Tycoon or Tradwife? Ballerina Farm’s Hannah Neeleman Makes Her Own Path

Her picture-perfect life as a Mormon farm wife has made Hannah Neeleman a social media star and a cultural lightning rod.

Like many a frazzled home cook, Hannah Neeleman suddenly realised she’d forgotten the final step of her recipe just as she was about to serve it. It was a sunny November afternoon in Kamas, Utah, and she was simmering a potful of stroganoff, made with beef and yogurt from the cattle ruminating in the barn next door.

“I didn’t add the mustard and the Worcestershire sauce,” the condiments that make the creamy dish sing, she said. Tripping into the pantry, she emerged with a glass jar in each hand: homemade versions of both.

It is not exactly hard to make your own mustard or Worcestershire, but who would bother? It is just this kind of self-sufficient, everything-from-scratch move that fills Neeleman’s audience with both admiration and irritation. It’s a mixture that has made her - and her Ballerina Farm - very famous, very quickly.

The name, inspired by her teenage years as a Juilliard-trained dancer, refers to the 133ha ranch, dairy and family spread where she and her husband, Daniel, live with their eight children, ages 1 to 12. But “Ballerina Farm” is also Neeleman’s hugely popular social media persona, with nearly 22 million followers across TikTok, Instagram and YouTube - far more than the combined reach of the long-standing domestic goddesses Ina Garten, Martha Stewart, Joanna Gaines and Tieghan Gerard.

“I love to watch what she does, but sometimes it makes me crazy that she makes it looks so easy,” said Carly Weber, an elementary school teacher in Bloomington, Indiana. “I have two kids, I can barely cook one thing most days, and there she is looking perfect and teaching herself to make mozzarella.”

Since 2021, Neeleman, 34, has been posting videos almost daily as she goes about her work as head cook, bread baker, shepherd, gardener, egg collector and entrepreneur. She appears so calm about this workload that even fans suspect her of concealing an army of household employees. (For the record, the family has part-time babysitting help and a teacher who home-schools the children three days a week.)

Neeleman has also built Ballerina Farm into a thriving food and housewares brand, a wellness and nutrition hub, a model for small farming and a showcase for her Mormon faith.

In the process, she has attracted many labels: homesteader, role model, missionary and tradwife - a term that went viral during the pandemic to describe women who glorify traditional roles as wives and mothers. And since a provocative profile of her last summer set off a global conversation, she’s become a lightning rod for every kind of opinion about how women should live.

Is Hannah Neeleman a modern homemaker choosing her own path? A deluded prisoner in a gilded cage of faith and family? (Her husband is the son of the JetBlue founder David Neeleman, and widely presumed to be independently wealthy.) A privileged influencer whose performative perfection masks the real work involved?

As she went about her day, bundling her daughters into coats and checking on a pen of pregnant Jersey cows, Neeleman sailed serenely around these questions, citing family tradition rather than faith or ideology as the force driving her life choices.

“I always knew I wanted to be a mom who supported her family” like her own mother, Cherie Wright, who raised nine children (and has 53 grandchildren), she said. “I didn’t know it would look like this, but I’m so proud of what we’ve built.”

A Mormon Tradition

Ballerina Farm’s leap to worldwide fame came in August, when The Times of London published an article that portrayed Neeleman as the cowering victim of a tyrannical husband. Though Neeleman posted a video calmly disputing this version of her life, the internet erupted with scorching criticism of both of them. Her fans flooded the comments, accusing him of dragging her from ballet into drudgery. Essayists on Substack said she takes advantage of generational wealth and her thin, blond, white privilege to promote a pronatalist agenda.

Neeleman is not one to shun the spotlight - she has competed in beauty pageants since high school and as recently as last year, when she vied for the Mrs World crown two weeks after giving birth. She’s on the cover of the current issue of Evie, a kind of Cosmopolitan for conservative women, looking sultry while milking a cow. But she is new to the kind of audience that talks back and shows up.

“People stand on the road and take pictures, they come up the driveway, they offer to live with us for a week to help with chores,” she said, sounding more surprised than upset that fans don’t always respect the boundaries of her real life.

She makes doughnuts from scratch, pulls herbs from her container garden and makes time for the occasional pas de bourree or weightlifting session with her husband. (Her new line of Ballerina Farm protein powder has been a top seller on the website.) As she rolls pasta or stuffs grape leaves, she’s sometimes carrying a baby in a sling or a toddler on her hip; the older children often drift into frame, but never whine or fight.

This unending stream of too-good-to-be-true content entrances her fans and infuriates her critics. But to Neeleman’s mind, she is simply doing what generations of Mormon women, and other women in traditional societies, have done before her. She is the latest in a long line of Mormon domestic influencers, beginning with the “mommy bloggers” of the early 2000s who quickly adapted their church-sanctioned skills at baking, cooking and housekeeping to the internet.

“Self-sufficiency, family ties, industriousness and land stewardship are deeply rooted in Mormon culture,” said Caroline Kline, a professor at Claremont Graduate University who studies the changing role of women in Mormon communities.

