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Now let’s talk about Ballerina Farm’s new wellness brand. Many of you are familiar with the Ballerina Farm brand from my previous conversation with Meg Conley about its “edentic allure,” which has become one of the most popular posts ever published on Culture Study. But for the uninitiated: Ballerina Farm is a tremendously popular Instagram/social media account documenting the life of Hannah Neeleman, a former ballerina-turned-farm-resident and mother of eight children outside of Park City, Utah.
I started following Neeleman alongside a dozen or so other influencers who fit into the “tradwife-ish” bucket back in 2021 or so, and have been fascinated by the skill with which she pairs the homesteading aesthetic with, well, a lot of money, and beauty, and children. A lot of influencers are doing something like this on Instagram, but no one does it quite as well as Ballerina Farm — as of this writing, the account has 10.4 million Instagram followers.
Other points of note:
Hannah is married to Daniel Neeleman, one of the heirs to the JetBlue fortune
She and her family are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (aka LDS). They are neither super-public nor super private about their faith.
Her husband’s Instagram is….hogfathering
In 2024, The Times (UK) profiled Ballerina Farm in a way that painted Neeleman as exhausted and quietly trapped; a slew of Tiktoks followed affirming as much; Hannah then posted a direct rebuttal of the profile. I wrote a bit about reaction here [all of this is semi-important context for the conversation below]
When her account began to take off, Neeleman started selling her sourdough starter via an online storefront, which has since expanded to include a cornucopia of BF-branded products: “mountain-made meat,” high-protein farm flour, weck jars, raw honey, French sea salt, Pumpkin Protein Powder, and the product that found its way to my inbox earlier this week: Ballerina Farm FARMER HYDRATE. (The Neelemans also recently finalized plans to develop a Ballerina Farm mothership/tourist destination, not unlike Chip and Joanna Gaines’ Magnolia properties (in Waco, Texas) or The Pioneer Woman Mercantile (in Pawhuska, Oklahoma). In other words: Ballerina Farm is no longer an influencer account. It’s a lifestyle and wellness brand.
But before we get to hydrating the way nature intended, I want to introduce you to Sara Petersen, author of Momfluenced (which I interview her about here) and the excellent newsletter In Pursuit of Clean Countertops. In her work, Sara often returns to Ballerina Farm to highlight the politics and ideology that undergird so much of the so-called “mamasphere” (which are often disavowed, by both creators and consumers, because none of this is political; it’s just “living my life!”) Sara’s writing gets into feminine self-effacing fantasy and pristine motherhood and negotiation of whiteness and “choice feminism” and so much more.
So when I opened that FARMER HYDRATE email, I knew I wanted to talk about it — and I knew I wanted to talk about it with Sara. Over the past week, we’ve hung out in a shared Google Doc to work through our reactions, parse the various historical, religious, and political ideas animating the brand, and just generally think big thoughts about fancy water. I hope you’ll enjoy — and join in the discussion below.
AHP: Let’s talk first reactions — what language in this ad sticks out to you?
SP: For me, the language took a backseat to the visuals of their video ad. But unsurprisingly, they’re emphasizing the “naturalness” of the electrolyte powder. It contains “100% real fruit,” “coconut water,” “Irish sea moss,” and “French grey sea salt.” The average health nerd and/or MAHA consumer can feel morally comfortable about consuming this product even though it’s definitively a processed food. Turning strawberries into powder, after all, requires multiple levels of processing!
I did the most cursory googling about the health benefits of French grey sea salt, and it seems that, in terms of health benefits, salt is salt. But doesn’t the idea of salt harvested in the French seaside sound lovely? Doesn’t the verdant softness of Irish sea moss sound romantic? It’s firmly planting an image of untouched nature into your mind. Rather than a sterile factory blasting and pulverizing all of these virginal ingredients into functionally the same electrolyte powder as Liquid IV or whatever.
