When an article from The Times of London about Hannah Neeleman started showing up in my messages last week, I was prepared for a fresh onslaught of think pieces and group chats adding to the Ballerina Farm discourse, but I wasn’t prepared to examine my own life through the lens of a farmer pageant queen. But that’s what happened.
Ballerina Farm is a working farm in Kamas, Utah, just outside of Park City. It’s owned by Hannah and Daniel Neeleman, an exceptionally photogenic married couple in their mid-30s. Ballerina Farm is also a wildly popular Instagram account, and more than an Instagram account, it’s a brand that sells what the Neelemans are growing beyond meats and sourdough starters and farm-fresh dairy — a lifestyle that seems wild and otherworldly, apart from the technology that launched them to fame in the first place.
Most importantly, Ballerina Farm is Hannah — the titular ballerina of Ballerina Farm.
Before she was the ballerina of Ballerina Farm, Neeleman studied ballet at Juilliard in New York City. After Hannah and Daniel were married, Neeleman “was the first Juilliard undergraduate to be expecting ‘in modern history,’” according to The Times article, which has caused quite a stir.
The Ballerina Farm lore expanded dramatically when, in January of this year, Neeleman competed in the Mrs. World pageant in Las Vegas 12 days after giving birth to her eighth child.
What’s curious — and what has been overanalyzed by scores of people fascinated with her online presence — is that Neeleman doesn’t seem to care about, or even be aware of, how famous she is, and how many people have deeply guttural feelings about her and what she has created.
Neeleman’s wildly popular Instagram account, @BallerinaFarm, has 9.3 million followers. That’s almost the population of Greece.
Neeleman and her husband are practicing Latter-day Saints and the parents of eight young children. They are no strangers to online critiques of their so-called traditional, or “trad,” lifestyle. I’m less inclined to believe that tradwifery actually exists and see it more as a conceptual creative pursuit. But what is unique about Neeleman is that she seems to really live that lifestyle outside of Instagram.
Neeleman appears to float above the discourse, wearing gingham and touching down gracefully in plié. It’s as if her posts about scoring homemade sourdough bread and all manner of homesteading sorcery go into the void, completely detached from the reactions, comments, analysis and outcry. There is an authenticity to her lifestyle and way of being that is clearly part of the magnetic quality that feels like a flame attracting moths, especially moths like me — a mom in my mid-30s.
Her response to the Times article was strikingly unusual — a departure from her stoic detachment. She said she was shocked by the article, and considered it “an attack on my family and my marriage, portraying me as oppressed, with my husband being the culprit.”
The headline of the article read: “Meet the queen of the ‘trad wives’ (and her eight children).”
Throughout the article, the writer, Megan Agnew, is simply trying to talk to Neeleman. And what keeps happening is that she can’t quite pin her down. By virtue of having eight children and a husband who is insistent on showing Agnew his irrigation ditches, there seems to have been limited time for Agnew to connect with Neeleman for a proper one-on-one interview. She’s interrupted by babies and her husband and a life deeply imbued with the circadian rhythms of life on a farm; there’s frankly little time in all that for a New York-based reporter.
The egg apron, explained
The story was always going to be controversial — seemingly every story about Ballerina Farm is — but Agnew’s story really took off when an older video resurfaced and was posted on TikTok of Daniel giving Hannah a birthday gift.
In it, Daniel gives Hannah an unwrapped package and she says, “Hoping they’re tickets to Greece,” with wide eyes and childlike anticipation. She rips open the package and sees a square of blue-and-white fabric.
“A hat I can wear in Greece?”
“It’s not a hat,” Daniel replies.
“Ahhhh! It’s my egggg aappprooon.” Hannah puts it on and does a little dance. She’s seems like she’s trying to hide her disappointment, but not very hard.
An egg apron is exactly what it sounds like — an apron with cutesy little pockets for individual eggs. “Now you can gather eggs,” he explains, later adding, “You’re welcome.”
When the public watched Daniel give Hannah that egg apron, it was as if a spell broke. What had been a collective curiosity and almost circus attraction all of a sudden took on a darker tone. The comments on the post turned the attention to Daniel and their marital dynamics: “RUN, GIRL,” hundreds wrote.
Agnew’s article was the left jab, and the egg-apron clip was the right hook.
