Latest news with #BallerinaFarm
Yahoo
30-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Ballerina Farm's Hannah and Daniel Neeleman Take Rare Vacation Without 8 Kids for First Time
Ballerina Farm's Hannah and Daniel Neeleman traveled away from their home in Utah for the weekend to attend a cousin's wedding in New York City In a video post recapping their travel day, the parents of eight marveled at how foreign it felt to take a trip without their kids. They stayed at home with their grandmother, as Hannah explained on TikTok The couple has longtime ties to N.Y.C., where Hannah lived while attending Juilliard. On his Instagram Stories, Daniel explained that they also got engaged and welcomed their first son in the cityHannah and Daniel Neeleman ventured east for the weekend, leaving behind their beloved Ballerina Farm and their home full of kids for some mom-and-dad quality time in New York City. On Sunday, June 29, Hannah posted an Instagram Reel documenting their arrival at their airport, where they felt the absence of their eight children. The influencer, 35, sported a butter yellow dress with red buckled shoes while her husband, 36, rocked up to the airport in a cowboy hat for their unfamiliar travel day. "Have we ever traveled just us, without the kids?" Hannah asked while filming herself. "I feel so strange ... Daniel and I are lost but in love." Daniel added to his wife's commentary, remarking with some astonishment, "I don't have a single diaper in my back pocket. Not a single binky." In Hannah's TikTok post of their travel day video, she explained that their kids were home with their grandmother. "It's been a while since we traveled just Daniel and I 😎," she added. "I love this." The rest of the video featured clips of the couple making their way onto the flight and eventually landing in New York, where they attended Daniel's cousin's wedding at St. Patrick's Cathedral. On her Instagram Stories, Hannah posted sweet photos from the event and detailed how she and Daniel "literally danced for 2 hours." Though the Neelemans are settled on their 328-acre farm in Utah, they have major ties to the Big Apple. Hannah trained as a ballerina at Juilliard for four years, hence the dance-inspired name of their shared business. And as Daniel explained on his Instagram Stories, the city backdropped the earliest days of their love story. "Hannah and I fell in love here, got engaged here. We lived our first year as a married couple here. Henry (our oldest) was born here. It always feels like home away from home," he wrote alongside a photo they snapped at the wedding, with the Manhattan skyline behind them. "We now have a [sic] 8 kids and a no matter, we love you NYC." While their children skipped this most recent cross-country trip, Hannah previously told PEOPLE that they regularly bring the whole family along for a visit. In fact, they've celebrated a few Halloweens on Manhattan's Upper West Side, continuing a tradition the mom of eight started while in college. "It's so fun. There's nothing like it," says the social media star. "It's so different here because our kids literally trick-or-treat on their horses. They just jump on their horses and then go down our county road and trick-or-treat." Read the original article on People
Yahoo
10-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The 'traditional family' financial structure is back, thanks to Gen Z
Two seemingly disparate topics dominated media during the 2024 presidential election: gender roles (the male loneliness epidemic; tradwives) and the economy (the cost of living or, its shorthand, eggs). But these threads might have been weaving a single narrative all along: The renewed fixation on traditional gender roles was a canary in the late capitalist coal mine, warning that the neoliberal era's social contract was leaking noxious gas. As of 2024, almost half of Republican men and one-third of Republican women believed that 'women should return to their traditional roles in society,' a cultural prescription that's doubled in popularity since just 2022, in part due to the grim outlooks of disillusioned young people. This vision was particularly seductive for young men, who voted for Trump in record numbers: Gen Z men report regressive gender views (like 'a man who stays home with his children is less of a man') at more than twice the rate of their baby boomer counterparts. This context makes otherwise unobjectionable family-friendly proposals — like that of a $5,000 baby bonus — seem more sinister, meager attempts at restoring the single-earner, single-caregiver family structure associated with a bygone era of American prosperity and dominance. In the world that Reaganomics built and over which 14 billionaires now run roughshod, it's certainly an alluring theory. Wouldn't it be convenient for those struggling in the tightening fingertrap of modern life if embracing the supposedly natural traits downstream of one's reproductive system was enough to raise wages and make housing affordable? But we shouldn't forget why we left the so-called 'traditional' family structure behind in the first place. The last time gender's cold war erupted into a battle fought on such explicit terms was around 50 years ago. Two years after Silvia Federici published her seminal work "Wages Against