduating, Daniel received a director role for his father’s home security company, Vigzil Vigzil. As Daniel is a nepo baby to the max, this is unsurprising. Daniel, right out the gate, got a major director role in a company that his father owned.
But because Vigzil was based in Brazil, Hannah and Daniel relocated to live in Brazil. While living in Brazil with young children and being in a new country, Hannah started getting into social media with her own blog. In this blog, there were often some hints of how much Hannah was feeling homesick. Yesterday, Daniel took the afternoon off work and we went for a drive.
I may or may not have had a major meltdown yesterday during lunch and told Daniel I was running away. It was quite the meltdown, man. So, he loaded up everyone in the car and we set out to press the reset button. We drove and we drove and we talked and cried. and Daniel held my hand tight. Charles slept and Henry watched the trucks on the freeway.
Everything really is okay and time with Daniel to talk was what I needed. There’s been more blog posts where Hannah talks about living in Brazil and mentions that her husband will be gone more than 12 hours a day and that since the family only has one car, she’ll be stranded with no car and a young child. She even mentions that she’ll spiral into a depression after being left alone for days on end.
This blog is very concerning to me personally in the way that Hannah completely writes off her suffering and acts like it was nothing or she was being over dramatic for doing that. Already, Mormonism tends to preach that women are more valued for their suffering in the home and in motherhood and ballet tends to also teach that suffering is an integral part to dance.
; As a ballerina, you are associated with many things. Elegance, grace, ; ; poise, but a term not often associated enough, strength. On this stage, I learned to be strong. And despite what some people think, that strength never leaves you. ; So, it feels, at least to me, that Hannah is set up to dismiss her pain.
; But yeah, she said it was a great sacrifice, and she acknowledges that her life today is built on great sacrifices, one of which was her relationship with dance. ; Well, you know, I I gave up dance, which was like big sacrifice for me. Daniel gave up, you know, his career ambitions, and we’re like, “Hey, let’s start something together.
” Like, those were big sacrifices for us. ; Even though Hannah seemed to miserable at times in Brazil, the Ballerina Farm about section on their website claims some of the most integral parts of their early stages in their family and development of Ballerina Farm came during their time in Brazil. We moved to Sao Paulo for Daniel’s work, where I danced with a local company, and we discovered our love of agriculture through weekend farm hotel getaways.
Farm hotels are somewhat popular in Brazil, and it’s what it sounds like, a farm hotel. You can stay on a farm, and it seemed staying at these farm hotels caused Hannah and Daniel to fall in love with farms. After finding this new found passion, they decided to embark on the homesteading life.
So, they moved back to Utah and bought a farm. With only four pigs, they were living out their homesteading dream. In a video titled Meet the Farmers, Hannah eloquently breaks down the reasons why her and Daniel decided that the farm was the place they needed to be, describing how her and Daniel wanted to raise their children on a farm for one reason or another.
The video focuses on how Daniel and Hannah seem to be parents who want to instill values of hard work in their children and think that living on a farm, walking across bridges, and rolling tires around is the best way to do so. ; For one reason or another, Dan and I both loved the idea of raising our children on a farm. And it was this dream that we talked about and we talked about and finally it just got to the point where we had to make it our reality.
; The Ballerina Farm website and pages provides imagery where farming appears to be a happy family all together with a few happy animals and somehow a thriving farm business is born from this. The reality of the farming industry, as I’m sure you can imagine, is very, very different. ; And the way that they make it work, the way that this farm is financially viable is because of the Instagram page.
In America, you could not have a small holding like that and survive unless you had other ways of making money or unless you can crank your prices up because you’re an online brand that people want to sort of invest in. ; The American farming industry is generally in a pretty rough place economically with many farmers not expecting to make money this year due to the war and tariffs as reported by Marketplace in March of 2026.
The New Yorker published a photography portfolio just recently as well about how small farmers are leaving behind generationally owned farms because of the financial strain reporting that last year farm bankruptcies jumped by nearly 50%. ; The number of agricultural bankruptcies has spiked this year and now farmers are saying that they will probably need a bailout to keep their essential industry afloat.
Almost every country that is relying on food imports from America has made major investments into finding alternatives as quickly as possible. ; Meanwhile, the Ballerina Farm rose to success only in the past few years painting and promoting the concept of small farms as the idyllic lifestyle. ; Just want to give you a little weekend recap here at the farm.
So we headed to town and watched the boys play their games. We hit our neighbors cattle drive on the way there and on the way back. So, it made us late coming and going. We are enjoying the most beautiful fall here on the farm. We got our new balling calves. These guys are going into our beef program.
They were just weaned from their mamas and looking so good. Aubrey came up and we did a protein powder photo shoot with the animals. And we also did some stuff in the kitchen with the kids’ little hands. It’s ready to go in next week, which is very exciting. This video made me laugh of the traffic that we had on our driveway as we were leaving.
Then that night we had some friends over for the first dinner in a pumpkin of the year. Then we headed over to the dairy and did our nightly calf feeding. ; Nine years ago, agricultural writer and researcher Sarah Mock published a post on Medium titled what farming isn’t, discussing the difference between the aesthetic farm-to-table farming and the actual agricultural industry after traveling to multiple states with a high density of farmland.
I can say safely that the idyllic pastoral daydream we cling to and pay for bears no resemblance to farming in the heartland or frankly to most farming anywhere. To shed some more light on the reality of the average picture of American agriculture, according to the FWD, an immigrant and criminal reform advocacy group, roughly 73% of agricultural labor is made up by the immigrant population with about 50% of all agricultural laborers being undocumented immigrants.
They are the backbone of the American agricultural industry. I also want to ask the question, who built the foundation of American farms in this country? ; Record agricultural debt combined with disruptive trade wars, financial consolidation of farmland, inclement weather conditions, the gutting of federal programs, increased input costs, and low market prices are combining to make most of these businesses completely unviable.
This is in addition to the problems that the industry isn’t allowed to talk about too loudly, like a lot of mysteriously cheap labor being a little bit harder to find right now. ; Recent ICE raids have only made the agricultural labor crisis worse. Though, of course, regardless, no one deserves to deal with ICE and the terror that ICE inflicts.
; A report by the Economic Policy Institute found that 70% of all investigations into the agricultural industry detected violations in wage and hour laws. Labor-intensive farm work like hand harvesting is almost always conducted by contractors since they are only needed when there is an actual harvest to be picked.
These contracts frequently pay based on output rather than total hours worked, which means it is very easy for these independent contractors to make less than minimum wage for their work. But now, with heightened immigration enforcement, farmers are also finding it harder to rely on undocumented workers who have typically been more willing to accept these unfavorable conditions.
; Ballerina Farm portrays farming in an entirely different reality. As a white family owning large pieces of land and picture-perfect curated images, along with food they can sell to you for a marked up price. ; In the meadows below, there are cows grazing, whilst pigs and horses roam higher up. ; And so, that farmhouse is down a very long track, and it’s sort of white clapboards, and you kind of look out the kitchen window, and it’s honestly like a screensaver.
It’s like kind of overwhelmingly beautiful. ; As this one commenter so eloquently put it, Ballerina Farms is not a farm. It’s a brand built on privilege pretending to be authenticity. It’s a millionaire’s photoshoot disguised as homesteading, selling the illusion of hard work while real farmers break their backs to survive without luxury kitchens or marketing teams.
Their polished image distorts public perception of agriculture, making it harder for actual working-class farmers to be taken seriously or earn a living. It’s not honest, it’s exploitation of a lifestyle they bought into with wealth. Ballerina Farms sells high-priced goods to a luxury audience, propped up by branding and influencer clout, while real local farmers that are doing the same or more work struggle to sell eggs or meat at fair market.
Local farmers get bashed for charging prices that reflect real labor and costs, while Ballerina Farm charges premium or even inflated prices and gets praised for being artisanal. In the promo video from the about section of the Ballerina Farm website, Hannah talks about how Daniel and her don’t know what we’re doing, and the result is four times more mistakes, as if that’s a charming aspect of them deciding one day to run away from the city and start a farm together.
But they’re the ones who are supposedly providing farm products that people are consuming. So, in actuality, it becomes kind of concerning. In this same section, Hannah makes a point of saying that other farmers didn’t like her and Daniel being city-slicker millennials. Rather than hide their lack of knowledge and experience, they try to make it a point of positive differentiation and authenticity to try and sell the idea that you too could ditch your life in the city and open a humble small farm if that’s what you’re passionate about.
; We didn’t know what we were doing and we still don’t. So, everything takes twice as long. ; ; We make four times the amount of mistakes as other farmers do. And other farmers and ranchers didn’t respect us. They didn’t like the city-slicker millennials coming in and trying to be like them.
; Why does Ballerina Farm have such a reputation as an artisanal brand while so many farmers are suffering. What did they do that allowed their audience to buy into, literally and figuratively, the influencer label and branding? After posting about their journey and starting a farm nearly every day in 2018, mainly on Instagram, Hannah started soft launching her brand, Ballerina Farm.
At the time, Daniel also received a master’s in business from the University of Utah, which may have helped in developing the Ballerina Farm brand. From 2021 to 2024, the Ballerina Farm Instagram account grew from just over 200,000 Instagram followers to 9 million, all off of Hannah posting about seemingly everyday activities on the farm, like milking the cow Tulip or baking sourdough bread.
; ; Open it and show me how to do ; Oh, some stroganoff. ; And then back in the meat? ; But that was the appeal of Hannah. Her life seemed so attainable, yet an escape at the same time, and aesthetically beautiful. But when you pull back the curtain, you realize slowly that none of this is attainable, and Hannah is either living a life that most people are unable to have or that most people don’t want to have.
; We drove home. ; I don’t say ; so. ; Hannah’s content slightly evolved over time, making a slight shift from the homesteader life of her getting up and milking the cows and posting selfies with horses, the sort of farmer life, to the cooking for my large family, taking care of my kids, and homeschooling, what’s been labeled as the tradwife content.
This coincides with a boost in the Ballerina Farm platform. People seemed to like this sort of content, or they just love to scrutinize Ballerina Farm and Hannah. But either way, her platform was blowing up in the process. Journalist E.J. Dickinson, an author of the book One Bad Mother, said in an interview, “Once you become a mother, it’s like the switch turns on, where everybody is just constantly scrutinizing every decision you make.
” In terms of social media, that’s one of the many places where you see this play out, right? It was why I was interested in writing about Ballerina Farm, because this is a woman who you would think is the apotheosis of good motherhood, right? But her comments are filled with people who are picking on her for the stupidest things.