Of course, husbands are famous for giving gifts that — how to put it? — don’t always quite deliver. Hannah made the decision to post the video, and we don’t know, we can’t know, exactly how she felt about the apron. He may have given her other gifts; we see only what they choose to show of their life. Maybe they are going to Greece. Maybe they’re there right now. And yet strangers on the internet interpreted that video as a cry for help.
Likewise, over the past week, the public has recontextualized Ballerina Farm and the Neelemans to, once again, project their own individual anxieties, insecurities and perhaps jealousies of the contradictions of Neeleman’s life. For many, including me, the article and subsequent video felt like a confirmation of some of my darker suspicions of how the Neeleman family operates.
And yet I find myself being defensive of their lives, and especially of Hannah. Ballerina Farm can hit close to home for women who feel threatened by Neeleman’s pastoral existence because it seems to reject the modern realities of being a woman, and especially a mom — and a working mom, at that. Most of us don’t have the family’s resources, for one thing, or their preternatural beauty, for another.
The Ballerina Farm critique that has affected me the most is the idea that Hannah wasn’t able to choose the life she has — that she was somehow bullied into marrying Daniel, that he pressured her into having a 15-passenger van full of kids, and that she seems to have simply fallen into this authentically Luddite life while also existing because of everything outside of it.
What is missing from the conversation is that Hannah’s agency is being stripped by the writer of The Times piece, as much as it may or may not be being taken away by her husband. And yet there is no doubt that the success of the Ballerina Farm brand is due to Hannah herself. There is no Ballerina Farm without the Ballerina. In The Times article, Daniel emphasizes that Hannah stays at home with kids and he works the fields. But, arguably, Ballerina Farm is what it is because of Hannah’s social media ambition and savvy.
If Hannah were truly as conditioned as the public says she is — to be trapped on a farm with a domineering husband and a brood of children — there is no way she would have been as ambitious as she was to qualify for, apply to and be accepted into Juilliard in the first place. That takes smarts, talent, social capital, resources and yes, ambitious dreams — wanting more than a provincial life. But the thing about the article, and about the discourse about Ballerina Farm itself — herself — is that it flattens Hannah into the ballerina on her brand’s label. A cartoon of something pretty.
What Ballerina Farm says about us
It is unknowable by us, the public, what Hannah wants out of life and what she wants out of her incredibly popular social media account. But we can believe her when she says she is a co-creator of her life and her brand. It is sometimes unknowable for the rest of us to know what we want, too. What we want out of life and the life we’ve created evolves as we do. And it’s easier to project our dreams onto someone else than to actually achieve those dreams.
Maybe that’s the real reason for Ballerina Farm’s popularity.
That Neeleman had a dream to be a ballerina and was good enough to actually be that thing, and continues to market herself as a version of that thing, is remarkable. Neeleman’s videos of herself dancing ballet in her mountain-valley acreage or in her Wilder-looking farmhouse hold a certain poignancy and gravitas. I don’t know many adults who are living even a part of their dreams, or had dreams that grand to begin with.
I don’t think I had dreams, or maybe my dreams were so realistic they didn’t seem like dreams. I just wanted to be happy. And just as we can’t know what Hannah wants, we also cannot know whether she’s happy or not in the life she’s living. Achieving success or one’s dream — and, equally, not achieving those things — is, of course, not a measure of happiness.
It’s clear what Daniel wanted. He wanted a farm. He wanted a lot of kids. He wanted to dig irrigation ditches. He wanted a wife on a pedestal; a ballerina in a music box. By her own account, there’s a lot in Hannah’s life that she wanted, and there’s a lot she didn’t want (like needing to stay in bed for a week because of exhaustion). But isn’t that the same for all of us to a certain extent? Aren’t most mothers of young children exhausted by the demands of work and family life? I wouldn’t mind a week in my bed.
What we want and the life available to us is a moving target, and it’s influenced by the people around us, who we marry, where we live, how we were brought up, and endless sliding doors of experiences and opportunities. Having every opportunity or choice available to you is a fallacy — we only ever have a certain choice set at any given time.
A follow-up article in The Times was published a week later. It has a softer tone and features more of Hannah. In it, Hannah says, “Anything great requires sacrifice.” That Hannah sees part of her life as a sacrifice can be seen as a disappointment. But the more I have thought about her statement, I find it to be self-aware and probably healthy. Philosophically sound, even.
When we make choices, we sacrifice other possible outcomes. Allowing Hannah to be a moral agent in her own story — to sacrifice what she wants, the way she wants — is what I’ll be projecting back onto myself.