Finally! An Episode About Ballerina Farm

Meet your new Mrs. American....the epitome of modern womanhood (??)

Since I started the Under the Influence podcast more than three years ago (I can’t believe it has been that long), listeners have been dm-ing me and emailing me about Hannah Neeleman, aka Ballerina Farm and asking me to do a UTI episode on her.

Well, I finally did. You can listen to it right now!

I first learned about Hannah through Sara Petersen’s riveting piece in Harper’s Bazaar way back in 2021 where she explored her fraught relationship with the mom influencer.

Ballerina Farm is one of THE most successful mom influencers in the world with 6.4 MILLION followers on Instagram….that’s an insane number for followers for someone who was not a celebrity prior to joining social media.

She has also skyrocketed to this level of influence in a very short period of time going from about 100,000 followers to 6.4 million in a little over two years.

I asked friends who regularly consume her media why they can’t look away. One attorney told me it feels like a brain break from her urban life with two kids. She said it was like a quick hit of a Hallmark movie. Quiet simplicity…easy happiness that you feel a little guilty about enjoying later on.

Sara Petersen really put it best in her newsletter In Pursuit of Clean Countertops (MUST SUBSCRIBE GUYS) when she said:

Most of the people I’ve talked to about Ballerina Farm find themselves compelled to consume Hannah Neeleman’s online persona because the math doesn’t make sense. A suspension of disbelief feels necessary when asked to consider that someone with seven young children could take care of those children; homeschool some of those children; help attend to a 328 acre ranch teeming with cattle, hogs, donkeys, horses, ducks, chickens, and cats; cook seemingly every meal from scratch; prevent her house from gobbling her whole; find time to dance; and do it all with a smile on her face. BF attracts so many eyeballs because Neeleman is the embodiment of a maternal ideal wholly impossible for most of us to attain. She’s the Gwyneth of moms, the Barbie of moms, the Martha Stewart of moms. This is why we stumble over ourselves trying to ascertain how many babysitters are lurking behind the scenes, why we comb Reddit threads looking for context clues, why we continuously ask ourselves what is up with all things BF. 

Ballerina Farm recently made mainstream headlines when she won something called the Mrs. American pageant.

Hannah documented the whole process of winning Mrs. South Dakota and going onto the Mrs. American pageant on her Instagram and TikToks…including a segment where she askes her millions of followers to vote for her in the BEST FACE section of the competition. The winners of BEST FACE get into the top 15.

BEST FACE! That’s all I have to say about that. I just have a lot of exclamation marks for that. I shouldn’t be surprised. This is a beauty pageant afterall. But it’s also 2023.

During one of the final rounds of the competition, Hannah Neeleman was asked when she felt the most empowered as a woman. Her response was that she felt empowered seven times, each time she had one of her children.

Here followers are well aware of how empowered she felt because she documented the home labor and birth on her Instagram account.

Neeleman’s response to the question of when she felt the most empowered on that stage in Las Vegas has since gone viral amongst pro life groups. It’s becoming a part of their propaganda in fact….proof that motherhood is destiny for the right kind of woman. Neeleman may not have anticipated this. Or maybe she did. Regardless, it’s important to note that anything an influencer of this caliber says can be used in any way certain groups want it to be used.

And that’s why I finally wanted to talk about her on the podcast. She has 6.4 million followers. That makes her very INFLUENTIAL. What she says has an impact on people.

That’s also why Sara is my guest on this episode. Her newsletter is the bees knees but her book on the world of momfluencing is a must read…It’s called Momfluenced and it is available wherever books are sold.

Here’s a little of Sara’s genius on this topic.

Jo: Who would you say Hannah Neeleman was if you just scrolled through her pictures?

Sara: You would see a thin, white, conventionally attractive, mother of seven in her very prairie-chic home. You would see her making mozzarella cheese from milk that she milked herself from one of her dairy cows.

You would see her making pork chops from the pigs that are roaming her hundreds of acres of land. It’s a celebration of family, a celebration of homesteading ranch life, and it's very much rooted in the domestic and nuclear family ideals.

Jo: And who is she separate from that account?

Sara: One thing I didn't mention in my little summation is occasionally you will also see her dancing on her feed. She is apparently also a graduate of Juilliard.

She’s wearing her Carhartt overalls while doing it, but still looking like graceful and like the embodiment of traditional femininity.

She’s married to one of the children of the founder of JetBlue. She certainly married into a rich family. It requires an immense amount of money to buy the amount of land they have in Utah.

Jo: And she was recently crowned Mrs. American? What is Mrs. American?

Sara: There's two of these pageants. Mrs. America and Mrs. American. They’re run by the same organization.

There really aren't many qualifications other than being married It is a fascinating history though. There's a great piece on Jezebel that was written a few years ago highlighting the roots of the pageant and how the pageant has transitioned into modern days. It started in 1938 as a way to get people onto the boardwalk in New Jersey. It was just a publicity stunt.