And it just really drives home to me just how much of motherhood, how much of social media has exacerbated this already pre-existing environment of how motherhood is about surveillance and watching and being watched and judging. There are theories on Reddit that the Mormon Church encouraged Hannah and Daniel to promote this lifestyle through essentially giving them a calling, because it looks good for the church.
They claim that through their experience, the Mormon Church would encourage people to be involved in social media, especially if you were attractive and talented and lived up to the values of the prosperity gospel. If you’re faithful, the Lord will provide. Hannah and Daniel Nielman seemed like perfect representations of that, but these claims are just speculation.
That being said, there have been many members of the Mormon church that have spoken about the Mormons’ long-standing ties to social media. Jana Riess, author of The Next Mormons, journalist, and senior columnist for the Religious News Service spoke about Mormon moms on social media in an interview for the NPR show It’s Been a Minute.
Riess talks about how the Mormon church teaches members that every member is a missionary, which has created various forms of missionary work throughout generations. ; that certainly it is a church that for decades has taught its members, {quote} every member a missionary, {unquote}. That has been a mantra. Even ordinary people who are just living their lives and raising their kids and going to PTA meetings, they are supposed to consider themselves to be missionaries as well.
; One being the Mormon mommy blogs that were created almost 20 years ago. Often there would be a subtle link to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but it was never too obvious that the mommy bloggers were Mormon or may even view themselves as missionaries. The Mormon mommy bloggers would try to lead others through their lifestyle, their so close to perfect lifestyle that would inspire others to want to be like them.
; One of the things that we could see happening 20 years ago as these blogs start taking off, these Mormon mommy blogs that you were talking about, is in the little corner you would see discreetly, oh, you know, here’s link to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And it wouldn’t necessarily be overt, it wouldn’t be let me tell you what I believe about Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.
; Not like outright evangelizing like one might think of. ; No, it was leading through lifestyle. So, I’m going to show you my happy family and I’m going to show you that we’re not perfect, you know, we’re we’re going to show you some cracks that are really nice looking cracks, right? I mean, as cracks in the facade go, we’re going to show you just a few ; [laughter] ; that are not that hard to look at just to make us seem more palatable, right? ; Past presidents of the church also encouraged members to keep a record of
their lives because angels would one day read it. ; One of the previous presidents of the church, Spencer W. Kimball, actually told Latter-Day Saints in the 1970s that ; ; angels in heaven would be reading their journals someday. ; Later in that same interview, Reese talks about how the leaders of the Mormon church in 2007 explicitly told its members to exert influence online by posting about their lives and sharing the gospel, meaning the leaders likely knew the power of social media and the
power of social media recruitment. ; So, in 2007, one of the highest leaders of the LDS church, M. Russell Ballard, gives a speech. ; There is perhaps no other time in the history when the church has received more attention. ; He said, ; ; “I ask that you join the conversation by participating on the internet to share the gospel and to explain in simple and clear terms the message of the restoration.
” ; But we cannot stand on the sidelines while others, including our critics, attempt to define what the church teaches. Most of you already know that if you have access to the internet, you can start a blog in minutes and begin sharing what you know to be true. ; And so, the church explicitly promoted this idea that you would write something, that you would post something to present your religion and possibly also yourself and your family in a positive light.
; Hannah uses this same playbook. She plays out an idyllic traditional role and doesn’t overtly speak on her role in the Mormon church. Yet, through subliminal messaging and the online influence of Hannah and Mormon influencers like her, the exact same lifestyle that the Mormon church says that women should attain to is the exact same lifestyle that’s made to look so appealing online.
Can you see that? ; We had some friends over at the farm this week. And between Nara and I, we had 11 children outside playing. So, we knew it was just a matter of time until they were in the house wanting a meal. And I don’t know about you, but our kids’ favorite meal is spaghetti. So, that’s what we decided to make for lunch today.
; Just as Hannah’s Ballerina Farm embodies values of the Mormon Church, Ballerina Farm’s particular version of being a tradwife and capitalism also embodies many conservative concepts. The conservative movement directly compares the burnt-out city-living girl boss to the peaceful, happy, tranquil stay-at-home mom.
There’s a video from A More Perfect Union that directly references Ballerina Farm, saying the aesthetic of trad that conservatives create is always the same. The aesthetic of trad that conservatives create is always the same. ; A beautifully decorated farmhouse in a perfect pastoral setting. And online, trad influencers like Ballerina Farm show us a vision of labor that’s connected to the earth and produces tangible goods.
A contrast to many jobs today where the fruits of your labor are usually just increased shareholder value. ; In the 2024 New York Times profile on Hannah, they wrote about her political alignment and faith, saying, “A member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Miss Nielson occasionally references her faith, but her posts are not overtly religious.
Hannah also doesn’t necessarily state any political views in her words, but her actions show those traditional American values of hard work and pull yourself up by your bootstraps behavior, while still maintaining a very particular aesthetic of femininity and womanhood.” ; Does it come at a particular moment for America where actually a lot of the country’s leaning into, you know, a sort of a Christian conservative version of American values that sort of almost reflects the politics? ; Which all feels very constrained. Hannah
went viral in conservative spaces online in 2023 after giving the answer to the Miss American pageant that giving birth to her children was the most empowered she’d ever felt. ; When have you felt the most empowered? When have you felt the most empowered? ; I have felt this feeling seven times now. As I bring these sacred souls to the earth.
After I hold that newborn baby in my arms. The feeling of motherhood and bringing them to the earth is the most empowering feeling I have ever felt. ; The intention of the Ballerina Farm imagery is to feed an idyllic image to a certain type of person who’ll pay for products to aspire to this lifestyle. While Ballerina Farm isn’t saying explicitly what values they align with, it becomes clear in subliminal messaging.
; Just a quick but important reminder here that Ballerina Farm is a brand that sells you things. And we deserve to know things about brands. We deserve to know their morals and their ethics. We deserve that because we’re giving them our money and that’s an important thing. So this new profile about Ballerina Farm told us a lot.
It told us a lot about what Ballerina Farm the brand values and how they treat women. ; Ultimately, it’s beneficial for Hannah’s brand to come off as a certain kind of traditional woman and also to eschew that image all in the name of turning a profit. So let’s talk about exactly how Hannah does that. ; So in the last couple of years or so, uh these women, these influencers online have gained more and more followers.
Now they post publicly about having a domestic at home lifestyle. So, they cook everything from scratch. They look after their children, often very many, and often it is linked to Christianity. And they talk about the peace and the pleasure of reverting to sort of more traditional gender roles at home.
; According to parent.com, tradwife refers to a married woman who embraces traditional gender roles, particularly focusing on homemaking and supporting her husband by raising the kids, cooking, and keeping the house clean, while the husband serves as the primary breadwinner. ; Tradwife is a traditional wife who is in a {quote} traditional marriage, which means she doesn’t work outside of the home, and she’s focused on rearing her children, making food, keeping the home, deferring to her husband on all decisions. I saw one tradwife posting
about specifically politics, how she’s really she loves that she doesn’t have to think about it, and she can just vote whomever her husband tells her to vote for. ; Cool. ; And, you know, it The thing is, choose your own choice, girl, right? Like, if this is what people want to be doing, go for it.
But, that’s not what is happening online, and a lot of the attention has been spent on these like massive accounts, like Ballerina Farms, who are very, very whitewashed figurative and literal version of what it means to be a traditional wife. But, this is something we have seen coming out of the Christian evangelical homesteader community for a long, long time.
And it is this idea of, again, shifting the Overton window away from feminism. ; While Hannah and Daniel play out traditional roles for the screen, showing Daniel working on the farm and Hannah taking care of the kids, in reality, the lines may be far more blurred, with Hannah being the reason behind the success, while Daniel is just there.
In fact, it kind of feels like Daniel banked off of his father’s wealth and success for most of his young adult life, even with his first job at the startup in Brazil. And then later, he banked off of Hannah’s success on social media, along with a massive farm, likely bought off of his family’s wealth. A Times journalist who wrote a viral profile on Ballerina Farms also released a clip that went live shortly after the article, reflecting on her experience reporting the story.
The reporter mentioned how Daniel leads the brand and Hannah is the face. ; Daniel is very involved in the brand. In fact, he kind of leads it. Hannah seems to be the sort of face. ; Sarah Peterson, author of the book Momfluenced, wrote a newsletter called In Pursuit of Clean Countertops. And this entire newsletter was inspired off of Hannah’s husband, Daniel.
In this newsletter, she has an article titled The Unbearable Daniel of It All, where she writes, “Daniel has long had a nasty little habit of speaking over and for the person whose Instagram presence is responsible for Ballerina Farm, the company becoming what it is today, a multi- tiered business with millions of followers.” What a queen.
In fact, you can tell just how insignificant Daniel is from the about section on the Ballerina Farm page, where they have three major headings: About Us, The Ballerina Farm Story, and Hannah’s Story. There’s no section for Daniel’s story, though it was apparently always Hannah and Daniel’s dream to start a business together.
They wanted to start a business and be co-CEOs. ; What’s Hannah’s husband’s role? ; He is They they call one another co-CEOs. Hannah is the face of the brand, I would say, from looking at her Instagram and the Instagram page. Hannah is definitely on the visuals. She understands how to do it, how to sell it.
She leads on the social media, but Daniel is in charge of the farm. ; The name Ballerina Farm is a reference to Hannah’s background in ballet, combined with her current life on the farm with her husband. As they stated in the Times profile, Daniel and Hannah are co-CEOs of the brand Ballerina Farm. ; Well, Daniel and I are are a partnership now, you know.
; Yeah. ; Like I don’t feel like I’m at home raising kids by myself. Like that’s hard. ; Yeah. ; You know. And women need support. And so when Daniel was like, “Okay, let’s build something together.” We ; ; we really carried the mantle together. ; Daniel Neillman claimed the couple believed that’s what happens.
When you grow up, you become an adult and you start a business. ; And Daniel and I are very much tag teaming this. Daniel and I have a lot of direct reports as the business has gotten bigger. If Daniel has a a meeting at the dairy with the the ag team, then like, you know, I’m on kid duty. We balance it.
On Tuesdays, I try to film a reel that I’m going to edit and like post. On Wednesdays, we we meet with the directors as a team. On Thursdays, you know, I have my meeting with the marketing team. So, every every day looks a little bit different. I don’t know if it’s well balanced, but it’s always a work in progress. ; In the NPR interview that I referenced earlier, they discussed how the tradwife image and girlboss image can both coexist and come into conflict in an interesting way.