Even if both the sea salt and the moss (to say nothing of the fruits) are decidedly not local (something many wellness culture devotees claim to prioritize), the storytelling power of the ingredient list distracts you from the fact that you’re spending nearly $40.00 on fruit powder and salt. What do you think of the bizarre syntax of the title itself? Like, why not Farmer Hydration?
AHP: There’s something for someone who studies syntax to unpack here about the direct address here: FARMER, HYDRATE! (As opposed to hydration for farmers, aka, Farmer Hydration — but let’s be real, I bet there’s a copyright claim somewhere in here).
Apart from syntax, here’s what sticks out to me: it’s attempting to connect the (well-marketed) wellness benefits of fancy water to farming, which ostensibly makes sense because this is a brand that’s called BALLERINA FARM.
But….do farmers need fancy water? (Does anyone need fancy water?) No. But also: actual farmers aren’t going to be buying this product, and they’re not the intended audience, either. The intended audience is people who like the idea of farming, and more specifically, the idea of farming as an ur text of American physicality/power.
SP: It’s funny because diet culture/wellness culture products are in many ways antithetical to what farmcore influencers are selling. Like, beef tallow and raw milk would make a lot more sense for the BF brand, but those things are a lot harder to scale/attract a much smaller consumer base. The idealized image of The Farmer as presented by Ballerina Farm (the brand) is someone who’s dipping a copper cup into a mountain stream or a handpump out back.
I don’t mean this literally of course — hello gastrointestinal distress — but in terms of nostalgia and a romanticized notion that everything (including good ol’ fashioned e.coli!!) was better in the Before Times. Leaning into normcore wellness products like protein powder and electrolyte powder is indicative of Ballerina Farm’s larger project of positioning themselves as a nationally recognized multi-category lifestyle brand.
AHP: That’s a great set-up for my next question. I think people who don’t spend a lot of time analyzing the Ballerina Farm brand (and let’s be clear that it is a brand, not a family) might think: this is weird, very off-brand. But the reason I can’t stop thinking about it is because how *on brand* it is, and how it brings corners of the brand that are usually very well cloaked into the foreground. What makes this feel on-Ballerina-Farm-brand to you?
SP: I mean, Ballerina Farm is all about the nuclear family, right? Notice how the whole farming family is included in the powder’s promo video.
Notice how each mini-vignette in the video ad for Farmer Hydrate intersperses a wholesome farm activity with the type of exercise a suburban or urban consumer might engage in. Daniel lifting bags of grain is the same actually as a ripped guy lifting weights in a moodily lit gym. Children running joyfully across fields is the same actually as going for a prosaic adult run. And of course, there’s The Mother (the most important iconographic figure within the nuclear family) as played by Hannah. Beautiful and [femininely!!!] strong. Nothing quite says feminine strength like ballet.
They’re quite literally communicating that drinking this electrolyte powder will imbue you with the magic of Ballerina Farm life. And what comprises the Ballerina Farm lifestyle? Family, physical strength, fresh air, natural beauty, American grit, American freedom, and American individualism. The European salt and moss is really just aesthetic frosting for Ballerina Farm Americana.
AHP: As you and I and our mutual friend Virginia Sole-Smith would agree, running around in circles is exercise and a major failure of exercise culture is trying to limit understandings of “a good workout” to something that occurs in a gym or with a fitness watch. But I am perhaps overly annoyed by the depiction of “what farmers do” — it’s a glossy (and white-washed) interpretation that allows us to continue to fetishize an agrarian lifestyle that is no longer available to the vast majority of farmers.
Farmers use very sophisticated tools so that they don’t break their bodies lifting bags of grain over and over again. They rely on the labor of people who are often in this country without legal status. But that’s not what they want to show. What’s more, a lot of farmers struggle with severe mental health issues in part because their way of life is no longer sustainable, especially under the new regime and its accompanying tariffs (and this is even WITH massive subsidies from the Farm Bill, a government entitlement that Republicans refuse to call an entitlement because it mostly affects their core voters). Which is a very roundabout way of saying that farmers don’t need athletic hydration optimization — unless they’re not actually farmers.
