Ballerina Farm's SECRET!

[00:00:01]I'm Jenny Gage, [music] and this is Life take two.

[00:00:06]Hi, thanks for watching. This is going to be a really hard video for me because today I have to admit that I had Ballerina Farm all wrong. I drove a thousand miles two weeks ago to get a closer look at Ballerina Farm. I've been there before, but it's been a couple of years, and they've grown since then.

[00:00:22]I've personally been featured in documentaries, articles, and videos as kind of a rebuttal to the Ballerina Farm lifestyle, articles including this Vanity Fair article, Tradwife versus Tradwife, this NPR segment, Tradwife Life isn't as good as it looks, and this Teen Vogue article about selling biblical gender roles. When a producer in France called me two years ago and told me that young French women were dropping out of college, getting married, and just like baking sourdough in the French countryside, I lost my marbles. Why? Because I was a Mormon homesteading Tradwife influencer, and it didn't work out for me as it doesn't work out for most women.

[00:01:03]>> I never have enough money. And why do I never have enough money?

[00:01:09]Because when I was a 19-year-old girl, my Mormon faith told me that I was supposed to be a stay-at-home mom. I got married. I started having babies. I dropped out of college. I never had a career.

[00:01:19]>> I was missing a very important ingredient that most of you were missing, too, and I saw it everywhere I looked at Ballerina Farm. Now, a lot of my audience has asked why specifically, Jenny, did you and your family spend vacation money going up to Ballerina Farm? I was hoping for some insight and inspiration. I hadn't set up an interview. I didn't really have a specific objective in mind. I was just hoping that as I peeked behind the scenes for the first time in a couple of years, that some things would click into place for me, and they absolutely did.

[00:01:49]The rat's name is Fern. He's supposed to be here. Standing at Ballerina Farm, I didn't see a woman baking bread. I saw capital. I saw land, inheritance, investment. I saw access. A backstage pass to a good life which can only be bought with money. Write that down, by the way, access is our word of the day.

[00:02:12]When we watch Hannah's videos and she's cranking out that fresh pasta to top with fresh feta, fresh basil, and those huge fresh Utah tomatoes while her kids run around in the background making happy kid noises, she's actually not showing us a peek into submissive wifery at all. She's giving us a glimpse of privilege that the rest of us will never have access to. So, I spent time and money driving to the epicenter of the tradwife universe so that I can think about feminism just a little bit more.

[00:02:45]And as I'm sitting there eating my farmer protein soft serve ice cream that was dipped in the butter and the gray French salt. By the way, the butter did not melt off my tongue for like the next 20 minutes after I ate it. Mixed emotions. I thought it was really tasty like the first few bites, but then afterwards I almost wish that it had just been a drizzle of butter and I personally don't plan to put butter and salt on any of my ice cream probably for the rest of my life. Anyway, while analyzing the buttery tongue, I realized that we are getting the Ballerina Farm convo completely wrong. This isn't about feminism and it never really was.

[00:03:21]Ballerina Farm is a story about capital disguised as a story about domesticity.

[00:03:26]What Hannah has that we don't have isn't a more submissive attitude, it isn't fluffier sleeves on her Little House on the Prairie dress, or strongly gender-focused biblical provider husband. What Hannah has that we don't have is is just money. A fortune, really. And that fortune gave her access to everything that she needed to build an empire. Her story isn't really fresh or new or exciting or anything. It's just the same old same old. Pretty girl meets a rich guy, gets married, and now she's rich. It is such a boring blasé Cinderella story. It's Lauren Bezos who goes from journalist to she marries Jeff Bezos and now she's a billionaire who can buy the poofiest lips her heart desires. Melinda Gates, Meghan Markle, Ivana Trump. Hannah's story is such a generic pretty girl married rich and all her rich dreams came true tale. Hannah's dreams just happened to be a lot of babies and baking bread in frumpy ripped clothes and marrying the son of the founder of JetBlue really paid off well for her. In 2025 Ballerina Farm made I want you to guess how much before I say the number.

