Why are we so obsessed with Ballerina Farm?

Thoughts on homesteading and whether our dreams are too influenced by social media

Welcome! APL is a newsletter for the woman desiring to build a strong marriage, purposeful life and an enduring family legacy.

If you aren’t familiar with the Ballerina Farm brand, it’s a Mormon family with seven kids living on a ranch in Utah. Their Instagram account has almost five million followers.

I personally know dozens of women who aspire to live like Hannah and her family. In a way, Ballerina Farm has become the poster child for this new homestead trend that has many wanting to move to the country, buy a cow, and garden in a pretty flowy dress. 

I’ll be honest: I look at the Ballerina Farm content and I often think that it is the dream life. 

But as much as I love their content, I wonder if women following accounts like Ballerina Farm (and other stay at home moms / homesteaders), is doing more harm than good. 

First, their life is not a realistic lifestyle that just anyone can achieve. My husband and I dream of having a ranch, so we watch land listings like hawks, and have sat down and run the numbers to figure out how much it would cost to run a beef direct to consumer business (similar to what Ballerina Farm is doing). 

Ballerina Farm operates on over 300 acres (their ranch when they purchased it in 2018 was listed at $2.75 million), and for our personal projections to start, we looked at 80-100 acres and under $1 million, for context. 

Once you add up the land mortgage payments (which would be around $10k per month for something under $1 million), buying the cows, processing, etc. it’s expensive.

When Ballerina Farm shares their story, they say that Daniel did keep his full-time job for a bit (he started out his career working in finance and tech in Brazil), but the point that is often not advertised is that Daniel’s dad founded JetBlue and several other airlines. Daniel’s wealth is estimated to be around $400 million! So, unless you were also born into wealth, the Ballerina Farm lifestyle isn’t exactly within reach for most people. 

Madison Vining is another similar account that promotes a homestead life with a large family and the story that your family can live this way too if you join their Modere MLM tribe. Madison is much more vocal about the importance of homeschool, parents staying home and raising kids on a farm. 

Once again, I see the appeal. I want that life too: I’d love for us to buy a couple hundred acres, have a million dollar family business and raise our kids on the land. But yet again, that doesn’t happen overnight (Madison made her money selling essential oils through MLM and investing in real estate with her husband).

Yes, they worked hard for it, but the get rich doing MLM is also not a realistic way for many women to achieve this “dream life” - only 25% of MLM participants turn a profit and at least 50% of MLM participants drop out after the first year, since the majority of those who join an MLM (73%) report losing money or breaking even (with 53% of participants making less than $5,000).

And I get it - accounts like Madison’s and Ballerina Farm can be categorized as “inspiration” - as something you look up to (like we do to celebrities), versus aspirational. 

But from personal experience, all that “looking up” at accounts and lifestyles like these, is influencing us in ways we may not even be aware of.

We think it’s only inspiration, but it’s so much more. 

With social media giving us access into the lives of others 24/7, we are constantly bombarded with messages that lead us to thinking we should be doing something or living a certain way or that our home/marriage, body, etc should look like that. 

It’s a constant dripping of “should’s”:

I should bounce back faster after a baby - look at her and how thin she is even though she has seven kids. 

I should be staying home with my kids and homeschooling them instead of letting someone else “raise” my kids. 

I should be dressing in flowy dresses to do housework and romanticizing motherhood as something that always brings me joy. 

I wish we could get out of our subdivision house faster and own a ranch like that. 

I should be posting on social media all the time and building a brand like they are. 

And those tiny “shoulds” breed discontentment and envy. 

It makes what we have not enough. 

And it makes me wonder: would I want a life like that if social media didn’t exist? Is this a dream true to me and my family or is the dream life I think I should have because I’m being influenced?

If I could step into Hannah’s life today and have everything she has, would my striving and happiness be complete? 

These questions always help bring me back to where my feet are. 

Because as beautiful as these women’s lives are, the story God has for me is not Hannah’s or Madison's life.

He gave me different strengths, gifts, callings, and opportunities. My body looks different from theirs. Sure, there may be similarities - my husband and I also want to own a farm, homeschool our kids and have a family business.

But it doesn’t have to be at the same scale or time table as how these influencers did it. 

And I don’t want to miss out on what I have now trying so hard to build the life I think I should have. I can make a beautiful home and plant a garden in our house in a subdivision. I can be okay working full time in corporate to be able to afford a ranch of our own in a few years.

With the influences of social media (and media before social media came around), few of us truly know what matters to us or who we are before the world to us who we should be.

This is especially true for women - from a young age, we were conditioned to aspire to be pretty, thin, married, wives, moms, and to have a successful career to round it all out (or, if like me, you grew up in a more conservative, religious community than to be a stay home wife and mom was the holy grail you were raised to achieve). 

So, that’s why I wonder: if you took the time and space to quiet the noise and prayerfully figure out what matters most to you and your family, would it change how you spend your time?

How your home is decorated?

How you dress?

How you view your body and your marriage?

How you raise your kids?

Where you live?

What you dream of? 

I think we all want to think that no, it wouldn’t. That we’re living our true authentic lives as the Lord willed for each of us. 

But, I also truly believe that if we gave ourselves space to re-evaluate without the external noise, we may be surprised to find buried dreams, or that we actually may want to dress our kids in something other than beige, and maybe we’re okay buying bread at the bakery instead of making sourdough from scratch just because that’s what Hannah does on Instagram (but also, I still really do want to learn to make sourdough bread, so if you have beginner tips, please share!).

Don’t get me wrong - it’s amazing that women like Hannah and Madison get to live out such beautiful lives, but I often have to remind myself that this is their business.

As much as they promote family and being home with their kids, their business is driven by their social media presence. They’re always posting, engaging, and selling their lifestyle brand to their followers. That is their work.

And to be honest, I don’t know that I want my family’s life to be that public and reliant on social media, and that’s okay (and yet another reason why I may not truly want what they have as much as I think I do!). 

See? That’s another result of doing the exercise of re-evaluating what matters to you: you may realize that the cost is not worth it to you to achieve the life she has.

So, knowing that, you can hopefully be inspired by the parts of her life that align with what matters most to you and your family, and let go of the “shoulds” that don’t align with your values. 

Take the time to redefine what matters most to you and your family.

What does motherhood and caregiving look like for you and your family in this season?

What dreams align with your values and goals?

What is truly important to you, even if it doesn’t align with how other women live out their lives on social media or in your friend group? 

What would your dream life look like if you weren’t influenced and if you threw out all the should’s? 

Until next time,

YPS

P.S. If you’re wrestling with the tension of work life balance, my Elevate Blueprint could be a good fit for you - in the first module, we talk about digging down to figure why we work, what our natural abilities and spiritual gifts are, how to overcome imposter syndrome, fear of success, navigating career ambition as a Christian woman, and building wealth as Christians. All of these are the foundation to figuring out what matters to you and your family, and what role work plays in your God-given calling on this earth. 

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