SP: Yes, and Ballerina Farm is not new to wellness culture! And yes, re: Daniel and his artful slinging of grain sacks, it’s like they’re implicitly saying that the best kind of exercise is OBVIOUSLY farmwork, but if you can’t get cut by yanking wooden gates out of dams, I guess you can lift some dumbbells. I also MUST pettily shout out Daniel’s acting chops in the video. The “whew what a heavy bag of grain this is - how very hard I work every day” facial expression is really chef’s kiss.
The packaging of Farmer Hydrate is interesting too. It’s more modern and less kitschy than, for example, the packaging of the Ballerina Farm protein powder (they have a new pumpkin flavor!) It’s equally at home tucked into one’s saddle bag OR in one’s gym bag. This might be a stretch, but the less aggressively cottage-core packaging might be the brand’s way of extending a hand to their urban and suburban fans. I always come back to their altruistic messaging communicated most clearly in the second New York Times profile of Neeleman:
The goal of all this enterprise, Ms. 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.
Ballerina Farm’s marketing of Farmer Hydrate explicitly reaches across the paddock into the average consumer’s grocery cart. You can quench your thirst as well as we quench our thirst. With or without the cowboy chicness of it all.
AHP: While also effacing the business as business, right? She’s using the language of “giving back” like she’s donating to the Boys & Girls Club — not selling wellness products at a significant markup.
SP: I’ll also say that Farmer Hydrate is pretty heavily MAHA coded, even more so than the protein powder. On Tuesday, Hannah posted a TikTok Live with their nutritionist, Tanna Fox, during which Fox explained why the three grams of prebiotic fiber contained in each serving of Farmer Hydrate make this electrolyte powder stand out from that electrolyte powder. She explained that prebiotics feed the “good” bacteria in our guts, and “our gut microbiome is like a second brain . . . [the prebiotic fiber] helps our mind stay happy.”
And wow, if this isn’t a deafening dog whistle for the MAHA mamas! It’s not a very big leap from “food is medicine” to “the conventional medical establishment wants us sick and addicted to sperm-killing SSRIs.”
Tanna Fox also seems to be banging all the usual MAHA drums. She makes alarming, decontextualized, and vague claims about ingredients, and emphasizes that we all have individual power over our own health. She claims that, for example, “our minds control our metabolism,” “freedom requires self-control,” and there’s a lot of focus on health being contingent on living with light. She’s also textbook “here are multiple ways to lose weight (including GLP-1s and six-week coaching sessions) but self-love is the most important thing!!!!”
Here’s how Fox frames her partnership with BF on her website (I recommend reading the entire thing, also worth noting that her brand is ‘Live Right Nutrition’):
Tanna also serves as the Director of Wellness at Ballerina Farms where she loves working with a brand centered on family values & real food, with the highest quality for clean products that fit real lifestyle needs for individuals and families. Ballerina Farms perfect touch of charm and authentic living inspires millions.
Here again, we’ve got a SLEW of MAHA words. The “highest quality” Americans are “clean,” “real,” “charming,” “authentic,” “inspiring,” and devoted to family. What goes unsaid: the contrast to low quality Americans, who eat fake foods and live false lives. Fox’s nutritionist offerings will feel familiar and cozy to any Ballerina Farm shoppers who believe that seed oils and red food dyes are singlehandedly destroying this country.
AHP: All of this makes me think about how MAHA messaging harmonizes with the contemporary discourse around Ballerina Farm. I’m thinking specifically about The Times profile that you and I have both written about, and Hannah’s explicit response to it, and the general idea that people just want to “hate on” BF for living their truth. The theme of triumphing despite persecution seems to run through it all. Can you connect my hazy dots a little more?
