My obsession with Ballerina Farm
The post in which I admit to watching all of the Ballerina Farm YouTube videos.
But first, a very inspiring short film about ballet
Ballet is an activity for the privileged, it’s expensive, exclusive to certain areas of the world, and it favors a very specific body type (white, thin). I did ballet for 10 years of my adolescent / teen / young adult life and it shaped me in so many ways. This short film made me tear up with memories of my own.
My dear friend Jacob has just widely released his newest film about a ballet school in Lagos, Nigeria. If you have never clicked on a link from me, this is the one I would beg you to! Just do yourself a favor and watch. It will move you.
Ballerina Farm
For the uninitiated, Ballerina Farm is ultimately a business: an actual cow, pig, dairy and chicken farm that produces DTC meat boxes and lifestyle accessories. It’s also better known as the influencer, Hannah Neeleman. She’s a former Juilliard trained ballerina and wife to Daniel Neeleman. He’s the son of a former JetBlue exec and heir to a many million dollar estate. The farm itself is a 328 acre ranch in Northern Utah and employs over 30 people. Their social media gives the impression that it’s a family business, where Hannah and Daniel (and some of their eight children) do a bulk of the farm work. It looks, to outsiders, like a homestead as opposed to the medium sized farm operation that it is. In a word, Ballerina Farm is a contradiction. She’s an LDS mother of eight (hoping for 13), she makes sourdough bread daily, mozzarella from scratch, drinks raw milk directly from her cows, eats astonishing amounts of homemade butter, is a weightlifter, is thin, is a beauty pageant winner, believes that abortion is morally wrong, is Co-CEO of a sizeable business, and she’s a marketing and branding phenomenon.
She does not fit nicely in society’s preordained boxes for women (raising eight children at home, loving god and running a business, how dare she!). All of her contradictions seem to make the internet absolutely explode over her. Whether you are a Ballerina Farm lover or hater, it’s nearly impossible to look away.
She’s often labeled a trad wife by the media, and rightfully so, she performs many such roles in her online persona. The sourdough (how did the trad wives get the corner on sourdough?!), homeschooling, a large family, farming, and religious overtones scream trad wife. But I watch their YouTube videos with an keen eye and I think she’s playing on a whole other level. She and Daniel have millions of followers hook, line and sinker. I get the impression that the entire thing is strategized at a conference room table (or their butcher block dining table) and the family shows up for their daily taping on their marks ready to perform. The whole thing is orchestrated with the single intention of selling more stuff from their website and farm store. If you cruise ballerinafarm.com, it’s not just meat from their livestock, it’s got frozen pastries, shoes, kitchen accessories, sea salt, beeswax candles, flour, soap, a whole collection of colorful enamelware, protein powder, and more! It’s got the entire kit to make you feel like a farmer yourself.
At the beginning of several videos, she swings on that apron and in that moment it’s easy to believe that I, too, could have this gentle, breezy farm life. If only I had the right apron and bowls and french sea salt. Not to mention she’s attractive, white and thin and is now selling “farmer protein powder,” so perhaps a little scoop of that in my morning smoothie and I, too, could have the body of a 20-something ballet dancer.
It’s ingenious marketing even if the whole thing screams of conservative values and societal backsliding. They have convinced their followers that an ultimate form of happiness could be achieved with a little procreation and owning all of the same things that Hannah skillfully uses in her own kitchen. As soon as you have matching aprons for the whole family, a freezer full of pasture-raised meat, four varieties of sea salt, a bow-shaped bread knife, a cabinet of enamelware and a pair of special-edition cowboy boots, well then, salvation is yours.
A project inspired by their home
It took all my effort not to purchase anything on their website while writing this because I spent a lot of time scrolling through all of the items for “research” and to be honest, a lot of the products are cute! In order to satiate my desire to have a quiet farm life via lifestyle accessories, I spent the better part of my evenings over the last few weeks making my own version of this quilted bunting hanging in their kitchen (screenshot above).
If you, too, feel called to this item and don’t want to spend 20-30 hours on a DIY version, I found a cute one from Kyrsset Shop.
Lastly, she’s even inspired me to feed my sourdough starter for the first time in months (sorry little guy). If only I had those enamel bowls it would be so easy to make a loaf for my family every day.
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See you next Sunday,
Bekka