We tend to think of tradwife as completely juxtaposed to the girlboss. But what if they were more similar than they were different? Both the tradwife and the girlboss, when it comes to social media, are a performance that are emphasized for the camera. ; Do you worry that what they’re putting out on social media and what a lot of these tradwives are putting out is this sort of unachievable image of this simple life which you know, normal people wouldn’t be able to to pull off at all.
Is this as unachievable as the Sheryl Sandberg lean in, I can rule the world while having a a family? I mean, neither sounds like it’s really doable. ; Yeah, that’s a really good point. And you know, she said to me, “I really want to show other women that it’s possible.” But, it’s not possible. Like, it’s not possible to live this life because not everyone can be a social media star.
This life is for social media and financially enabled by social media. ; Tradwives often play into traditional roles in a performative way for the camera. No iPhone to be seen or Samsung’s smart refrigerator because it doesn’t really fit the imagery. But, the irony is they’re making money performing to the camera, but the performance is all in acting like they don’t have a business.
For a girl boss, it’s kind of the opposite. With a girl boss playing into the performance of working, capturing themselves in meetings and on their laptop, traveling, #grinding. ; And they’re also grossing hundreds of thousands of dollars as business women. So, it is rife with a lot of irony that their business is making themselves appear like they don’t have a business.
; So, it’s clear that the tradwife persona is for many of these influencers an image they work to portray online. While behind the scenes, ultimately, they’re working to run an online business. Writer Sarah Peterson’s article, The Unbearable Daniel of It All, speaks to the significance of the Viral Times profile and trad image of Hannah and Daniel’s life.
But, it goes much deeper than the particulars of one mom influencer’s maybe, probably marriage. The massive popularity and visibility of a woman who adheres to so many of patriarchy’s most impossible requirements, both explicitly and implicitly, normalizes the point of view in which it’s maybe totally okay for men to be making decisions about women’s bodies, in which it’s completely natural for men to be deciding who qualifies as a real woman, in which it’s God’s plan that women stay in the home and raise children alone and unsupported on a
figurative island in which daycare is synonymous with maternal neglect and which birth control is sinful in which paid maternity is irrelevant since mothers shouldn’t be working in the first place in which is right and sacred that the truly good mothers are collapsing into bed for weeks at a time while the real life of Hannah can’t be gleaned just off of a social media profile the more important aspect is the messages that Hannah conveys mostly about what womanhood should be and look like what tradwife ideals is Hannah
subliminally pushing with her content the factual history of what traditional women often actually did compared to our modern-day conception of what traditional rules are is wildly skewed as the commentary channel farm to taper points out ; and what Mormon women got up to back in the 1800s would be just completely unrecognizable to religious conservatives these days so up here are some of the things they did trad Mormon women went to medical school became doctors ran their own medical practices and invented new kinds of
surgery while raising their kids trad Mormon women pushed the men who ran the church to get on board with vaccination and pasteurizing milk and they won because trad Mormon women were sick and tired of having all these kids and then watching helplessly as they died from preventable disease like smallpox and tuberculosis now did trad Mormon women get these wins by being nice and darling and persuasive and gently leading their husbands along to do the right thing no they beat their husbands in elections so they
could just be in office and do the public health work that their husbands were slow to do trad Mormon women didn’t do this whole like oh the man is the head of the household and we have to respect that thing they didn’t do that they figured that if we’re all human fallen and mortal well that clearly includes the men too so that’s why you have to answer to a higher power ; from an episode of the Slate podcast host Candace Lim and internet culture reporter Kate Lindsay asked the question what are the differences between a
tradwife and a stay-at-home mom they ultimately came to the conclusion that a stay-at-home mother is a job in itself, but a tradwife is an identity that someone takes on and carries within themselves. It also goes beyond just caretaking and into their relationship dynamic and being subservient to their husband.
; she was part of this wave of mommy bloggers on Instagram that were kind of pioneering aspirational motherhood. And Hannah Nielman, I would say is the final boss of that. She’s a skinny blonde who lives on a farm. She gives birth and then goes immediately to pageants. She makes homemade sourdough and she also just never looks tired.
; Most stay-at-home mothers I’ve spoken to don’t stay home because it’s their most ideal situation. They usually stay home for a combination of reasons, but the biggest factor has become financial reasons. Bottom of the line, daycare is expensive and the cost seems to be growing every day. Daycare is so expensive that it can literally be more cost-effective at times for one member of the family to stay home with the children than it can be for a child to be at daycare with both family members working. The podcasters also know how
influencer tradwives blur the line and complicate the idea of the tradwife. They’ve made it seem like the lifestyle of the tradwife is more popular than it actually is. With more influencers posting about the tradwife lifestyle than people might be actually living it. And in actuality, successful and known tradwives are really just successful businesswomen or business people.
; I think it is hard to avoid the tradwife discussion because it brings up a lot of personal feelings about the nuclear family, the socio-economic role of the woman in the house. ; While it is possible that Hannah is entirely happy with her life, especially with her background growing up Mormon, others who have had to untangle themselves from toxic situations can’t help but project and see parts of themselves or people they’ve known onto Hannah and her story.
; I am an independent woman now. I live in Boston. I’m single. I don’t have children. And I think it would be so easy for me to project my own traumas of my childhood or being raised, all those things, onto another family, especially if they don’t align with my choices. ; Though an important aspect to all of this is that though many have given Hannah the title of tradwife, has Hannah ever taken on the title herself? There’s a Vanity Fair article that speaks about how Hannah responds when asked if she was a tradwife. She responded with her
husband, Daniel, in the room saying, “I don’t necessarily identify with it. Because we are traditional in the sense that it’s a man and a woman. We have children. But I do feel like we’re paving a lot of paths that haven’t been paved before.” In what way? What paths are Hannah and Daniel paving that have never been paved before? I would love to know.
She agreed when her husband, Daniel Nielman, who scarcely left his wife’s side during the interview, said she was a co-CEO of their farm business. “So for me to have the label of a traditional woman,” she continued, “I’m kind of like, I don’t know if I identify with that.” ; Even though she might not see herself as particularly traditional, some of those basic ideas, you know, pronatalist, like it is important for us to put having families above everything else.
By that measure, she’s pretty traditional. But at the same time, she’s running a business off of it, and I think there are wild ways that that’s not very traditional. ; In the interview, it almost seemed like Hannah was going to say that she was a feminist, but stopped herself before fully saying it.
That doesn’t mean she’s completely comfortable calling herself a feminist. “I feel like I’m a feminist,” she said before stopping herself. “There’s so many different ways you could take that word. I don’t even know what feminism means anymore,” she continued. “We try so hard to be neutral and be ourselves, and people will put a label on everything.
This is just our normal life.” ; So this is the sort of place that they’ve arrived at, I suppose. Hannah doesn’t see herself as a tradwife. She sees herself as being a working mother, basically, which is working online. ; We’re just still doing what we’re We’re not #tradwife. We We can’t help it. Like, this is what we are.
We’re trad dad, trad wife, like, so be it. ; And I also don’t necessarily identify with because I I don’t feel like I mean, we are traditional in the the sense that we’re like a man and a woman, you know, we’re We have children. Um I do feel like we’re paving a lot of paths that haven’t been paved before. ; Yeah. ; She says that she does it every night after the kids go to bed, so she goes to sleep at about 1:00, 2:00 in the morning.
She’s up at about 6:00, 5:30, 6:00. She goes to the gym. And then she does it all again. ; Tradwife or not tradwife, feminist or not feminist, girl boss or not girl boss, stay-at-home mom or not stay-at-home mom. What if Hannah Neeleman is simply just a woman? One that created a successful brand off of being whatever people thought she was.
Hannah gained 20 million followers across TikTok and Instagram once the Ballerina Farm brand went viral. She went from a ballerina in New York City to a social media tycoon in a matter of 5 years. She has her own brand, a 328-acre ranch, meat to sell, and even her own standalone store that sells her sourdoughs, ice cream, and cupcakes.
; We’re opening up our first brick and mortar little market here in a few weeks, and we’re so excited. We held media day a little bit ago, and Dana and I shared our ; story. Hannah is a boss in her own right. And outside of the performed social media, traditional or binary gender roles do not exist anymore.
Statistics show that women are starting to out-earn men. Though this is just conjecture, I have seen a lot that there are a lot of partnerships where women still claim they’re still the ones taking on the majority of housework, even though both partners are working equally outside of the house and providing an equal amount.
But also, overall, most people and families are living paycheck to paycheck. This means anyone who’s choosing to have a family dynamic where one person stays home, not just because it’s a necessity to be a stay-at-home mother to provide that labor, but more for the fun of it, to play-act a traditional fantasy, well, that’s kind of a privileged position to be able to do that.
You’re choosing to half your income for a lifestyle choice and are able to do so comfortably. Maybe that’s why the home studying, tending family, stay-at-home lifestyle content does so well. Ultimately, it’s a complete fantasy that’s unattainable for most working-class Americans. I mean, when you really look at the photography of Ballerina Farm, and I mean, take a second look, it becomes obvious that it’s all an act for the camera.
; ; I’m not sure if I should tuck in or tuck out. ; ; In Hannah’s Time 100 shoot, when she was named a top 100 creator for 2025, everything in Hannah’s kitchen is perfectly imperfect. Her picture frames are slightly off-kilter, but in a way that gives her kitchen charm. But, when you kind of think about it, if they had a major photoshoot taking place, why were the picture frames so imbalanced? I guess with so many children, one has very little time, but still, Hannah’s outfit is perfectly imperfect with a
jean ensemble of all-American classicness, a jean top and a jean apron, except the jean tones don’t match. There’s pots and pans left askew on the stove. ; Line is that she doesn’t post about anything bad. Um which she says is is her form of privacy. So, that’s a lot of the criticism that she gets from other mothers.
You know, in the last 5 years certainly, we’ve become better at talking about the difficulties of parenthood where people felt pressurized not to before. But Hannah and the Nehlmans are sort of very much on the like everything looks I mean it’s rustic and it’s chaos, but it still looks gorgeous and she doesn’t really post about the bad things.
So, she’d call that her form of separation. ; Everything is curated to look perfectly imperfect, so it looks very authentic, raw, and real. But if you take a second look, you realize how curated all of that is. The entire Ballerina Farms EV magazine cover shoot in 2024 has a very trad American West almost manifest destiny vibes.