Housework," a woman named Terry Martin Hekker took to the op-ed pages of The New York Times to bemoan the state of homemaking — not because she wasn't being compensated for her time and labor, as second-wave feminists like Federici suggested she ought to be, but because she felt too few women were choosing to do it anyway. Examining household income trends, she muses, 'I calculate I am less than eight years away from being the last housewife in the country.' Betty Friedan, avert your eyes. Hekker, the author of the 1980 book "Ever Since Adam and Eve: The Satisfactions of Housewifery and Motherhood in 'an Age of Do-Your-Own-Thing,'" was the ur-tradwife. Her writing adopted the defensive, defiant tone that will be familiar to anyone who's had the displeasure of viewing the infamous "Ballerina Farm" response to the Times of London article about the modern 'queen of the tradwives.' (The more things change..) Of course, Hekker may not have realized at the time that many of her housewife contemporaries were entering the workforce not because they had read a time-machine-faxed advance copy of "Lean In," but because inflation was creeping higher and their families needed another paycheck. In short, for reasons people have always worked: for money. In the piece, Hekker alternates between playful and indignant. Her argument — that the 'do your own thing' mantra of the women's movement should extend to homemakers, a group she saw as at risk of becoming 'extinct' — seems fair enough, though at times it's plain that Hekker believes being a stay-at-home mother is not only her thing, but the right thing. Putting the ambitions of her peers in scare-quotes in one particularly biting parenthetical, she writes, '[There's no getting even for] years of fetching other women's children after they'd thrown up in the lunchroom, because I have nothing better to do, or probably there is nothing I do better, while their mothers have 'careers.' (Is clerking in a drug store a bona fide career?).' Speaking of her foremothers, she writes, 'They took pride in a clean, comfortable home and satisfaction in serving a good meal because no one had explained to them that the only work worth doing is that for which you get paid.' On this, it's hard to argue: Care work, the work that makes all other work possible, is invaluable — though it certainly isn't valued. But the harsh reality of spending decades out of the workforce in our current paradigm — which, as Hekker rightly argued in 1977 and which remains true today, views work only as that for which you can be paid — is zeroes in the Social Security records, little or no retirement savings of one's own and a slim chance of being able to find meaningful employment later, should one need it. While married women over 65 are about as likely to be poor as married men, divorced women are 56% more likely to live in poverty than their counterparts. (A 2024 Social Security office analysis projects that offering credits to caregivers would increase the monthly benefit of a quarter of the population living in poverty by 14%, a modest but important step in the right direction.) Hekker wrote this op-ed in 1977, a time when the U.S. economy had stalled. Now — 40 years deep in the great neoliberal experiment, in which wages have long grown stagnant, most federal spending has accumulated in sky-high asset prices and labor protections have become so brittle there's hardly anything left to weaken — it's never been more popular to wonder whether the promise of trickle-down, hustle-bustle economics was a trap (it was!). But rather than yearning for the strong unions, high corporate and marginal tax rates and illegal stock buybacks of yesteryear, many cling instead to the ahistorical, rosy image popularized by 1950s nostalgia porn, that which Hekker valorizes in her piece: the superiority of the 'traditional,' single-income family, in which a (male) breadwinner works for a family wage, and a (female) caretaker manages life at home. This is the image cosplayed today by many-an-alt-right grifter on social media, propped up by the bounty of Amazon storefronts and AdSense (did their patron saint Betty Draper have affiliate links, too?). This conflation of gender orthodoxy with American prosperity is popular for a frustratingly simple reason: A politics which refuses to engage with a rigorous economic analysis in the face of parabolic wealth and income inequality has no choice but to attribute the creeping void of American precarity to cultural explanations instead. In other words: Do the gender roles again, a growing contingent of Americans seems to believe, and the prosperity will return! In this accounting, feminism made women selfish and undesirable, men no longer exhibit sufficient 'masculine energy,' and the result is .. wage stagnation? But gender role orthodoxy as a solution to economic problems confronts the same shortcoming today it's always faced: Dependence on the long-term, unwavering benevolence of another person is an abjectly risky financial strategy. Even Reagan, who, as governor of California, signed into law the first 'no-fault divorce' statute in the country, knew trapping people in marriages was a bad idea. Widespread adoption of such unilateral divorce laws saw a drop in the female suicide rate of 20%. So set aside the fantasy that