SP: All dots connect to choice feminism. And maybe also Manifest Destiny. Women who write critically about cultural texts involving women are “not supporting women’s choices.” To be even more explicit: in this analysis, we are “tearing other women down,” according to the logic that any choice a woman makes is inherently feminist. Many trad influencers, for example, proudly flaunt their married, maternal status as proof of their radicalism, their freedom, and their unwillingness to “conform” to hustle culture or whatever.
In this equation, the toxicity and inhumanity of hustle culture is, of course, blamed on progressives and feminists. A queer woman deciding to never have children (for example) does absolutely nothing to threaten the status quo (which is still hetero marriage and kids!), or women’s ability to choose marriage and children, but the “lifestyle under threat” narrative is much more compelling. It’s sexier to buy into a worldview which posits you as a brave truthteller!
There’s something similar happening with MAHA mamas and their protests against vaccines and fluoridated water. Even if there’s ample data to show that these health initiatives are a net positive for public health, a MAHA mama will argue that her “medical freedom” is being encroached on if her kid’s public school has fluoridated water bubblers. In both cases — the water bubbler mom and the tradwife who claims to be marginalized and oppressed by feminists — it’s a matter of prioritizing the individual’s choice over the collective.
The various waves of western feminism have been flawed in many ways, but most folks would agree that some clear net positives have been achieved (despite many of these rights being actively attacked by our current presidential administration). I think most MAHA mamas would balk at the idea of giving up their access to credit cards or their ability to peddle their homeopathic wares on social media, right? And similarly, modern medicine is wildly preferable to biting on a stick after taking a shot of whiskey before someone cuts off your gangrenous leg???!!!
But the MAHA crowd and “choice feminists” (or even anti-feminist, pro-femininity warriors) all claim that the individual’s right to do whatever the fuck she wants should be the highest priority. Even if her access to “freedom to choose” impedes her neighbors’ access to meaningful, safe, economically secure lives. But it’s all mythology. Women (particularly white women) have always made choices that harm others and are counter to their own ability to thrive.
And within the mythology of Manifest Destiny (the belief that white men were chosen by God to “conquer” Indigenous lands), the white guy’s “freedom” to actively destroy ecosystems and food sources in pursuit of his destiny is heralded as “surviving adversity” at the expense of the people actively under threat by colonization. But rugged individualists (particularly white men) have always relied on government aid and community support to survive their violent pursuits of “freedom.“ (Just like most MAHA folks rely on some modicum of modern medicine and most traditional women rely on some form of feminism).
Claiming persecution is also a time-tested (and effective) strategy used by conservatives. I mean, “the nuclear family is under attack,” THEREFORE we must not allow trans girls to play middle school soccer. “Family values are eroding” which is why women are choosing not to have children which is why birth control is BAD and pronatalist medals are GOOD. Feminists have made a generation of women and girls miserable, which is why all women should accept that only a husband and kids will make you truly happy. Public school cafeterias serve frozen waffles which is why we should homeschool and live off the grid.
In all of these cases, conservative policies undergirding capitalism are the real culprits. Instead of supporting policies that would help all families, regardless of what those families look like, the conservative move is to simply double-down on the status quo and make it difficult/impossible for anyone who doesn’t fit that mold to prosper. Are you exhausted? I’m exhausted!
AHP: This is where we arrive at what I see as a really interesting tension in the BF Brand, and something we haven’t talked about: the Neelemans are devout members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Like many other LDS, their public prominence — even without explicit proselytizing — is still proselytizing: making Mormonism attractive, public, and mainstream. And persecution is very much a part of the LDS understanding of itself (in short: people have long willfully misunderstood and attacked us, our prophets, and our beliefs). But it’s also not very LDS to yell about it.
So you have that persecution understanding sublimated, very effectively, I’d say, into the MAHA Ballerina Farm brand. It doesn’t matter if they’re posting a picture of their eight kids or Farmer Hydrate, both are essentially a screw you to the haters (of Trad Wife-ism, of “healthy living.”)