[00:04:34]A reported 80 million dollars just in 2025. I asked a farmer friend if they made 80 million dollars last year and they did not. They have a significant farm. It's fairly large, but they said that they didn't come anywhere close to that. A few weeks ago I had an article published in the Women's Exponent about the beehive behind Ballerina Farm. I also turned the article into a video which I'll link in the description and David Neelman, Hannah's father-in-law, the founder of JetBlue, commented on that post. He said that nobody in the comments understands Hannah and Daniel. They're all just misinformed and that they were very hard working, that they did it all on their own. And my vacation is so wild. I don't know if I'm just attracting this stuff or if I'm being led like Joan of Arc because I'm leaning so heavy into that big sister save the world type of energy right now. I don't know. The jury is out. So I've been reading David Neelman's book that he's in The Mormon Way of Doing Business and I was reading it like the whole drive up to Utah and as I'm walking up to the farm stand to order my farmer protein soft serve there's David Neelman literally just sitting at a picnic table. It's just like him and two other people. He's just like in a baseball cap just hanging out at the farm stand. I almost died and I also don't know how many people in the world would recognize David Neeleman and just like, "Oh my god." But I did, and I was kind of mad because I was going to throw my book in the car just in case I ran into him somewhere, but then I left it back at the hotel, and I didn't have it, and I could have had him sign it. So, here's what I did after I blinked twice and realized that that was actually David Neeleman, the founder of JetBlue, sitting there at the table. I went up to him and said, "Hi, Mr. Neeleman. You don't know me, but my name is Jenny Gage, and I wrote the article about the Ballerina Farm beehive that you commented on, and it's just really nice to meet you." Then I also asked for a selfie with him, which he totally obliged, and I have to say that he was one of the nicest people that I talked to my entire vacation. He was genuinely just so kind and so respectful. Then I asked if I can email him about coming on my channel so we can talk about some of this, and he's like, "Hey, well, why don't I just give you my cell phone number?" So, he holds his phone up to my phone, tap, tap, and now I have his cell phone number. So, I'm going to text him about a showtime. I'm so mad that my book was in the hotel room. Anyway, David was right. They do work hard, but so do we all. My farmer friends who didn't make $80 million last year worked to just as hard. So, I went to the farmstand, and then I went to the bakery in Midway where I bought a sandwich and a few things including Willa, the famous sourdough starter who I will be bringing to life soon. We drove past the dairy and saw Daniel, and I could not stop thinking about the access.

[00:07:17]There's a word for what we experienced in Utah there. It's agritourism, and it's what the Neelemans are doing at the moment. Kevin posting on a John Deere here is the perfect example of agritourism. Kev did want me to say that he is an international guy for all of you farmers and not a John Deere guy. I have to be honest with you here.

[00:07:37]I had a feeling of intense jealousy, anger, almost like grief, as I stood in front of those greenhouses there with the mountains and all of the fields around this farm stand at Ballerina Farm. It's been almost 14 years since me and my children have owned land at all, and we've been renters for most of my son's life who just turned 17 last week with no backyard for him to have a swing set or a dog, let alone cows and greenhouses for me. I work as hard as Hanna Nelemann guaranteed, but here I was sitting at a picnic table eating a sandwich with fresh picked arugula and apricots because I don't have what it takes to have my own backyard and grow my own damn arugula.

[00:08:25]Most of us don't. So, they sell us a backyard experience on their socials with chickens and kids, dogs running around under the peach trees to give us a glimpse of regular life because we no longer have access to it. I realized as I licked my soft serve that Hanna isn't a feminist problem, she is a socio-economic one. And Hanna Nelemann of Ballerina Farm did not start the war.

[00:08:47]Ronald Reagan launched our current round of class warfare in the '80s with some key deregulation and some really wild economic tactics that my granddad, who was an economics professor, particularly loathed.