cultural capitulation to this 'traditional' vision would fix the nation's economic issues (it wouldn't), and you're still left with a proposition that balances the heavy burden of long-term security for roughly half the population on the temperamental, one-legged stool of another person's affection. This is a lesson Terry Martin Hekker learned the hard way. In 2006, she returned to the pages of the Gray Lady to write a follow-up called 'Paradise Lost (Domestic Division)' in which she provided a somber update. After her original column had experienced the 1970s version of virality, she wrote a book and toured the country 'lecturing' to 'rapt audiences' about 'the rewards of homemaking and housewifery,' enacting a less overtly political but equally ironic interpretation of the Phyllis Schlafly playbook. 'So I was predictably stunned and devastated,' she revealed, 'when, on our 40th wedding anniversary, my husband presented me with a divorce,' trading her in for a 'sleeker model.' She wasn't alone. 'There were many other confused women of my age and circumstance who'd been married just as long, sharing my situation.' But 'divorced' wasn't the right word for how she felt — 'canceled' was more fitting, as it described what happened to her credit cards, health insurance and finally her checking account. Her ex-husband took his younger girlfriend to Cancún. She became eligible for SNAP benefits and published a second title: "Disregard First Book." The collective longing for a sturdier system, currently molting in tradwife TikToks and behind the paywall of Andrew Tate's Hustlers University, is supported by a scaffolding of legitimate critique. When the U.S. moved to a dual-earner economy, it did virtually nothing to address the question of caregiving, a critical component of any functioning society. In the absence of a robust, systemic approach to care as a public good (save for the dangling carrot of a one-time $5,000 baby bonus), we shouldn't forget the real, if imperfect, protections available to us. For people who want to have children and continue to participate in the labor market, this might look like using a high-yield savings or money market account to begin saving for the climbing expense of child care before a child is born, to defray some of the unmanageable costs. And for those who think they may want to work inside their homes and provide this care themselves, it means building terms around spousal support into a prenuptial agreement that outline what happens if your marriage (and, by extension, source of income) goes away someday — like how much money you'll receive, and for how long, while you look for employment again. These steps — as well as those which can help women earn more money without working harder than they already are — are the focus of my new book, "Rich Girl Nation." But if there's anything this state of affairs should teach us in the meantime, it's that the game of inventing cultural explanations for material shortcomings will always assign the shortest sticks to those least able to demand long ones. That is a feature, not a bug, of the far-right's vision for women's futures. Forgive us if we don't want to play along.
Business of Fashion
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Business of Fashion
The Business of Ballerina Farm
MIDWAY, UTAH — Many who stumble upon Hannah Neeleman on TikTok find themselves asking one question after they've spent a bit of time admiring her photogenic farm life: How on earth does she find the time to bake so much homemade bread while raising eight kids? Neeleman chalks it up to meal planning and plenty of advanced prep. But when it comes to Ballerina Farm, the lifestyle brand she launched with husband David Daniel Neeleman, she'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 Neeleman while serving cups of homemade buttermilk at a preview of her brand's new store in May. 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 barnwood 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' Silver Lake neighbourhood. 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 pasteurised variety. A sign on the wall promotes raw milk, which they sell at their farm stand. ADVERTISEMENT Many products are inspired by — and sometimes sourced from — her family farm. Others are imported. Customers can buy cardamom apricot amaretti and ginger rhubarb strawberry kombucha at an in-store cafe counter, or purchase 20th-century Belgian art. 'We've just had fun bringing in beautiful products that are the best in the world,' Neeleman said during the tour. 