At the same time: LDS members, particularly mainstream ones (which, I’d argue, would include the Neelemans) are also not anti-vax. They’re not anti-science. They’re not anti-public-school, either, in part because they believe that it’s important to live their message and their beliefs amongst those who are not (yet) LDS. I think that’s important to underline, and has always been a point of tension between evangelical Christians and the LDS. (It’s also worth noting that many evangelical Christians are still very, very resistant to even conceiving of LDS members as Christians. This understanding has shifted a bit since the late ‘90s when I was subject to videos at youth group trying to convince me as such, but it’s still a very strong strain within the evangelical community at large). There’s a shared sense of persecution that undergirds a lot of the messaging, but the source material for that persecution is substantively different.
And obviously we don’t and can’t know what the Neelemans are actually doing in their day-to-day lives, but we do know that they — and whoever is working for them — understand that there is rhetoric that will be very effective on the MAHA universe you describe above: a motley assemblage of people who understand themselves a Christian conservatives, relatively socially liberal crunchy moms, people “just asking questions”.....and LDS members with similar beliefs. So as much as the Farmer Hydrate (and other wellness products) branding annoys me, I also see them as part of a very savvy business strategy that hails a broad and eager consumer base.
Sara: 100%. I mean, who among us hasn’t bought a canister of marine collagen because she wants to believe it will make her thin hair less thin (me, it’s me)!? Wellness is such an economically powerful category because almost everyone wants to be more well. And “well” can mean almost anything. But yes, the soft proselytizing is so much more effective in terms of attracting politically ambivalent consumers. It was years, for example, before I knew Naomi Davis (an OG mom blogger also known as Taza) was LDS, but at that point I had already entirely internalized her joyful narrative of motherhood as something to aspire to.
I know Mormons were certainly persecuted throughout their history, but I am curious about whose lives they themselves have impinged upon in years past, particularly as white settlers in the American west, you know? Last year I interviewed ex-Mormon writer Alyssa Grenfell about some of the violence within the church’s history (Joseph Smith at one point supported blood atonement), and of course, the historical exclusion of various marginalized groups from participating in the religion itself. This is all to say that I find the habit of various conservative groups claiming a victimized status interesting, because either their “victimhood” is taken a bit out of context or almost entirely nonexistent.
AHP: Absolutely yes — the crucial thing about a persecution narrative is that you’re evoking some past persecution (Mormons were indeed persecuted for their beliefs) as justification for your present actions, no matter how much they might currently (or historically) exploit, harm, or jeopardize the safety of others.
Which is how you get people claiming that they were shunned by their neighbors, shamed by traditional medical practitioners, and demeaned by their educators for not vaccinating their children — and using that persecution as evidence of their righteous beliefs. Again, exhausting. I guess the only way for us to end this conversation is by saying that Farmer Hydrate annoys me because all the complex ideological underpinnings exhaust me.
SP: That’s exactly it. It strikes me as uniquely absurd that nostalgic imaging and storytelling evoking American mythology is supposed to make as froth as consumers - TODAY. Or maybe what more accurately frustrates and perplexes me is the fact that this type of lifestyle marketing is still so obviously effective! The jubilant launch of Farmer Hydrate (and the promotion of the Farmer Hydrate lifestyle) feels so entirely out of touch with the urgency and instability of the political moment.
The American brand is NOT coherent in 2025, but the Ballerina Farm brand is contingent on consumers remaining loyal to whatever version of America is still most alive within their imaginations. The BF brand is entirely reliant on people’s ability to maintain a sense of cognitive dissonance between the country we’re actually living in and the country (some) stubbornly want to believe exists. ●
Sara and I started us off, but I’d love to hear more thoughts: What else do you see at work in the Ballerina Farm brand right now? On their Instagram, in the “protein farm flour,” in the ad for Farmer Hydrate? LET’S DO SOME MORE CLOSE READING!
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