The question of how to be a modern Mormon woman has bubbled to the surface of mainstream culture in recent hit reality shows like The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives and The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City. (The stars often describe themselves as “Mormon 2.0.”) Like the discourse around Ballerina Farm, they spotlight Mormon women making a strenuous effort to wedge feminism and autonomy into the traditionally strict limits of their lives. Kline said that in recent years, women have put pressure on the church to expand their roles, making room for equality within marriage. “Being a tradwife is about submission,” she said. “This looks more like the church’s idea of partnership.”

Neeleman is often mentioned in the same breath as Nara Smith, another newly popular Mormon influencer who has posted videos of herself making things like SpaghettiOs and Cocoa Puffs from scratch, often in evening wear and full makeup.

Neeleman’s prairiecore pinafores and natural look fit the traditional Mormon stereotype. So does her family of 10, though such fruitfulness is becoming less common except in families that are very observant, very wealthy or both.

‘The life I always wanted’

Neeleman was raised not far away, in Springville, where her parents ran a floral business. Neeleman, the eighth of nine children, says she grew up cooking and foraging with her mother, “a bit of a hippie” who made simple food with fresh ingredients. “I didn’t know what canned spaghetti sauce was,” she said. “I thought it was something you make, not something you buy.”

She learned to dance jazz and tap; when she was 11, a Russian ballet academy came to town and she saw dancers on pointe for the first time. “They were like goddesses,” she said. “I loved their physique and their strength.”

She trained hard, and at 16, turned down a full scholarship to Brigham Young University to join the prestigious four-year BFA programmre at the Juilliard School in New York City, where she lived in a dorm and worked as an usher at Lincoln Centre.

“I spent all that cash on restaurants,” she said, tasting foods that she hadn’t encountered in Utah: Cantonese dim sum, fresh bagels and French pastries.

She and Daniel Neeleman met during her senior year, and when she graduated in 2012, they were married and expecting their first child.

“I always knew that ballet wasn’t my life’s goal,” she said, pointing out that professional dancers, like professional athletes, tend to have short careers. “This is the life I always wanted.”

On this November day, she seemed as tired as most parents of young children, but hardly trapped. Her five daughters were at the local library with a babysitter, her three sons were free-ranging outside and her pride in pressing whole herb leaves between sheets of fresh pasta was obvious.

In her wide-open living space, all the furniture was pushed to the edges to give the children room to run around. One corner held her internet-famous Aga, a British cast-iron stove coveted by DIY cooks that she bought second-hand on Craigslist. (A new Aga of this size starts at about $21,000.)

A panful of snow-white beef tallow sat on the counter next to a supply of fresh herbs and an unusually elegant KitchenAid mixer. “Jennifer Garner sent me that,” she said sheepishly, as if worried she might be name-dropping.

A well-oiled machine

A knock on the window signalled the arrival of that day’s supply of raw milk, two glass jugs that Daniel Neeleman lifted into his wife’s hands. He’s in charge of yogurt production, a staple of the family’s diet. The dairy cows produce more milk than the Neelemans can drink; the ranch yields more meat than they can sell; the sourdough starter reproduces every day. In this kind of kitchen ecosystem, making beef stew, mozzarella and waffles on a daily basis isn’t necessarily performative; it’s an efficient way to feed a large family.

Daniel Neeleman soon appeared in a Carhartt coverall, and gently herded a reporter, photographer, Hannah and her public relations chief (hired since the Times of London debacle) into a utility vehicle to visit the dairy barn. Daniel Neeleman, 36, grew up mostly in Connecticut, but he is as passionate as only a new farmer can be.

The bright, airy space was nearly silent, without the usual soundtrack of suction pumps and lowing of impatient cows. The couple invested US$400,000 ($685,000) in a top-of-the-line robotic milking system, which allows each cow to be milked on her own schedule, and collects microdata like the rate at which she chews and the number of steps she takes in a day. Two giant Roomba-like machines roamed the aisles, quietly absorbing manure, then parking themselves to be emptied.

The next step in the Ballerina Farm expansion will be a creamery, producing butter, cheese and ice cream. To learn the trade, the Neelemans have visited top producers like Maison Bordier in Normandy, Arethusa Farm in Connecticut and the Ballymaloe Cookery School farm in Ireland.

Ballerina Farm has also become a thriving direct-to-consumer business, complete with retro branding and a new slogan: “Wholesome Charm for Everyday Living.” What began as a modest TikTok storefront has become a retail hub with 50 employees producing frozen croissants, fresh wreaths, mother-daughter gingham aprons, and US$298 ($510) cowboy boots.

The couple have bought 5.6ha in Kamas, where they plan to build an educational farm complete with animals, a visitor centre, a restaurant and an event space to attract day-trippers.

“Utah people are still pretty close to their agricultural roots,” Daniel Neeleman said. “Even if they’re living in a townhome in Salt Lake, on the weekend they want to get out on the land, see how their grandparents did it.”

The goal of all this enterprise, Hannah Neeleman said, is not to accumulate more wealth, converts or fame, but to bring her followers the joy she experiences in family farming.

“The community has given us all this,” she said, gesturing to the farm, where a freshly painted barn sported the new Ballerina Farm logo. “Giving back seems like the least we can do.”

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