'Our French salt — I fell in love with salt when we went to France three years ago.' A former Juilliard ballet student who gave up her dance career to buy and run a family farm with her husband, Neeleman's idyllic content has attracted nearly 22 million followers across social platforms. On TikTok, the hashtag #ballerinafarm is up to 2.5 billion views. That hashtag will bring you to a mix of Neeleman's own videos, depicting milking sheep or rolling dough, but also an ecosystem of fans and critics who react to her every move, whether it's receiving an egg apron from her husband or competing in a beauty pageant two weeks after having a baby. With their massive and highly engaged online audience locked in, the Neelemans are moving fast to expand Ballerina Farm into a real-world lifestyle empire. There's the new store, and 20 employees hired in the last four months. Its bestselling Farmer Protein Powder will be stocked at New York's Happier Grocery, the Big Apple's answer to Erewhon, in June. The Neelemans want to create an agritourism site complete with hospitality and an event space. They say the business is profitable, while declining to share sales numbers. The Ballerina Farm Store in Midway, Utah. (Ballerina Farm) Ballerina Farm already has the hallmarks of some of the biggest and trendiest lifestyle brands on the market, with a farm-themed twist. Its product lineup and price points (that protein powder retails for $67 a bag) are similar to brands like Flamingo Estate, while Neeleman's cooking videos evoke an even more industrious Martha Stewart, who follows her on Instagram (viewers can try their luck at home with Ballerina Farm's $89 sourdough kit). TikTok especially has given Ballerina Farms instant access to a global fandom, most of whom have no intention of milking their own cows. Los Angeles is the top city for e-commerce orders, while 62.5 percent of Hannah's social media followers are outside the United States, according to Daniel Neeleman. ADVERTISEMENT Hustle Agriculture As avid followers know, the Neelemans married three months after their first date, in 2011. Two years later, the twosome were raising goats in Brazil, which sparked the idea for Ballerina Farm 1.0. 'We wanted the farm to make money; we wanted to be able to support ourselves,' said Hannah Neeleman. Daniel left his job as a director at Vigzul, a home security company started by his father, JetBlue founder David Neeleman, and by 2017, the couple was raising pigs in Utah. They turned to social media to promote their new artisanal meat business, gaining a niche following of customers and fellow farmers. 'When we were first starting [on] Instagram, we had a lot of homesteaders that followed us, because we were really in the thick of building things — our first milk cows and building chicken coops,' said Hannah Neeleman. But it wasn't until the pandemic that she became a mainstream success. 'I remember not more than a week going by when someone was like, 'You're exploding on TikTok,'' she said of the account that is now up to 9.8 million followers. Her Instagram following, which was at 443,000 in January 2022, grew to 8.3 million by January 2024. Media attention raised her profile even more. A viral July 2024 profile of her life in the UK's Sunday Times was followed by appearances in The New York Times, Glamour and other publications. (Neeleman hasn't welcomed all of the attention, calling the Sunday Times profile an 'attack' in a video posted shortly after it ran). Each piece sparked a firestorm of online discussion, as audiences obsessed over her life path and marriage, which ballooned into broader debates about whether her content implicitly supported 'tradwife' ideology, especially after she was featured in a 59-page spread in Evie, a publication aimed at conservative women. A representative said the feature 'was not intended as a political statement.' ADVERTISEMENT All that attention and world-building elevates Neeleman to a category of fame beyond social media influencers, and into the realm of mass-market celebrities, said James Nord, founder of influencer marketing agency Fohr. The logical next step would be a reality show. Daniel Neeleman says they've been offered 'dozens' of opportunities, but haven't signed onto one yet. 'Never say never,' he said. The Simple Life The day before the store preview, Hannah Neeleman led a tour of her family's newly built 150-cow dairy. She discussed the finer points of manure collection (she said a robotic 'manure roomba' gathers it), shared her views on the virtues of raw milk and described the best type of feed for optimising cream content. The Neelemans produce a portion of what they sell, and they refer to Ballerina Farm's brand ethos as 'close living' — sourcing locally and homeschooling their children to help on the farm. As demand has grown, so has their supply chain. The handmade soap is made by a neighbour; the protein powder sources whey from Ireland. 'We're limited; we're a small farm,' said Daniel Neeleman. 'We have to lean on other farms to help supply us.' Even as they expand into product categories like wellness that can be shipped internationally in large quantities, there remain 'products that we'll probably never be able to scale, and we love that,' said Hannah Neeleman. One of the main ones: their raw milk, which can't be sold outside their own store, per health regulations. The brand's website says customers need to sign a waiver to buy it, and a required disclaimer on the vintage-style bottles warns that it 'can be unsafe.' The success of the brand hinges on how many followers tuning into Ballerina Farm out of aspiration, drama — or the combination of both — will end up placing orders for products. The Neelemans, meanwhile, remain practical about their ambitions. 'We're not trying to go public. We're not trying to franchise. We're not trying to be in every gas station and every grocery store,' said Daniel Neeleman. 'That isn't really what makes us excited. We like to keep things small and special, and that's kind of where we're at right now.'
