What Ballerina Farm Isn't Showing You About Farm Life

Three Working Farmers Weigh In

In 2017, I was writing an essay about women's work, and emailed my Iowan grandmother for background context about her life growing up on a farm in a farming town.

Grandma and a cousin. And horses!

She started with a story about my grandfather working his first job as a “shocker.” In the 1930s, farmers would drive a horse-drawn mower through the oat and barley fields, before going over the field again with a machine that separated the harvest into bundles. That's when the "shockers" came in. They'd walk the rows and pick up three bundles of grain at a time, before leaning them against each other and placing another bundle on top. My grandmother underscored how hard it was, "especially for anyone with allergies . . . all for hot, dirty, hard work and no AC! I know they were paid very little!"

My grandmother herself grew up on a farm where her father walked behind a horse-drawn plow breaking prairie sod so crops could be planted, much like Laura Ingalls Wilder's family did.

Laura Ingalls Wilder Was Not A Tradwife

Like Wilder, my grandmother helped her mother with canning, cooking, and cleaning, and she eventually taught in a one-room rural schoolhouse. In her email to me, she says she "really had it pretty easy growing up," which I suppose is true when you compare her youth to her mother's.

My grandmother at the farm

Here’s what my grandmother had to say about her own mother’s life. When we romanticize our pioneering grandmothers of yesteryear, I’m not sure we think much about the specifics. And there are LOTS of specifics.

Your great grandpa and his hired man went to the barn to harness the horses, then a bite to eat and out to the fields, GrMa would bring them morning lunch. They usually laid in the grass briefly after the moon meal to rest before going back to the fields. At harvest time, neighbors worked together so GrMa had to do evening chores - feeding chickens, ducks, cattle and hogs. She could not handle the bushel basket of feed on her shoulder so she would carry two 5-gallon buckets full at a time! She would also milk by hand and then carry the milk to the cellar and separate it - of course she also had to wash the separator which she hated!

The evening meal was light, then the men played checkers or listened to the radio battery) and to bed early, GrMa had mending, ironing etc to do. I don't know how she did everything! She hung the washing on lines strung around the kitchen after all went to bed if she could not hang it outside. Washing done in the cellar, heating the water on a wood stove! Work! Oh - I had to gather eggs! I took a stick so I could hold down their head while I reached under while they sat on their nest in each box - they would often peck! The cream and eggs were sold to pay for staples- sugar, flour etc. bread and butter always made at home. Carrots were packed in sand in crocks and preserved in the cellar. Meat was "canned" or smoked in a little special bldg. Butchering of a hog or cattle was major event!

My grandmother expressed sadness over the changes she’s witnessed in her farming town—where she spent her entire life—as fewer and fewer farmers were able to make a living in the era of factory farming. "The business was not good." While her memories of growing up on a working farm weren't at all devoid of joy and pleasure—far from it—her straightforward emphasis of the hardships associated with farm life are a far cry from the version of homesteading and farming bliss we see online.

I've written about Laura Ingalls Wilder's influence on MAGA ideology, and several essays about the cultural impact of accounts like Ballerina Farm in selling a largely unattainable and overly romanticized vision of farm and family utopia. But I've never talked to a real working farmer about their take on the conservative marketing of farm life and the right's weaponization of farming grit in the culture wars. So today, that's what I'm doing!

Kaitlin and her family run a working livestock farm, Amy and her family earn a third of their income from cattle ranching, and Emma and her family run a blueberry farm. Their responses have been edited for brevity and clarity.

How does the dream of homesteading and self-reliance (being peddled by both online tradwives and MAHA influencers) differ from the reality of being a working farmer?

Emma: Like any online content, it’s clear that what is shown is always the best and prettiest 20%. What people likely don’t notice is that farming is 24/7 and comes with constant worry. We worry about the weather, our equipment failing, our prices being too high, our grants falling through, our markets drying up, pests, drought, disease, you name it! Only some of these worries can really be planned for in advance, i.e., equipment failure. Often, it feels like you fix one problem, and 3 new ones pop up. The constant tide of issues and “fires” can absolutely get you down. (I use fires in parentheses because 3 years ago we actually had our main barn/store/warehouse/cold storage burn down overnight. It was a lot).

Kaitlin: No farm is an island! No one person can do everything. I mean, they can try, but they won't be great at anything. Do we raise animals on pasture and sell them to customers? Yes. But all of the little animals come from somewhere else. We buy chicks from a hatchery, piglets from a neighbor, and often dairy heifers (female cows who have not had a calf yet) to help grow our herd. We buy the corn and soybeans the chickens and pigs eat from another neighbor, and pay yet another to make hay for us. (Neighbor meaning less than 30 minutes away.) We take our fully grown animals to a nearby butcher shop for processing. My beloved husband (entirely serious), lovingly said to me one day, "I don't think now is the season [of life] for you to learn how to make bread." Amazing, Amen. I buy our bread from the folks two booths down from us at the Farmer's Market.

Amy: They don’t often show the hard shit. Losing animals, losing sleep, the time it takes, living rural realities. What they show is the Disneyfied version of homesteading/farming/ranching. Ballerina Farm for example often shows gross negligence or outright mistreatment of their animals. An operation like FiveMarys isn’t tradwife per say, but they also don’t show all the outside help they have either, creating a very misleading image on social media.