[00:09:01]Particularly. Reagan believed in trickle-down economics. Support the wealthy and it will all trickle down.

[00:09:08]Raise the ceiling and that will support the floor. Reagan believed prosperity would trickle down forever if the government got out of the way, taxes on the wealthy were reduced, and markets were just allowed to do what markets do. 40 years later, we've had enough Reaganomics so we can kind of see the results, and I think that we can ask ourselves, did it work? Reagan's policies shifted the economic landscape of America in significant ways that most of us do not have any idea of today. Let me give you some specifics, and I know that everybody like falls asleep and scrolls to another video whenever I give statistics, but please, for the future of America, just listen to a couple of these. The top federal income tax rate in 1980 was 70%.

[00:09:48]Reagan lowered that tax rate to 50%.

[00:09:51]Then the Tax Reform Act of 1986 lowered again. It went from a 70% tax rate for that top income to a 28% tax rate. The argument was if rich people keep more money, they'll invest it. They'll create more jobs. They'll build businesses. All that prosperity's going to trickle down to all of us at the bottom. That's [ __ ] It turns out if rich people keep more money, they just keep more money. End of story. Reagan rolled back government regulation across industries like banking, telecommunications, transportation, energy. Those are all the big ones.

[00:10:23]Businesses became freer to merge, expand, and consolidate, which eventually helped create today's giant mega-corporations with their enormous market power, which is what led to all of the billionaires who were summer camp for billionaires that I accidentally ended up inside of 2 weeks ago. One of the biggest symbolic moments that most of us working-class people don't realize happened happened in 1981.

[00:10:45]Over 11,000 striking air traffic controllers were fired. Businesses took that moment as permission to become more aggressive against unions, and we workers lost bargaining power. In this Reaganomics petri dish, corporate profits grew much faster than workers wages. The rich got richer and the poor got poorer. But wait, there's more.

[00:11:06]Reagan also cut funding for public housing, food assistance, mental health care, education, welfare programs. This number pisses me off so much. The median home price in 1980 was around 2.5 to three times the median household income.

[00:11:21]Today, the median home price is five to seven times the median household income. And in really high-demand housing markets, that number can go even higher. This pisses me off, too. In 1980, a CEO made about 40 times the average worker, which seems like a lot. That alone makes me mad. Today, CEOs make 350 times what the average worker makes. Did it trickle down? I don't know. Let's fast-forward to today. In 2026, people can no longer buy homes. They can no longer start businesses. They can no longer own land.

[00:11:57]They can no longer do anything that people did prior to the 1980s and Reaganomics. The average American has more debt to savings, and we have lost that word of the day, that very important word. We have lost access to everything. The difference between the amount of work that you and I do and $80 million a year Hannah is that access.

[00:12:18]Her money is working for her. I am working for my money. She had access.

[00:12:23]Daniel grew up rich, rich, rich. He lived in a massive home. He had access to education. He had access to a job working for his dad, for a data storage company that his dad built, for a reported $450,000 annual income, which is a lot of money for a young kid fresh off his Mormon mission and fresh out of college. My first job before I became a tradwife was $5 an hour managing a pretzel maker. All of this stuff gave him access to everything that they needed to become Ballerina Farm. The original farm was purchased for 2.97 million. I want to hear in the comments, how many of you have the money to purchase a $3 million farm just to get started? That's an amount that most Americans will never have. The Nielsens had the money to remodel the ugly kitchen and make it camera ready. They had money for the fancy stove that Hannah was going to do all the cooking on. They had money for wardrobe and gardeners and all of the pigs. They had money to attend the very expensive, very exclusive Five Marys influencer homesteading training school that catapulted Hannah very quickly into success. So, yes, they worked hard, but they combined all of that all of that with their hard work to become an 80 million-dollar business just last year alone. All the rest of us, we just have the hard work. We just get a paycheck, and that paycheck for many of us is going to our landlords and our creditors and making them richer and richer every month while we just stay stuck. I was sitting at that picnic table eating my Ballerina Farm focaccia sandwich with the apricots and arugula that I realized something. That lack of access we all have now means one thing. The American dream is officially dead for most of us.