Telegraph
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
‘We're missionaries, in a weird way': The Mormon wives scandalising the church
Mormonism is having a moment. On TikTok and Instagram; in hit stage and TV shows; amongst the believers forming snaking queues outside churches from Salt Lake City to South Kensington. In the era of Trump's America, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, with all its conservative rules and regulations, is riding a wave of increasing popularity. Social media is dominated by Mormon 'trad wife' influencers such as Nara Smith and Ballerina Farm, who present an idyllic, old-fashioned daily existence filled with Bible study, baking and breastfeeding their never ending supply of children to their millions of followers. Sales of The Book of Mormon, the LDS's holy scripture, have doubled since the start of the millennium, with the church – which has around 16 million active members worldwide – reporting that more than 200 million copies had been distributed by 2023 (up from 100m in 2000). But there's another factor at play in the church's resurgence. Last year, reality TV gained a new megahit in The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, a soapy, scandalous series about a group of female Mormon influencers (known as MomTokkers) living in the state of Utah. Disney reports that season two, which launched last week, has already been watched by five million people (a marked increase from the first season premiere, according to the studio, although the increase has not been publicly declared). It includes all of your regular reality TV ingredients: ex-best friends turned enemies, villainous backstabbers, outlandish gossip (illicit sex! Adultery! Gambling!) and carefully controlled social events that, 99 per cent of the time, end in screaming matches. Set against the backdrop of a swinging scandal that almost tore apart the lives of some of the show's cast back in 2022, it's a recipe for TV gold. That scandal centred mostly on Taylor Frankie Paul, the show's main catalyst for entertainment: she swears, gets arrested, cries over her volatile relationships, screams in other women's faces. She was also the one to reveal three years ago that she, her ex-husband and several other Mormon couples – all with large social media followings – were engaging in 'soft swinging'. Divorce followed for both Paul and season two's new cast member Miranda McWhorter; pariah status seemed set in stone. Until it wasn't, and fears that they would be shunned by the church instead resulted in a hit TV show about their personal lives. Season one set Paul up as a star capable of rivalling reality TV's most famous agents of chaos (The Real Housewives of Atlanta's NeNe Leakes, Love Island's Maura Higgins, Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner) with her messy family and relationship dramas and love of confrontation. But there was always a niggling feeling amongst viewers that we wouldn't understand the full story until McWhorter – Paul's one-time best friend, fellow leading MomTok influencer and, vitally, swinger – shared her side. And finally, in season two, we get just that. McWhorter, 27, appears on screen insisting that her sole motivation for joining the cast was financial: she was freshly divorced from teenage sweetheart Chase (who reportedly expressed his feelings for Paul, after the swinging scandal) with two young children to provide for. The other women are immediately furious, and accuse her of 'clout chasing' – meaning she wants in on the lucrative brand deals they've all come to expect as a result of the show's popularity. But it's evident that, without McWhorter and Paul – the original MomTokkers, along with Camille Munday – none of them would have a show to begin with. Much of McWhorter's screen time is spent cleaning up the messy details of what the other cast members had heard about the scandal: was there sex involved? (No). So it was just kissing? (Apparently). The breakdown of her marriage to Chase is addressed during a fiery episode when he confronts Dakota, the father of Paul's youngest child, but it's mostly told through the prism of her relationship with Paul. Over a hilariously classic reality TV-setup of a serene lunch date gone wrong (any Made in Chelsea fans will know the sort), McWhorter and Paul duke it out, eventually declaring that they've resolved their differences. Speaking to me over Zoom, McWhorter says she knew the other cast members would be unsure of her motivations for joining the show. 'Obviously none of us are doing this for charity,' she says. 'But that's just an added benefit, because I've been able to formulate real friendships'. To keep things separate, she says she and co-star Whitney Leavitt work under a different management to the other women, meaning they're not competing for the same deals. It wasn't just the other women who took a while to get on board with her joining the cast, however. Her family had their own concerns. 'It's definitely been a difficult challenge for them,' McWhorter says. 'Even them accepting my different perspectives on the church itself, and where I'm at with it, has been hard.' @maycineeley 😭💔🫶🏼 #momtok ♬ original sound - kardashianshulu Her main reason for joining the show late, she says, was to navigate her divorce off-camera – and to let the heat from the swinging scandal die down. 