There’s a video component where they have this orangey hazy filter over the camera and Hannah is in a long Little House on the Prairie chic dress with cowboy boots, Daniel in his cowboy hat. With the orangey filter, you can see the exact tone and aesthetic that they’re trying to capture. It’s also important to note that EV is a right-wing magazine as well.
Another example is the Nehlmans spending a lot of money just to specifically adopt a farmhouse aesthetic. Meg Conley, research and writer, talks about it in the 2022 interview that took place in Anne Helen Peterson’s culture study. It’s fascinating then that when the Ballerina Farm was being remodeled, they exposed the shiplap and then put insulation on the outside of the house.
They take something that once served a real need and embrace it because of its aesthetic, even though it’s more costly than time-consuming than modern alternatives. ; ; Their Aga stove that is often featured in Ballerina Farm content is a perfect example of this. ; Where do you get dragon milk? ; I’m going to replace these tunnels here.
And then it’s just going to be the tops, the rail, the lids, the shroud as well. They’re hidden under these little chrome buttons, you see? Both new lids, so that includes lining, great cord, handle. ; We think of Aga as being kind of fussy and fancy. Also, they cost at least 20K if not much more.
But its origin story is pretty practical. Gustaf Dalén was a Swedish engineer and inventor. In 1912, he won the Nobel Prize in Physics. Dalén was blinded in an accident during an experiment months before he won. While he was working from home, he realized how much labor it took for his wife and their housekeeper to stoke the stove all day for cooking and heating the home.
So, Dalén set about inventing a stove that would stay on all day without creating a mess or hours of work. Today, Aga stoves are incredibly expensive, but they’re no longer more efficient than any other stove. They can burn through an incredible amount of fuel. And it’s very lovely that Dalén decided to find a way to relieve housewives and housekeepers from the burden of fire keeping.
Yet, when men see a woman performing the intense labor of care work, they often seem to think they’re seeing a problem that needs solving. The problem is care work is labor intensive, and their solution is often here’s an invention that will make it more efficient for women to do care work. Within the context of performed traditional gender roles, the continual warmth of the Aga feels smothering to me.
; I wanted a wood cook stove because I just thought they were so charming and beautiful. And there’s a lot of, you know, new ones being made that are really incredible. But Daniel which I agree now, said like that is probably not realistic with all the kids and all the cooking you do, like a wood stove is going to be a lot.
And so I found this browsing through the internet, and I was like, “Wow, this is It’s not a cook stove, but it’s still really beautiful and has a lot of the same charm um and functionality that cook stove does. And so once I laid eyes on it, I was like, “I I have to have it.” ; The the freight truck showed up with two pallets.
You know, we had to get the tractor to unload it, you know, and the tractor’s like straining. And I’m thinking like, “What is in these pallets?” And it’s because the stove is made out of solid cast iron. ; Solid cast iron. ; So we finally got these things into the house, and the guy came to install it, and he said, “What is this?” He called like the company hotline, and they chewed him out, and they said, ; “Don’t you dare touch that.
” ; “Don’t you dare touch that stove.” ; are not a certified Aga installer, you do not touch this stove.” ; Back away from the stove ; immediately. ; Immediately leave the premises. So they gave us the number of the guy ; There’s only one in the western United States. ; Yeah, we had to, you know, bring him in and um ; Now, luckily he lives in Utah. He does.
; In the Ballerina Farms content, it’s always Hannah doing the caretaker and homemaker work with a ton of her children surrounding her often, and Daniel always out working on the farm. And I mean, it’s only Hannah in the house and only Daniel working on the farm in their content. It gives the impression that Hannah is the only person taking care of her children, cleaning the house, cooking, doing all the very labor-intensive home care work around the farm, which is quite a lot when you have such a large place with so
many children. It also gives the impression that Daniel is the only person working on that massive 300-plus acre farm, which, let’s be real, as spoiled and privileged as Daniel was, do you really think he’s the only person running around there all day working on that farm? If you take 2 seconds to think about it, a multi-millionaire family with a huge farm business, they are definitely not the only ones working on that massive farm and taking care of their family.
There are tons of others who likely work with them on a daily basis, help raise their cattle, tend to the farm, probably help with the burden of child care to some extent. You just don’t see it at all in much of the content they choose to put out there. But often the other people who are helping Hannah and Daniel are not in the picture because it doesn’t add to the image of a family living out their dreams on a farm.
In an interview with the Salt Lake Tribune, Hannah also spoke about how she has a team of employees who help her with all of the labor. A few also claim that Hannah Nielson must employ a small child care army hidden off-screen. She maintained that she had no nannies, though she said she had other employees, including farm workers, a personal assistant, a babysitter for date night, and a teacher to home-school five of her children in a one-room classroom.
I mean, that is far, far more help than most people get. But sure, according to Hannah, she doesn’t have nannies, which I’m sure to her is a badge of honor to wear as most in her circle of wealth tend to offload their children onto nannies. But what I’m trying to say is the Ballerina Farm content is deceptive in that it portrays an image of Hannah and Daniel doing it all with no help whatsoever, that they’re a regular American family with a can-do attitude who pull up their sleeves and get to work when they have help behind the scenes to help with the
heavy lifting whenever needed. Not to mention in the first place Daniel’s very rich father, who likely helped lay out all the groundwork to build out this image in the first place. And yet all the work that Hannah has actually accomplished, she hides from the world. Hannah essentially started a large farming operation, shipping millions of dollars worth of meat, running a multi-million followers social media account, which is a business that many people are paying a lot of money to get involved in. She now has a stand-alone
store with baked goods and participates in tons of magazine shoots, essentially working as a model. Yet this isn’t a reality that’s portrayed on her social media, at least not often. It doesn’t sound like Hannah is a traditional stay-at-home sort of wife. It sounds like she’s working multiple jobs and running multiple businesses, kind of doing more than most CEOs do.
Hannah’s brand is a carefully curated part of her life and a performance in some ways. And the tradwife lifestyle is ultimately a lie in the modern digital age. Hannah is a performer in other ways, so this shouldn’t be a surprise. She’s a ballet dancer and since 2010, she’s competed in four beauty pageants.
Miss New York 2010, Mrs. Utah 2021, Mrs. American 2023, and Mrs. World 2024. ; One year ago today, here at this Westgate Hotel, I embarked on a life-changing adventure. As I pass on my crown as Mrs. American, I am filled with gratitude and joy to have been able to be a part of this journey. What a year it has been.
I’m deeply and forever grateful for the unwavering support of my husband Daniel and our children Henry, Charles, George, Francis, Lois, Martha, Mabel, and Flora. Your love and encouragement has been my greatest strength. I’m also so grateful to the Mrs. American organization, Elaine and Tanna, and my directors, Jackie and Jolene.
Their dedication has been instrumental in my journey and I’m so thankful. Another highlight of my year was growing and giving birth to my daughter, Miss Florie Joe. I was pregnant with her during the pageant and my due date was just 2 weeks before the Mrs. World pageant in January. Florie was born January 2nd and 13 days after she was born we checked into the Mrs.
World pageant here in Las Vegas. With our supportive family and community together her and I, we made it happen. Another cherished memory I hold forever will be competing on the Mrs. World stage while my father watched proudly. He passed just 2 weeks after. His memory continues to be a guiding light in my life and I miss him every day.
I know he’s been my guardian angel the past few months. ; She was a dedicated beauty pageant competitor who competed for Mrs. American 2023 less than 2 weeks after having her eighth child. ; So she had won Mrs. American in August, which is a pageant for people who are married. And so she qualified to go through to Mrs.
World essentially. And at the same time as she qualified, she became pregnant for the eighth time. So when the final of the pageant rolled around in January she had just had a baby. So she appeared on stage in her ball gown and spray tanned and her hair done and she was 12 days postpartum. ; Oh wow. ; I know. ; I mean [laughter] most most people would barely be standing.
; Just bringing back the definition of tradwife as people have defined it, which is staying home and taking care of the kids. Does going off to compete in a beauty pageant two weeks after having a child mix with that? ; How did she go from giving birth to standing up in a swimsuit on stage to answer questions? ; She said that she’d laid low for some days.
And then after which she kind of looked at her husband and said, “I don’t think that I can do this.” ; Five days after I had the baby, I like looked at him and I was like, “I don’t know if I’m going to be able to go in a week. Like this is a lot. Like I was bleeding and swollen and milk was coming in. ; ; Then slowly she began to get up and she started doing sort of ballet exercises in the bathroom.
And she had been preparing, she said. She’d been having ice baths in the irrigation ditches on their land and like weightlifting and ; Oh my god. ; I know. And and the the irony is is that it was like this Herculean effort, this like really brutal hardcore effort to basically look totally perfectly composed and pretty. And like she hadn’t really made very much effort at all.
And I guess that’s kind of what being a tradwife and for many years being a woman was about was that you had to look a certain way. You also had to make it look like it was completely effortless. ; If anything, Hannah competing in a beauty pageant two weeks after giving birth, well, let’s just say that’s something I could never do in my entire life or imagine doing because I’m a wuss.
Okay? But because of all of that, I would argue instead, Hannah’s kind of a master of show business and social media is another form for her craft. Alongside her tradwife brand, Hannah’s been featured in a bunch of magazines and articles as mentioned in this video Like EV, Cowgirl, multiple times articles, including their top 100 creator list, Vanity Fair, just to name a few.
She was working it in magazines, modeling, which is also work. So, what was the ultimate goal for Ballerina Farm? Is it to be a farm? Create a tradwife social media account? Or to transcend beyond that? To create a lifestyle brand that can sell a multitude of products capitalizing off of the Ballerina Farm name and image. The Nielmans launched their first Ballerina pop-up store in February of 2019.
Four months later in June of 2019, Ballerina Farm started shipping their pork direct to consumers. Ballerina Farm has worked to brand a farm together with the grace and beauty and elegance of ballet. When they’re selling mostly meat products grinded up. An interesting dichotomy that I guess at least sets it apart from other farms.
The Ballerina Farm farm sells mainly beef and pork, which nowadays the primary way you can buy is through their website and you purchase it in a frozen package. ; I wanted to explain a little bit about our build your own box function on the website. You can put between two and 14 items in these boxes. I’m just going to make a a little practice order here, a little sample order.
Got some pork chops here from our Berkshire pigs, breakfast sausage, shoulder roast, ground beef, world famous bacon, ground pork, ribeye steak. These are Chef Ben’s famous croissants. We have three regular and three pound chocolate. And it will go FedEx to your [crying] house. Many of you will get it overnight. Depending on where you live, it could take between 24 and 48 hours.