[00:14:03]We can't build sustainable lives for ourselves and our kids. We can't retire one day and pass a little land, money, and financial help on to the next generation. We're right back to where the old world was that a lot of my ancestors fled Europe to get away from.

[00:14:16]We are all serfs. We can never own the land or anything, and we now pay money to sit on a picnic table at a farm stand and pet a chicken. The underlying root of why Ballerina Farm exists and why JetBlue founder David Neelman exists is intergenerational ownership. It was her hard work plus all that that did the trick, and ownership was the magic ingredient. David Neelman's dad owned land, and he owned a little shop called a Quick Mart that some of the modern Circle Ks and other convenience stores are modeled after. That gave him capital to set his son and daughter-in-law up for success.

[00:14:51]America is now the owner class and the renter/worker class, and the American dream is dead. Prior to Reagan, America went through many eras of giving the working class access. Some of that came in the form of homesteading.

[00:15:08]Homesteading is why my family had many, many different ancestors on my family tree were homesteaders. My great-great-grandparents homesteaded in Colorado. Free land plus their labor. My grandma inherited some of that money, which she used to put my uncles through college. That originally homesteaded the land gave her a little bit of capital to help them all start businesses and get going in successful careers. I watched my granddad one night write out a check to one of my uncles for a concrete company. I don't know all the details of that deal, but that check was staggering to me as a young 20-year-old girl and my granddad was just a college professor, so it's not like he was independently wealthy or something. What I saw at Ballerina Farm had nothing to do with feminism at all. It is the new face of class warfare, which isn't really a new face at all. It's the same old, same old. It's the haves versus the have-nots. The owning class with capital to invest and land assets to leverage selling us tickets to see their land so we can pretend we still have access, which we actually don't. Ballerina Farm has created this incredible agritourism experience. Uh there was a $25 dairy tour with Daniel himself. We got the information, we drove past, but my budget is so tight we couldn't pay the $50 for me and Kev to go see the dairy.

[00:16:21]It was about $320 a ticket for their farm-to-table dinner experience, which times two for me and Kevin was basically our entire vacation budget per week. So we had to pass. We can't even access just like the agritourism experience. We just don't even have the money for that.

[00:16:38]And we're all over here talking about whether or not Hannah and Danielman should be a tradwife when we should be talking about how the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.

[00:16:47]We all need to regain that access.

[00:16:48]That's what the American dream was.

[00:16:50]Ballerina Farm is Reaganomics in action.

[00:16:53]Hannah and Daniel are rich as [ __ ] and it is trickling down. Their staff make a little money, the other farmers, people in their area whose home prices have gone up just because Ballerina Farm is there. I'll even make some money on this video about them. Trickle down. But trickle down keeps the have-nots, which is the rest of us, renting from them for life, working for them for life. I'm personally sick of the trickle and I think it's time we turn up the [ __ ] flow. At some point, the working class has to just say enough is enough. I got bullied by my audience for posting soft serve selfies of me with the little Ballerina Farm label on it and then posting the picture of me with David Neelman and honestly, I should have. We need to bring back support for small business and stop supporting the corporatizing of America. Time to vote those Reaganomics out of existence and then dance on their [ __ ] grave. Raise the floor.

[00:17:45]Democratic socialism is the only path forward for all of us hard working Americans. I don't want Hannah not to be happy and successful. I just want all of us to have access to that same happiness and success. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for everyone.

[00:18:04]That's what America was supposed to be about.

[00:18:07]I'll be hanging out in the comments. I'd love to hear what you think and I hope to have David Neelman on so that we can discuss this a little bit further.

[00:18:14]Thanks for watching everyone.