'There was a lot of judgement during the swinging scandal, and now that the show has come out of it, it's more acceptable. [Other Mormons] don't look at me the way they used to, which is unfortunate, but also kind of the name of the game sometimes'. Being around Paul, too, had felt difficult and triggering – 'I wasn't sure if I was ready to put myself in that position' – but having resolved their differences on screen, it appears to have worked out. However, the success of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives has caused some consternation in the church itself, with other LDS members concerned it offers a negative window to their everyday lives. Prior to the release of the first season, the church issued a statement on its official website decrying the 'stereotypes' and 'gross misrepresentations' made about their members via the show. Though some of the cast members are devout followers (Jennifer Affleck, Mikayla Matthews, Mayci Neeley, Leavitt), the others are largely women who grew up in the church but have since distanced themselves from it: Paul, Layla Taylor, Demi Engemann, Jessi Ngatikaura. Affleck was publicly called out on social media by her extended family for choosing to take part and broadcast her marriage troubles. A prominent Mormon fashion influencer, who also lives in Utah, tells me that some of the girls in the show have become laughing stocks, viewed by their communities as fame-hungry and ungodly. The LDS's famously strict rules – no coffee or alcohol, definitely no sex before marriage – are bent to the women's will rather than followed: coffee gives way to litres and litres of fizzy soda; beers are sneakily sipped at pool parties; the women attend a Chippendales strip show on a trip to Las Vegas. Many Mormons choose to wear holy 'temple garments', made up of cotton shorts and vest, differing via gender, under their modest clothing. But in The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, crop tops and mini skirts reign supreme; it's immediately noticeable just how many of these women have had Botox and facial filler. They're also all addicted to TikTok – or the #MomTok corner of it, anyway, where they have been luring in followers with dance and lifestyle videos since the pandemic. Leavitt, the show's resident villain (her arguments with Paul dominated much of the first season, and in the second, she regularly fights with Engemann and Matthews, who accuse her of being vindictive and drama-hungry), boasts one of the biggest follower counts, with almost three million fans across various platforms. She felt the sting of her large following for the first time four years ago, when a video of her dancing in front of her son's hospital incubator while he was being treated in intensive care (he is now healthy) went viral and the internet branded her a monster en masse. Then came the show, in which Leavitt's love for confrontation put her at the epicentre of seemingly every drama or argument. The villain role was one she took on by accident, she tells me. 'I can't help but be myself, and unfortunately, that gets me in trouble sometimes,' she laughs. New viewers may be surprised, given she looks like the vision of wholesomeness with her prim dresses, simple blonde bob and apparent love of being pregnant (the 32-year-old welcomes her third child in season two). The outfits aren't the only thing masking her tough edge – when I speak to her, her soft voice and girly giggles make you think more of a teenage cheerleader than a reality TV antagonist. In the show, Leavitt is unafraid to remove herself from toxic situations or skip events populated by cast members she doesn't like entirely, a decision she says she made to make her 'mental health a priority' and protect her family. As for criticism from the public, who argue the show makes a mockery of the church, she responds: 'I think it's a lot louder online than it is in person. People send me comments and I'm like 'Are you even Mormon?' I still go to church, and it's very welcoming. Obviously people love to talk about the show and they want the behind-the-scenes, inside scoop, and of course I zip my lips'. If anything, she suggests, the show has been a way of spreading the word of the church: 'Maybe we're actually missionaries, in a weird way'. @taylorfrankiepaul Don't ask me how I know all the trendy trends though. #momtok #coparenting ♬ original sound - 🧍🏾♀️🧍🏾♀️ For all the controversy, though, the success of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives seems only likely to keep growing. Its stars appear on US talk shows and other reality programmes (including Vanderpump Villa), it has millions of viewers, and a quick search of the title on TikTok not only pulls up clips from the show but countless videos advising how fans can channel the style, lifestyle choices or beauty treatments of the cast. For those worried about the rise of 'trad wife' dynamics, especially in the US, as reproductive and civil rights come increasingly under threat, the show's popularity hints at a darker trend: where beautiful women, meant to serve as perfect housewives who bend to their husband's every whim, monetise their submission – in turn making said husbands very, very rich. These women exist on a corner of the internet not that far removed from Andrew Tate's legions of twisted followers, who decry any woman who isn't conventionally attractive or willing to conform to traditional values. One only has to look at Affleck, who spends the majority of her time on screen denying to the other women that her husband is abusive. The misogynistic insults he throws at her, and his expectations that she be a full-time stay at home wife while also providing financially through her work on social media, make them believe otherwise. Fans of the show – and its cast – would argue that the women's decision to monetise their social media content is an easy way to earn big bucks; the best of both worlds where they can simultaneously rear children, churn out countless loaves of homemade sourdough and become financially secure. McWhorter and Leavitt are adamant that the best part of being a cast member is the ready-made friendships with other women – but scanning their plethora of brand deals online, one imagines it's more likely to be the thousands of dollars sitting in the bank.