; You can also build your own frozen box with anything from cinnamon roll croissants to pork lard included. ; This is the large weekly special box. It’s coming with an assortment of ground beef and ground pork. And we have package of our sourdough chocolate chip cookies. These are browned butter. Only the best ingredients.
You bake from frozen. They’re so so delicious. Bacon, two premium steaks in here. Also a roast. Each weekly special is coming with the hand towels and the soap. ; Reviews for the Ballerina Farm food has always been pretty positive, especially for their baked goods. So, I don’t want to knock it completely, but Ballerina Farm is charging restaurant prices for their food products that they ship frozen to you for you to cook yourself.
; We know she’s controversial, but we ordered Ballerina Farm. The box itself was $149. Tax was $9.31, and then shipping was $69. So, this definitely isn’t a cheap box. They have risen. They are fluffy. They smell amazing. We have to brush with egg wash, but I don’t have a brush, so I’m using a spoon. Oh my god.
I wish you could smell this. It’s time to taste test. I’m going to pop this one. I don’t know if you can see the butter. Oh my god, the chocolate croissant. Those were all excellent. I don’t know if they’re worth the price. I think that the payment of almost $70 for shipping is a little bit shocking.
Um you know, if you’re really interested in trying like sourdough baked goods, you can find those locally without having to pay that much for shipping, but really good. ; And the underlying message here for why you should buy from them is because their farm supposedly has better farm products.
Because look at how happy their family is, who’s homesteading and living a traditional lifestyle. These products must be of better quality than what other farms are producing, right? ; But I think the most important thing about branding is that people know that these products come right from our farm. Right from pasture to plate, farm to table, whatever you want to call it, and they’re supporting a small business and a family behind it.
So, that’s what’s most important. ; The Daily Mail apparently visited the Ballerina Farm for some reason and wrote about the cows, saying the farm, which is nestled right in the Utah mountains, is vast and houses a red barn emblazoned with Ballerina Farm. The sprawling land is home to 120 dairy cows, 150 cows total, who go out to pasture as often as they want and are milked whenever feels necessary, sometimes by hand and sometimes by the couple’s contact-sensing Lely robot.
Again, this sounds idyllic and wholesome, like the Ballerina Farm is somehow better than other farms. And because of the branding, people believe it and buy into it, literally. The business has grown into a multi-million dollar business with an estimated annual income between 6.5 million and 8.3 million. The success is driven by diverse revenue streams, including meat and produce sales and social media earnings.
Hannah Neeleman’s personal net worth has been estimated at 2.5 million, and Daniel Neeleman’s net worth on average has been estimated at around 6 million. Hannah and Daniel are not traditional humble farmers. As much as they claim to be traditional, they’ve always had the privilege and flexibility that their wealth affords them.
Here’s a hero response to David Neeleman on the New York Times Insta article, Blossom and Branch Farm. So, you’re insinuating that the majority of farmers in this country don’t work hard enough, and that’s why they can’t afford to buy a $3 million property and invest in a $5 million dairy barn.
Really? You’re insinuating they don’t have a safety net and their familial wealth, collateral, and investments? That they made millions selling checks, notes, sourdough starter, and meat from a handful of cows? Gee, if it’s that easy, why isn’t every farmer a millionaire? Meanwhile, dairy farms like my dad’s, which has been operating since the late 1800s, cannot even operate anymore due to the realities actual farmers face.
Listen, there’s nothing wrong with helping your kids, but let’s acknowledge privilege. It would be amazing if this family could do more to highlight the farmers they source from. Highlight the struggles of generational family farms that don’t have private investment behind them. That would be a whole lot more authentic than whatever this is.
An insult to farm ranch wives everywhere. Hot take, I initially wasn’t going to say anything, but I can’t stay quiet any longer. I am a ranch wife. I’m a mom. I’m employed full-time. Ballerina Farm likely paid for their cattle, buildings, equipment in cash. It doesn’t work like that in the real world of agriculture. Most of us have hundreds of thousands in debt and struggle to get by every year.
The sacrifices that women have made to support their farming, ranching husbands are unreal, but they’ve been doing so for decades and building a dairy, really? Thousands of family dairies have shut down in the US because they couldn’t afford to operate, but these guys have the money to start one out of the blue.
I cannot stand these creators that romanticize the farm ranch life. We bust our asses every single day spending a dollar to make a dime. This is our lifestyle, our roots, what we live and breathe. Is it beautiful? Yes, there’s no doubt. Would I encourage this lifestyle and welcome newcomers? Hard to say.
I’d be supportive, but going in, you better believe you’re going to be making sacrifices. Ballerina Farms is insulting to the agricultural world, but Ballerina Farms is looking down at the rest of the agricultural world pretending that they somehow offer better products play acting the agriculture and farming life. Meanwhile, they never endure the hard realities of it because they’ve always had a strong financial backings to lift them up and give them a cushion to fall back on.
So, let’s examine the Ballerina Farm products and find out if they actually are better than the other farm products out there. The Ballerina Farm products fit right into a niche category at a very specific time. Ultimately, Americans especially have grown distrustful of our food and have grown tired at times of the stress of what many may call city life.
Others might call the drain of capitalism. Ballerina Farm is selling the traditional homesteading lifestyle and their products give off the vibe of luxury like Erewhon, Whole Foods, etc. There’s a blog post titled what Ballerina Farm isn’t showing you about farm life that asks the question, “What do you think this nostalgia for pioneering and growing one’s own food says about cultural anxieties?” A woman named Amy answers, “The new nostalgia for homesteading and growing your own food signals to me both a breakdown in the
trust behind our food systems and how fed up people are with the commodification and corporatization of everyday life. Homesteading in general is on the rise. In a 2022 survey from Homesteaders of America, of 4,000 homesteaders surveyed, 40% said they started within the past 3 years. A November 2024 volume from KFF, a health policy research, polling, and journalism institution, explained that the MAHA campaign and food recalls, combined with the rapid spread of misinformation on social media, contributed to greater
mistrust in food safety. The report also talks about how 40% of surveyed TikTok users believe health information that they see on the app, while far less will consult an actual health professional about that information. People tend to fall into this bias that more expensive food is healthier or has a higher quality.
Some things encourage these biases. The newest food pyramid introduced by the government emphasizes non-processed whole foods. Research by the site Numerator found that if Americans followed this new guidance of the food pyramid, grocery bills would increase by $1,012 per year before accounting for inflation. And this isn’t even accounting for branded luxury food like Ballerina Farm or Erewhon.
In a 2025 Vanity Fair article on the business and appeal of Erewhon, journalist Isabelle Truman writes, “Erewhon owners Tony and Josephine Antoci acquired the business, a former niche health food store, in 2011, transforming it into an aspirational retail experience. Erewhon positioned itself as the lifestyle equivalent of a luxury fashion brand.
Holding an overpriced smoothie or carrying one of its branded totes became less about groceries and more about alignment with a rarefied health-conscious elite.” Higher up in the article, there’s an interview with an Erewhon customer, where the customer says, “The fact that it’s healthy means you can justify the price.
” She’s holding a pink smoothie and a basket stocked with Irish sea moss supplements and Erewhon branded chocolate. Her friend is celebrating her birthday at the store with a pastel green smoothie and talks about the abundance of natural light. “I feel calm here,” she says. “No one’s stressed.
But that could also be because everyone is rich. This is exactly the appeal of Ballerina Farm and all the luxury food stores. It’s not just the food they’re selling, it’s the lifestyle they’re selling as well. The food and the idea of health behind it, or that it’s more homegrown, more homemade in the case of Ballerina Farm, which may lead people to believe that it’s healthier, can be the key to justifying the cost, even if people normally wouldn’t spend that amount.
So, let’s actually examine the quality of Ballerina Farm products. This commentary channel and small farmer, Farm to Taber, rightly points out that it’s a little bit questionable that the Ballerina Farm brand never tells you exactly how much meat you’re buying when you purchase their frozen meat packages. ; Let’s talk about the business model behind Ballerina Farms meat.
They sell beef and pork. I’m going to focus more on beef just because there’s more to talk about with beef. First step, we got to find out how much their beef costs, and that is surprisingly difficult to figure out. They have lots of meat packages that you order online and they ship to you frozen.
And most of them do not seem to tell you how much meat is in the package, like this one. It looks like it’s meant to be an affordable option, mostly lower demand cuts like ground meat, sausage, and stew meat. With a note that says they’ll substitute cuts out depending on availability. And it’s $250.
Okay, well, if you’re buying in bulk, that could be a lot of meat, that could pencil out. So, how much meat do you get in this $250 package? It doesn’t say. Let’s look at something else. None of these Ballerina Farm products tell you how much meat you’re buying. This is the only beef package I can find on their website that says how much meat you’re getting, and it comes out to $11 a pound for ground beef.
; Not only is this plain sketchy, but in general, if you don’t know how much meat you’re buying, how do you plan meals that require a specific meat amount? What is Ballerina Farms basing their pricing off of if it’s not a specific weight of meat? The other, well, certified wild thing about Ballerina Farm is there’s really nothing about the brand that makes it more natural and homegrown than other farm products.
As Farm to Table points out, other than just selling you the brand of tradwife and glamorous photos of Hannah dancing through farm fields. ; That makes their beef so high-quality and so glamorous that it’s worth $11 a pound. So, organic. Is Ballerina Farms meat organic? No. All they have to say here is, “We only use antibiotics when we feel like we need to.
” Which, good on you, but that’s what every farm does. That’s because medication is expensive. And if you think about how hard it is to give medication to a cat or dog, just imagine the same thing with a 1,000-lb cow. Nobody medicates livestock for fun. This never given steroids or hormones is also kind of standardish even in conventional beef because so many of the cattle in the US are being raised on small ranches where it just doesn’t make sense logistically to use those things.
What about grass-fed? Is Ballerina Farms beef worth more because it’s grass-fed? Let’s talk about it. Ballerina Farms says their cattle always have access to grass and pasture. What does that mean? Well, access to pasture is what people say when you ask them, “Are your cows grass-fed?” and they can’t say yes.
They say access to pasture. And I want to be clear, there is a real reason to use these wiggle words, and that reason is Utah. You might have heard it’s kind of dry out there. When there’s no water, there’s no grass. So, if you want to sell beef year-round as these folks are doing, and you want it to be 100% grass-fed, you want to be in a place where there’s water and life grass at least most of the year.