Daily Mail
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE The TRUTH about Ballerina Farm... and what it's really like behind the scenes
Hannah Neeleman, known to her nearly 20 million followers by Ballerina Farm, perhaps became the most famous 'tradwife' in the world after a Sunday Times interview controversially labeled her the 'most well-known' of this particular brand of influencers. The social media star and entrepreneur lives on a 328-acre farm in Kamas, Utah, with her husband, Jet Blue scion Daniel, 35, and their eight children, showing their everyday life online to their large collective following. Raised in a large Mormon family in Utah, Hannah was the eighth of nine children. Though she trained as a ballerina at Julliard, hence the name, she gave up dancing professionally shortly after graduation, instead choosing to pursue a family and farming. Online, Hannah is primarily known for her aesthetically pleasing videos in the kitchen, where she whips up elaborate, homemade meals for her family. She shows followers how she makes herbed spaghetti, mixing the flour and egg by hand and then stretching it in her KitchenAid pasta attachment, or making raspberry jam from scratch. As their farm has grown, the Neelemans have built a booming business around their brand, selling everything from $67 Farmer Protein Powder to $44 sourdough kits, and various homemade spreads and seasonings. Customers can also buy frozen goods, like chocolate croissants, as well as cuts of meat, which comes from their farm and their sister farms throughout the US. They have their own meat processing facility in Springville, Utah. Neeleman's videos are captivating to her audience, to put it lightly. The idyllic life she portrays through her content seems to elicit an awed reaction from many, while others watch through a critical lens, unable to look away. Last year, the family weathered a media storm after the piece published in The Times of London titled, 'Meet the queen of the 'trad wives' (and her eight children).' The story highlighted certain complexities of Hannah's lifestyle, painting a particular picture about her relationship with her husband, parenting, her Mormon faith, and her career as a professional dancer. The writer implied Hannah was living a life that she didn't enjoy, or worse - one that she didn't choose. For her part, Hannah addressed the controversy afterward, telling viewers she felt like the piece was an 'attack on her family.' She claimed that it portrayed her as 'oppressed,' with her husband being the 'culprit.' She'd already refuted the 'tradwife' title, telling The Times she didn't 'identify with it' because although she is married and has children, she feels like she and Daniel are 'paving a lot of paths that haven't been paved before.' The Daily Mail visited Ballerina Farm in Utah - where we saw for ourselves what it's really like on the TikTok-famous farm. To perhaps the surprise of some viewers, and especially their most outspoken critics, the Neelemans are running a full-fledged business empire - and there's a lot more than meets the eye to both the brand and the couple themselves. During the Daily Mail's time in Utah, we traveled to the couple's new brick-and-mortar market, and had the opportunity to go on a private tour of their farm, led by Hannah and Jonathan Curley, their director of agriculture. 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 and 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. Jonathan and the Neelemans work as a team when it comes to the dairy. According to Hannah, a nutritionist comes in for the cows once a month, and tells the couple what to add to the cow's diets for the creamiest milk possible. Recently, it's been cotton seed. The farm was surprisingly quiet too, as Hannah and Jonathan explained that this is how a dairy should be. We learned that cows that moo are actually in need of something, and it's better to have a calm dairy. 'Daniel and I and the Ballerina Farm team, we do nothing halfway,' Hannah told the Daily Mail, after feeding us farm-fresh butter, fresh-baked croissants, which tasted like they were from a bakery in Paris, and a homemade orange seltzer. Lunch was a delightful mix of Ballerina Farm beef kofta with olives, pickled red onions and tossed parsley, as well as sugar snap peas and ricotta, salad, and glazed carrots and hummus. The farm was surprisingly quiet too, as Hannah and Jonathan explained that this is how a dairy should be The sprawling land is home to 120 dairy cows and 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 We were treated to an array of delicious food while we were on the farm, including a homemade orange seltzer 'We really try to provide products that are sourced in a way that's beautiful and direct and also, we want to be able to offer people delicious food,' she continued. 'I think people will think what they want to think, I guess, but when they come to our stores, our physical spaces, we want them to feel that love and intention.' Despite Ballerina Farm's booming success, one product continues to spark controversy - the raw milk they sell that has not been pasteurized to kill harmful bacteria. The polarizing product has stirred debate online, with heated discussions often playing out in the comments of Hannah's videos. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, consuming raw milk, which has become a trendy product among influencers and celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow, can lead to 'serious health risks.' Despite the health risks, Hannah defends the sale of Ballerina Farm's raw milk, which the farm says is tested every day. 'There are so many benefits to raw milk nutritionally,' she 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 being able to stand with total confidence behind the milk, and people are excited about it,' she added. However, Hannah did share that she feels a lot of milk today 'still needs to be pasteurized.' 'We have an amazing team that's, like, so meticulous… so it's really fun being able to stand with total confidence behind the milk, and people are excited about it,' she added 'I feel like if you're able to find farms that are local and small, and have good procedures, then I stand by raw, I think it's so great. But honestly, we love all milk. If we're out and about and we can only get pasteurized, like, we definitely drink it,' she shared. Last summer, Cleveland Clinic warned about the health risks that come along with drinking raw milk, such as salmonella, and Listeria monocytogenes. In addition, it can also put you at risk for avian flu, which has been on the rise over the past year. Though, not everything they sell is raw. Their team pasteurizes some of their other milk products, like their chocolate milk, as well as their yogurt, butter, and cheese. 'When we started farming, it was a whole new energy in life that we found, because there is something so beautiful about raising your own food,' Hannah said. 'The energy and passion comes from what we do.' Hannah explained that when she and Daniel first got married, just months after they began dating, she could tell that his heart was in agriculture. 'When we first got married, I really could tell that his love was with animals. It was every weekend or every night that he had off, he was going to tour a farm, or meet with farmers,' Hannah described to the Daily Mail of her husband. 'He learns a lot from farmers and from people we met along the way. That was the highlight of our trips to Europe, and to Maine, just meeting the people that are growing their own food and how they're doing it,' she continued. When they bought their first farm in Spanish Fork, Utah, which tragically burned down in 2018, Hannah said that the farmer they purchased it from 'really took Daniel under his wing,' teaching him about irrigation, building fences, and the health of the animals. 'He learns a lot from farmers and from people we met along the way. That was the highlight of our trips to Europe, and to Maine, just meeting the people that are growing their own food and how they're doing it,' she continued Upon returning from our trip to Utah, it was clear Ballerina Farm is not just a frilly 'tradwife' business, or just operating under a TikTok bubble strictly limited to her aesthetically-pleasing content - it's a real business entity, and a brand that the family has big plans for 'There have just been so many people in our lives that have taught us, and we're always learning too, we love traveling and going to farms, because in a way, they're life-changing, every farm visit,' Hannah said. As for the future of Ballerina Farm? The couple has big dreams. In the next few years, Hannah and Daniel want to open an agricultural tourism site on their farm, where visitors can experience a microdairy, chickens, a market garden, and farm stand. They also have plans to build out a creamery. 'We just want to be able to give our community part of Ballerina Farm in a way that's really thought-out and beneficial, educating,' Hannah shared. Now, the couple are expanding their business to their first brick-and-mortar storefront in Midway, set to open this June. Daily Mail got a sneak preview of the store, which was stocked with all of their own products, including their meat, as well as a curated selection of items that they love. In addition to buying groceries, you can also buy fresh-baked goods and sandwiches. Upon returning from our trip to Utah, it was clear Ballerina Farm is not just a frilly 'tradwife' business, or just operating under a TikTok bubble strictly limited to her aesthetically-pleasing content - it's a real business entity, and a brand that the family has big plans for. Although Daniel's family is worth an estimated $400 million, the couple appears to be self-sufficient, just as they've always dreamed - though the brand declined to disclose sales numbers to the Daily Mail. As for Hannah, we didn't see a woman who is oppressed, but rather a serious entrepreneur. With such a huge following, controversy and the occasional backlash is inevitable, but it's clear Ballerina Farm will be just fine either way.