And while a lot of the United States fits that description, Utah does not. ; Additionally, Ballerina Farm buys meat from a partner farm. So, a lot of the meat they sell isn’t even from their farm to begin with. ; Um another thing that I wanted to point out is that our dairy is a small operation. So, products like our protein powder um that milk does not come from our cows.
It comes from grass-fed whey, mostly in Ireland, actually, because cows are able to be on grass almost all year long there, and they produce a beautiful grass-fed whey that is in our protein powder. So, I wanted to address that. ; This contradicts much of their branding and claims completely. ; If Ballerina Farm gets meat from other farms, how do they make sure that meat is up to their standards? Well, Ballerina Farm doesn’t really have clear standards to meet in the first place.
So, maybe that answers that question. They’ve got some nice lines that sound like standards, like, “Our animals are never given steroids or hormones.” Does this also mean the animals their partners raise? We have no idea. We will never know from this website. ; Ballerina Farm often isn’t selling steaks or high-end cuts, but the low-grade cuts to people online who don’t know what to look for or how to quality check.
; And selling direct on the internet is key to why this works, because grocery stores will not just pay you more for your meat because you told them a nice story. Grocery stores want your meat to actually be better. They’ll do quality testing. They’ll make you get certified grass-fed, organic, humane, fair trade.
They want your meat graded USDA select, premium, or choice. They’ll make you do those things to justify that higher price. But you know who is not experienced enough with buying meat to make you prove your stuff is high quality before they pay a high price for it? A lot of folks on the internet. ; Ultimately, Ballerina Farm has figured out a master business in this way, selling low-grade meat at a high-end price in frozen boxes, but convincing people it’s high quality through branding alone, through images of white
Mormons frolicking through fields. Yet, people adamantly defend the Ballerina Farm prices. Ballerina Farm markets to the rich and not the poor. And they have never hid that fact with their prices. They know their stuff is expensive and that the regular person can’t always afford it. You never see me in a Burberry or Louis Vuitton store cuz those stores are for rich people who can afford those brands and prices.
Y’all need to stop chastising this woman for her products and brand cuz you cannot afford it. If you want to afford it, level up in this world so you can buy nice things. Many gravitate towards the Ballerina Farm brand, feel charmed by it because it evokes the feeling of a humble family growing a family farm together, selling small homegrown products.
But now you know the reality, even if they continue to hide behind the facade. Is Ballerina Farm a farm or is it just an influencer brand? One of Ballerina Farm’s first products was not a food product, but Ballerina Farm t-shirts that followers could buy for $20. The Ballerina Farm product array has expanded to a variety of on-brand products from aprons to sourdough starter kits to their frozen boxes as noted earlier.
; ; An issue of culture reporter Anne Helen Petersen’s newsletter Culture Study in October of 2025 wrote, “When her account began to take off, Nielman started selling her sourdough starter via an online store front, which has since expanded to include a cornucopia of Ballerina Farm branded products, mountain made meat, high protein farm flour, Weck jars, raw honey, French sea salt, pumpkin protein powder, and the product that found its way to my inbox earlier this week, Ballerina Farm Farmer
Hydrate. In other words, Ballerina Farm is no longer an influencer account. It’s a lifestyle and wellness brand.” About the Farmer Hydrate product, it’s branded being this natural new thing, when really it’s just electrolyte powder that does include processed ingredients. For example, dehydrated strawberries require processing.
; ; So much of what Ballerina Farm creates and sells is made for a lifestyle brand and is ultimately not authentic to being farmers. The Nielmans being true farmers is not a reality. The farmer image was just something created to ultimately further their brand. Much of Hannah’s content on TikTok nowadays is primarily promotions of her new products, which can be bought through the TikTok shop.
; about Ballerina Farm is they cannot keep this apron in stock. I literally went to link it yesterday cuz I was wearing it and I couldn’t find it and I found that it was out of stock. There’s something so bizarre about this traditional back to the old days farm products being sold on the TikTok shop. Hello.
Okay, so I wanted to get on here because tomorrow we are launching protein powder variety pack, which is all three flavors in one bag. And we’re also launching single serve, which has been something we’ve been trying to get over the finish line because some of you want to try just one flavor before you buy the bag.
So vanilla, chocolate, I mean these tiny bags are just they’re so cute. One of the top comments on this video is “Tiny bags are so cute and also so incredibly wasteful and bad for our planet.” The dichotomy of being on this natural farm out in rural Utah and then selling these plastic tiny packs with a gold stamp and trying to make it seem natural made with colostrum.
This sort of natural Ballerina Farm protein product. Ballerina Farms is on sale and they have the sample protein pack in stock. You can get one of the larger bags on sale today. I personally love all flavors and I love the sample packs for travel. Their wet jars are also on sale perfect for your sourdough starter.
I’m going to link these in the cart below. Grab yours before the sale ends. Because Ballerina Farm products are on the TikTok shop, different TikTok creators can advertise the products and receive commission if people buy from them and off of their link. This means once you start seeing Ballerina Farm products on your feed, you never stop seeing them.
One of Hannah’s favorite things to advertise, as you probably already noticed, is her protein powder, which she’s constantly holding up in her TikToks. ; As you might have seen, we just came out with pumpkin pie protein powder. It tastes like pie, pumpkin pie with whipped cream on top. It has real pumpkin, cinnamon, cloves, and ginger in here.
So right, is the color of the protein powder. We’re going to make a pumpkin pie right now. Put whipped cream on top. But they might ; It seems like she’s always holding up the protein powder, but I rarely see her actually whipping together a protein drink because it’s not really trad, which kind of shows the stark contrast between what Ballerina Farm sells and then the lifestyle they promote.
It’s not really trad to open up these artificial packages and create a protein drink in the blender. Instead, she has to hand make a pumpkin pie to promote her pumpkin protein powder. This pumpkin pie I made is so good. That’s why you should buy my pumpkin protein powder. Make sense, right? ; Okay, we are making a chocolate protein drink.
; Yay, the first time I’ve actually seen Ballerina Farm make a protein drink to promote their protein powder. ; They bring you the ripped bag, so this one’s ripped. Start with opening your bag, milk at the bottom of your cup. This is raw sheep’s milk. Putting in a little bit of extra powder for real chocolatey flavor.
Sheep’s milk is really ; Why would you need to add cocoa powder to your protein drink if they have the best flavor already? And she opened the package as if she hadn’t opened it before. ; Really creamy. So, this is going to be decadent. Okay, so more milk and vanilla. So, we’re going to add a teaspoon of vanilla.
And a scoop of just a scoop of more protein. ; I’m sorry, but Hannah is acting like she has never made a protein drink in her life. ; more protein. Then add some ice. Okay, here it is. This is coconut cream milk. Let’s try. ; Just takes one sip of it. This reminds me so much of the McDonald’s CEO taking a bite of the burger and being like, “Mhm, delicious.
Yes, I eat this all the time.” Hannah also makes a lot of posts about their electrolytes, the Farmer Hydrate electrolytes. ; here in the hot house to let you know that this morning we launched our Farmer Hydrate. So, this is the daily electrolyte drink that we’ve been working on for a long time. So, it’s one-to-one sodium potassium and it’s two-to-one calcium magnesium, so it’s so hydrating.
Flavored with real fruits, got organic coconut water, it’s got Irish sea moss in here. It also has our ; ; gray French salt. ; These feel just like the latest buzzwords of whatever’s in the health food stores. Irish sea moss, prebiotic, and coconut water, which you don’t necessarily need for a hydration supplement, and I can guarantee they utilized those buzzwords to mark up the price exponentially.
Also, how much Irish sea moss is in this product to justify a markup in price? I’m sure it’s like a teeny tiny little bit of Irish sea moss so that they could put that on the package and make it sound probably fancier than it is, but that’s just speculation. ; [snorts] ; How much did she miss in the water? Why did she do that? Okay, as noted before, their prices are not cheap.
Farmer Protein and Farmer Hydrate bundle for $103, high protein flour set, $40 for flour. There’s the Farmer Hydrate and a single Weck jar, it looks like, for $42. Electrolytes are essentially salt. It’s minerals. It costs almost nothing to produce. I know that, of course, Ballerina Farm claims that they have a bunch of added stuff in the mix, but it cannot cost that much to produce to justify a glass jar and minerals, salt costing people $46.
What is this? The wellness bundle, whatever that means, for $139. The protein powder that Hanna is constantly promoting is $61, which for very high-end protein, I wouldn’t say that’s always completely outrageous. It would maybe just depend. What’s the quality of protein, the amount you’re getting, etc.
The most outrageous one to me personally is the Farmer Hydrate, which is $37. Compared to the prices of other electrolyte products, that’s just so much. Oh my gosh. They have Ballerina Farm merch, a $50 shirt and $98 sweatpants. If you want to wear something that says Ballerina Farm, what says traditional living on a farm like a sweatshirt and sweatpants? Ballerina Farm is not the first lifestyle farming brand to ever exist.
In the 2024 New York Times profile, a comparison is directly drawn between Chip and Joanna Gaines and Ballerina Farm. Chip and Joanna Gaines started Magnolia Farms, which started out as a farm and then became its own lifestyle brand and now sells products at Target. So, the question is, is Ballerina Farm wanting to start another high-end lifestyle brand like a Magnolia Farm or even the Pioneer Woman brand that sold at Walmart and also has its own farm location, as opposed to a sort of true farm that sells food products that they cultivate
on their land. Magnolia Farms, Pioneer Woman, as lifestyle farming brands also have their own agrotourism sites, which is something that Ballerina Farm is also working to develop. As acreages are shrinking, farmers are working to develop more and more agrotourism. And Hannah and Daniel seem to be trying to get in on this revenue opportunity as well.
Daniel describes what the agrotourism site will be by saying, “It’ll be a place people can come and see agriculture in action. I don’t want it to be a petting zoo. I want it to feel like a working farm. You come and see a pig and 6 months later, that pig will not be there, right? He’s moved on. He’s now bacon.” Most of the animals on the farm will live part of their life there.
Yeah, sign me up for that. I definitely want to see a pig that’s about to go bye-bye soon. Where do I want to spend my vacation? Watching animals spend their very last days on a farm. I do wonder if Hannah and Daniel’s time at Farm Hotels in Brazil inspired them to maybe one day create something very similar.
If not, why not? Like that would be cool. Better than people just showing up on a farm, walking around, and seeing pigs that will one day go bye-bye. As interesting, I guess, as Ballerina Farm agrotourism sites might someday be, Ballerina Farm recently has had a plethora of controversies, which has dampened the brand image, particularly its image of luxury and purity.
So, let’s talk about that. ; ; Hannah launched the Ballerina Farm in-person store in Midvale, Utah. Along with the launch were viral incidents, like when a customer found a fly in a cupcake at the new store. ; Guess what’s baked into this cupcake? A dead fly. And I’m going to post a little picture here. A dead fly. And so I’m like, disgusting.
; Was the Ballerina Farm brand expanding too quickly? ; What are these called, Avery? ; Chocolate shoe buns. ; Chocolate shoe buns. ; What’s up, girl? ; Liz Flora wrote an article in The Business of Fashion about the store’s opening, saying, “Hannah Neelman’s enlisted a staff of 60, including multiple chefs to develop her brand’s growing array of food, home, body, and wellness products.
It definitely doesn’t happen without a team behind you,” said Neelman while serving cups of homemade buttermilk at a preview of her brand’s new store. ; Ballerina Farm has been an online business since 2017, but we’re opening up our first brick and mortar little market here in a few weeks, and we’re so excited. We held media day a little bit ago, and Daniel and I shared our story, and um a little bit about the market.
And really, the heart and soul of this market is going to be the kitchen and the things that we’re dreaming up and making in there. But it was such a cool day to see the shelves start to fill up, and to see people in the space, and to really get a glimpse of what it’s going to be like. Honestly, our team is miraculous and works incredibly hard.
And so, it’s going to be so fun to get this over the finish line and have you come visit. Yeah, it was a great day, and we’re so excited. The Ballerina Farm store opens in mid-June in the 6,000-person town of Midway, about half an hour south of Utah’s ritzy Park City ski area. With a Japanese-inspired charred wood exterior and reclaimed barn wood floors, it has the sort of upscale rustic charm that’s equally at home in rural Utah or a hip shopping street in Los Angeles’s Silver Lake neighborhood.
The store sells everything from the brand’s farmer protein powder with colostrum to soap made from sourdough crumbs and pig lard, as well as dairy products of the pasteurized variety. A sign on the wall promotes raw milk, which they sell at their farm stand. ; It’s been a little bit busy here on the farm for the last couple of weeks.
So, as you know, we opened up a little farm stand down the road. And we’ve been selling our raw milk from the dairy, which has been so fun. We also sell eggs and some veggie that’s been grown here locally. And then about 20 minutes from here, we’re opening up a market and cafe grab and go. So, that you can get all your kitchen and pantry essentials there.
Grab a protein smoothie and a soft serve ice cream. And we’re so excited. ; According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, consuming raw milk can lead to serious health risks. But Hannah Neelman feels differently about the matter, promoting raw milk and it seems hoping to create a niche market opportunity through selling the product.
There are so many benefits to raw milk nutritionally, Hannah told the Daily Mail, adding, “But it does need to be produced in a very clean environment. And the cows need to be clean. And you have to make sure that every step of the way is just monitored. We have an amazing team that’s like so meticulous. So, it’s really fun to be able to stand with total confidence behind the milk.
And people are excited about it,” she added. The farm store ended up being a massive success with people from all over coming to the store to buy Ballerina Farm products and document the experience online. ; Here’s everything you need to know when you go to the Ballerina Farm in Midway, Utah.
They have a bakery with so many good products that they do sell out, so make sure to go early if you are looking for something in particular. Make sure to get a raspberry lime olive oil cake. They sell lots of different products and meat straight from her farm, along with a lot of cute kitchen stuff and of course her farmer protein. At the bakery, they also serve soft serve ice cream and it was so good.
They do only have outdoor seating, but it’s so cute. My daughter and I loved it and can’t wait to come back. ; Though it didn’t always go very well, like the woman who found a fly in her cupcake. ; Okay, Ballerina Farms count your days. So, me and my sisters and my little baby here, we went to the new Ballerina Farm store in Midway, Utah.
It’s like a 45-minute drive. Um and plus like Olympia here is still new, so it’s like it takes some effort to get places, but we were really excited to go to the new storefront. So, we go and I get a little cupcake thing. I’m eating it. I look down. Guess what’s baked into this cupcake? A dead fly, and I’m going to post a little picture here.
A dead fly, and so I’m like, “Disgusting.” And I go back up to the counter. I’m like, “Hey, there’s a fly in this cupcake. Can I get a new baked good or can I get a replacement of the cupcake?” They’re like, “Yeah, sure.” Get a new cupcake. I’m eating it. I see something in it. I pull it out.
It’s a string, like a string from an apron or a shirt or something, but it is a huge string. I’ll also post another picture. Um and so we’re like, “Okay.” And honestly, it doesn’t seem like these women were too blown away by the whey lemonade, which doesn’t sound that appetizing to me either. ; We went to Tradwife Central.
We went to Ballerina Farm Store so you don’t have to. Honestly, it’s a cute concept. It’s similar to Waco. It reminds me a lot of Magnolia. I think the berries are organic, but they looked a little rough. They had sourdough starters. They had cheese. They had a bunch of stuff, and we got a ton of drinks to try. The funniest was the stick of butter, like an actual stick that you can actually hit people with.
The store was pretty small. There’s also not a lot of seating. I think it’s under construction, but they did have sandwiches, croissants, and froyo. We got a ton of drinks to try, so we started with this whey strawberry lemonade. ; But it’s lemonade, so ; Okay. We’re going to rate them for you. ; I give it a three. Sorry. ; This is the regular whey lemonade.
; Four. ; Chocolate milk farm protein. ; What do you give it? ; I don’t know. It’s not better than Fairlife. ; It has a weird aftertaste. ; It does. ; Strawberry milk farm protein. ; Mhm, that one is yummy. Seven and a half, eight. ; The sourdough chocolate chip. ; Sourdough chocolate It’s crunchy. ; Oh.
; Eight. ; Oh. ; Oh. ; Oh. ; Seven cuz I don’t like my cookies too crunchy, but it’s good taste. ; That’s fair. I was rating the taste. ; Yeah. ; Crystal. ; That’s good, but I’ve had better. ; A five. And I’ll take Crystal. ; It’s like a mid. ; But the Ballerina Farm Store became flooded with fans to the point that it started to affect the local town.
Locals complained that the town was being overrun by tourists and wannabe tradwives who were seeking the Ballerina Farm aesthetic. Thoughts on the Ballerina Farm Store from someone who’s from Midway. I’m from Midway, and while it’s always been slightly touristy, it’s never been like Park City and for good reason.
The town cannot support a large number of tourists. The extent of the touristy part is legitimately two streets and we’re pretty limited on hotels. Since this store has opened, there has been a very obvious shift. We cannot even get out to Main Street on weekends to enjoy the local businesses because the whole place is literally overrun by wannabe tradwives.
The more affordable option to eat at in town has to turn off mobile ordering now because of the insane lines and the free activities meant for locals to connect are overrun by rich Mormon wives. This is a prime example of billionaires getting whatever they want despite what it does to the local communities. I I not spoken to a single local who is in support of this over glorified grocery store and very few have even visited it and it’s an insane place to open it considering almost the exact business exists like two blocks away. I never
liked Hannah but this story just shows how little she cares about anyone but herself. She could have easily placed the store somewhere in the valley where the traffic is easily supported or even Park City where the majority of the population is part-time residents but instead she chose to ruin a small town where long-time residents will face real consequences.
I believe she knew exactly what she was doing as she strategically only placed a farm stand in Kamas and chose to open this business far from where she and her own children reside. I really hope the novelty will die down by winter and she’s forced to close her overpriced store. This woman definitely got herself a bunch of new haters in Midway.
Hannah continued her Ballerina Farm Store. It’s unknown if there was still hype around the store and she continued to focus on selling her raw milk which only caused more controversy. In early 2026 the brand’s pivot into raw milk sales faced a public health crisis. ; Was unsafe raw milk ever sold at any Ballerina Farm Store? ; That’s a great question and no.
; No, absolutely not. ; Absolutely not. And and when we saw some of the comments circulating on social media about this we realized that there was a lack of knowledge, a lack of education um because unless you have bought raw milk before you kind of don’t know how it works. ; On January 29th, 2026 public radio station KPCW reported that Ballerina Farm halted their raw milk sales after samples failed health tests.
The farm released a statement on February 10th of 2026 claiming a commitment to transparency and food safety but people highlighted the inherent risk of unpasteurized products. ; In 2024, Hannah was asked by the Daily Mail how safe it is to sell raw milk, to which she replied, “As long as the cows are clean and the environment is clean, it is relatively safe to do so.
” Well, the thing is, as much as Ballerina Farm is a brand, they are also a social media powerhouse that posts photos and videos of their barn publicly. I’m going to post some screenshots of their barn here, and I highly recommend you pause the video to take a closer look. Now, I’m no health inspector, but I did speak with some people who’ve worked with cows, and they told me this barn is one of the dirtiest they have ever seen.
Far from the circumstances that Hannah outlined that are conducive to producing raw milk. And lo and behold, Ballerina Farm failed a milk safety test, which found excessive levels of E. coli-causing bacteria in their bottled raw milk. Now, Hannah’s husband, Daniel, issued a statement that I think perfectly encapsulates everything that is wrong with influencer brands.
He said, “Producing raw milk takes careful planning from a facility and infrastructure standpoint, something we learned after the fact.” Now, not only does this directly contradict what Hannah acknowledged in her 2024 interview, but one would think if you are going to go against CDC guidelines and advertise this product to tens of millions of people, you would, I don’t know, maybe do a baseline level of research.
But hey, Daniel’s family is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and they have already discussed building a raw dairy farm after temporarily halting sales of the product. Unfortunately, this is not the first time something like this has happened. Influencers are notorious for quickly spawning brands in the interest of capitalizing off their windows of fame with very little regard for quality control or authenticity.
If you take anything away from this video, it’s to stop taking health advice from unqualified people and to stop buying influencer slop. ; On February 10th, 2026, Ballerina Farm released a statement on their website regarding raw milk. The third sentence in the statement reads, “We’re committed to transparency, food safety, and responsible stewardship in all of our agricultural practices.
” What does stewardship in agricultural practices even mean? ; Hannah said, “Wow, there’s been a lot of talk about raw milk this this past week.” And I said, “Well, what’s from?” And she said, “Well, you know, there’s a lot of misinformation going on out there.” And I said, “About what?” And she said, “Well, misinformation, you know, it’s about all types of stuff.
” And I said, “Well, you know, let’s talk about it.” ; Does Ballerina Farm currently sell raw milk? ; No. ; When did you stop selling raw milk? ; In August of 2025. ; Why did Ballerina Farm stop selling raw milk? ; Dan and I are extremely good at taking on too much too many projects at once. And so, um we had this idea of once the dairy was up, we were going to start selling raw milk and also start making cheese and ice cream and butter and all the things.
And I think it was pretty clear to us that with our small team, we had to kind of focus on either pasteurized milk products or raw raw milk because raw milk does have intense legwork behind it because of the regulations. Each state is a little bit different. But for us, every batch has to be tested.
It’s about a 2-hour drive there, 2-hour drive back. And so, we just kind of financially made the decision of like because raw milk is such a small part of what we want to do, and we still want to do it someday, um we’re going to focus the team to pasteurized products for now. ; There’s a Tik Tok that summarizes the deeper meaning behind the Ballerina controversy as well and how it symbolizes the collapse in the brand that they pretended to uphold from the Hydroxide Food Science account.
I cannot stress this enough to you guys that just because someone is not big food means that they care about anything about you other than your dollar and in some ways they make things way less safe than a giant corporation that has money to invest in their food safety. It’s kind of this weird catch-22.
These people aren’t even trying to set you up for health success at all. They’re trying to set their bank accounts up so that they can continue to sell off of your fears of the food industry. I do think that a lot of Ballerina Farm fans thought that because the Ballerina Farm brand was all about a family and homegrown products meant that their products were made with more heart and love and care and less ; ; greed and exploitation, which just isn’t the reality.
The Ballerina Farm raw milk controversy also coincides with a broader political movement surrounding raw milk. Who knew that raw milk could be politicized? But raw milk has been supported by figures like RFK Jr. who frames unpasteurized milk as a liberty issue despite warnings from the CDC. It’s my right to drink poison. Who are you to stop me from drinking belladonna if I want to? This is an infringement on my rights as an American citizen.
According to Politico, raw milk emerged as an issue taken on by conservatives back in 2008. Politico traced it all the way back to the fight of a Republican state representative pushing for a bill to legalize raw milk after they heard from a constituent and small farmer that they received a cease and desist letter from the state agricultural department for serving raw milk.
This article also makes some interesting points about how raw milk started in the 2000s and was more aligned with liberal areas, aligned with diets like eating organic or vegan and it was even sold in Whole Foods. However, as Trump rose into power and trusting experts in science, especially during COVID, became a way to demonstrate opposition to Trump, raw milk became more increasingly an issue taken up by Republicans who saw raw milk as something in opposition of big government and lobbyists. RFK Jr.
and the MAHA movement have now, for lack of a better term, latched on to raw milk. ; Joy, thank you, Randy. Cheers. Thank you for your work. It’s an honor to spend time with you. ; You too. Appreciate you. Hope to be seeing more soon. Thank you. ; A tweet from RFK Jr. reads, “FDA’s war on public health is about to end.
This includes its aggressive suppression of psychedelics, peptides, stem cells, raw milk, hyperbaric therapies, chelating compounds, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamins, clean food, sunshine, exercise, nutraceuticals, and anything else that advances human health and can be patented by pharma. If you work for the FDA and are part of this corrupt system, I have two messages for you.
One, preserve your records, and two, pack your bags.” Almost everything RFK Jr. is talking about here is kind of a product that could be sold as a health product while also being unregulated. I wonder why that is. Just recently, and tragically, New Mexico’s health department put out a notice on February 3rd, 2026, warning citizens not to consume any raw milk products after the death of an infant from a listeria infection, which they believed was caused by the mother drinking unpasteurized milk during her pregnancy.
; Okay, hello. I wanted to come on here and talk about raw milk and some of the things that have been circulating online. Following the farm stopped selling raw milk in August of 2025. It was a business decision for us. We were never shut down or there was never any products recalled. All the the milk that was on the shelf and sold in our little farm stand was 100% safe, absolutely delicious.
No one was ever sick from any of our milk that we sold. And we realized that economically it just wasn’t making sense for us to putting put so much time and effort into this raw milk operation. Um because the majority of our products were going to pasteurization and and so we decided, “Okay, you know what? Let’s focus this dairy, the setup that we have, the team that we have to use this milk for our pasteurized products, which we are super passionate about.
We love We love the butter. We love the ice cream. We love the cheeses. We’re getting more and more into brie cheese and feta cheese and all these products that we’re really excited about. ; Because of these controversies that blatantly put Ballerina Farms customers in danger, some started to realize that the Ballerina Farm brand was a fake persona.
As their TikTok feeds were flooded with Ballerina Farm products that were marked up in high prices but are ultimately manufactured and processed food more than they are homegrown. The facade began to crack. ; Ballerina Farm is a lie. What? I was so confused whenever I was told this just now. Um but no, apparently Ballerina Farm is a scam.
Not Not Let me Let me explain. I asked and I was like, “So, do they live on a farm and have a farm?” Yes, they do. However, they have a bunch of employees. The clothing that she wears is not clothing that she wears. What? They said that’s her costumes. She wears Little House on the Prairie outfits are just outfits that she wears for the camera and then she changes into regular clothes.
She wears makeup. She goes out. She goes skiing regularly. She’s in Utah, but she’s literally right next to a major ski town. And when I looked up Park City, Utah, I was like, “Oh, that’s so quaint.” No, it’s a major ski resort, guys. Not only that, but when they go to the dad’s house, they have like 10 private suites that Hannah and her kids will stay at when they’re at the dad’s house.
And they’re calling this like a ski-in and ski-out home. Didn’t even know that there was such thing as ski-in, ski-out privately owned homes. I thought there was only ski-in, ski-out like mega hotels. So, yeah. ; More and more people began criticizing Ballerina Farm and understanding it’s a business and a brand. Recently, Daniel Nielman has tried to rebrand both his own image and the Ballerina Farm brand after the raw milk controversy.
GQ published an article titled The Real Life Diet of Daniel Nielman, who abides by the rule of skinny French woman. Much of the photos in this article are Daniel looking very approachable, happy, and handling veggies on their farm. This entire interview article is Daniel claiming that he and Hannah are 50/50 and that Daniel does much of the housework and caretaking.
Like in this one section where the interviewer asks, “Is there something that you find yourself doing in your housework contributions that you never imagined that you’d be doing?” Daniel responds, “I remember Grandpa always saying, ‘Grandma did the diapers and I did the barf.’ I think there’s been a generational change there.
The rules are very much interchangeable. Now, I would say as far as the cooking goes, I definitely didn’t see myself cooking as much as I do.” Daniel mentions in this article, “I have just one brother who’s seven years younger than me, and then I have seven sisters. So, I I kind of raised by my sisters and my parents. They did a lot of the domestic stuff.
Dad went to work every day. Mom stayed home with us kids. I just kind of thought that’s how family works. When I met Hannah, this all got kind of turned upside down because we both come from very entrepreneurial families. We both knew we wanted to start our own company, but I just imagined that I would go to work and Hannah would want to stay home with the kids.
When she said, “No, we’re going to work together. You’re not going to leave me home with the kids.” My mind had this epiphany moment. That’s kind of the route we’ve taken and it’s been a lot of fun. I’m home. Hannah and I split everything. After that, much of the article goes into talking about processed foods that are seen as bad for you versus unprocessed foods, which in my opinion is a way to kind of funnel people into the Ballerina Farm brand.
I grew up in the ’90s and so Mom, bless her heart, she was feeding us what all the other moms in the neighborhood were feeding their kids, which was canned Chef Boyardee and SpaghettiOs. We were drinking Tang. We had Gushers in our lunch boxes. We were just eating terribly. When I met Hannah, she wasn’t eating meat. She wasn’t eating dairy.
She had yet to find a clean enough supply and things kept hurting her stomach. I think that’s when someone told her, “You should get a family milk cow because ever since I’ve been drinking milk from our own cow, I haven’t had any gut issues.” Within a week, we had a family milk cow and for the first time in many, many years, Hannah was chugging milk.
She was making ice creams, eating butter and her gut issues had gone away with the dairy. And then, kind of the same thing happened with the meat. Oh, you should try raising your own animal. I bet you’ll notice a difference. So, we started raising pigs, then cows, sheep, all the things. It’s become a really big part of her identity.
But what I notice is from a weight standpoint, processed foods put on really bad weight for me, really quickly. For me, eating clean comes down to just being healthy, feeling healthy, looking healthy. The cleaner I can eat, the better I do in my fitness routines. So, what exactly does eating clean, unprocessed food come down to? As we noted earlier, their hydrator has dehydrated strawberries in it, which requires processing.
And one wouldn’t say protein powder is necessarily unprocessed food. There’s a certain amount of processing required of each ingredient. From Daniel’s statements, milk and meat that comes directly from their farm is somehow better, less processed than others, but there’s little information to provide exactly why that is.
Why you can make cookies, butter, ice cream from Hannah’s cows and not any other cow in the world. As Farm to Taber discusses, Daniel goes on to talk about how he makes protein drinks every day, and that’s his version of eating clean, unprocessed foods. We’re making lunch for the kids who are just getting out of school, and that’s when I eat my first meal of the day.
In my case, I hit Farmer Protein, which is our powder. I’ll fill up 32 oz of liquid. Half of that is water, half of that is whole milk. Then I put two scoops of protein powder in it. Is it milk from your farm? Yeah, milk from the farm. Absolutely. Raw milk, I presume? This is pasteurized milk.
Really? That’s what we’re making right now. So, I’ll put two scoops of protein powder in it, and then I’ll put about 10 g of creatine. That drink right there is 600 calories. I don’t know about you, but parts of this article definitely feel like a subliminal ad to me for Ballerina Farm, as well as a goal to sort of rebrand the controversies surrounding Ballerina Farm and particularly Daniel Neilman.
Ultimately, the Ballerina Farm brand is all about building the small farm image, but in reality, Hannah and Daniel Neelman have strategically utilized social media and their generational wealth to establish a lucrative business that isn’t necessarily selling a higher quality product. Who are American farmers? The true backbone of American farming is not privileged wealthy white people like Hannah and Daniel Neelman.
And while Hannah capitalized off the concept of the nostalgia imagery of American farming and homesteading, in actuality, the people who have built the farms and cultivated the land that have fed American people have never looked like Hannah and Daniel. And they’ve certainly never been as privileged as them.
Hannah and Daniel obscure this reality while simultaneously profiting off of an image that has never belonged to them. And that’s all for today’s video. If you made it to the end, thank you so much for watching this whole video. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope to see you in the next video. Stay well until then. Bye. ;