Missing from their feeds are what it feels like to lose an animal, what it feels like to lose a crop to hail, what it feels like to worry about your husband sleeping in his pickup for the 17^th night in a row because it’s been below freezing that long during calving. Many also never touch on the financial realities (we are guilty of this too). Having chickens to sell eggs, growing your own garden, and processing your own food is almost always a money losing endeavor.

Is it relatively rare for a working farmer to earn their entire livelihood from farming?

Emma: When it comes to small-scale agriculture, it is incredibly difficult to make ends meet with only farming. I don’t know many of my fellow small-scale farmers or food producers who don’t have to supplement their income in some way. Our historic farm would not be able to survive purely as a commodity blueberry farm. We value-add most of our harvest into juice, jam, ice cream, and other products, which allows us to provide our products year-round and maintain a unique position in a competitive market. In addition, two of our 4 owners hold outside jobs so we can supplement our income and provide our families with healthcare. We apply multiple times a year to federal and state grants and we have benefited from state nutrition programs to sell our crop.

Kaitlin: The rich farmers you know or hear about probably had a generation or two back of extreme frugality and a bit of misery to get there. My husband talks about the early years of his parents' farm (he was about twelve, there were six kids at that point), when there was no money for extras. Just groceries and taxes. They did not go anywhere. They stayed home, gardened, and played a lot of Monopoly.

Also, no one starts from nothing. Homesteading doesn't take as much ground, but farming like we do requires quite a lot of ground. I don't know about where you live, but in Indiana and Illinois, farm ground can go for $10,000, to $16,000 an acre, or more. (A football field is about an acre and a third.) Our farm sits on one hundred acres that my husband's parents purchased back in 2000.

Amy: SO FUCKING INCREDIBLY RARE. Even farm and ranch influencers who are big enough are earning money from influencing and not just farm receipts. I do want to put some nuance into this and distinguish between household income and individual income. Farmers and ranchers make up roughly 2% of the US population. Of those, it is estimated 96% of *households* had some form of off-farm income in 2023 according to the American Farm Bureau Federation. An individual farmer could probably make their entire living from the farm exclusively, but when you start adding in a spouse and kids it becomes exponentially more complicated. In those households it is very often the wife who has the off-farm job. The role of health insurance in these statistics cannot be overstated. Year-round income stabilization and health insurance are the driving factors for many off-farm jobs.

What do you think this nostalgia for pioneering and growing one's own food says about cultural anxieties?

Emma: Food touches so many aspects of our lives, whether it be our health, relationships, cultural, or financial lives. Everybody must eat; food can bring us together, and it can highlight our disparities. I believe that as a community, we feel powerless and unsafe in our world, and regaining control of our food is an intuitive way to gain a sense of control in our lives. Additionally, I think growing your own food is deeply rewarding, which is in stark contrast to the hollowness of the digital world that surrounds us and the grind of modern daily life. Making something or growing something in a world that is built around selling everything to you is an act of rebellion that feels satisfying.

Amy: The new nostalgia for homesteading and growing your own food signals to me both a breakdown in the trust behind our food systems, and how fed-up people are with the commodification and corporatization of everyday life. Rural living, raising crops and livestock is a slow(ish) way of life, and it can make it easier to reconnect with your family. Those reasons and our deep abiding love of cattle and rural areas are quite honestly those most of the reasons why we do it. Everything is commodified, but if you do something for yourself it’s at least partly stepping out of that rat race. So many of us want more meaning in our lives, want more time with our families, and those can be so hard to achieve with a corporate 9-5.

Kaitlin: On one hand, I would love it if everyone would put down their f*cking phones and went outside and grew a little garden. I think the mental health of the average citizen would greatly benefit. However, many folks just do not know how hard the pioneers had it, how much physical effort it takes. There may be a connection there in how people have such a little understanding of other people's experience. Even I don't know about all of the subsidies and government grants of the past and present that allow the industrialization of ag to get to where it is today. Our products are expensive -- ground sausage is $9/lb, ground beef is $10/lb, a half gallon of milk ~for pets~ is $7 but we aren't millionaires. The products cost that because that's how much it costs us to produce and make a profit. Food at the grocery store is less expensive, because you don't realize how much of your tax dollars are helping it be so.

What do you want the millions of people consuming this nostalgic farming content to know about real farmers and their lives? Sometimes it seems as though influencers with hobby farms almost cosplay "working farmer" as a way to prove something about themselves, their motherhood, or their work ethic.

Kaitlin: WHERE'S THE POOP, HANNAH?? Even in an ideal farming situation -- like ours, honestly -- there is poop. My husband walks in the door, strips, puts his dirty farm clothes in a hamper right by the door, and puts on his home clothes before walking into the living room. This year is also a "bad year" for ticks, so we've had to pull a few of those off of ourselves and children already this spring. The outside is lovely, but it is also teeming with life, which is how it's supposed to be, but some of the outside is kind of gross, actually, and I would like to wash it off. And again, I haven't seen tons of the content, but I'm guessing no one talks about the relentlessness of it. Don't get me wrong, I do want this lifestyle for our family, but it is very different from what my life as an engineer was like, or what my friends' marriages with 9 to 5s look like.

Emma: Real farming is often propped up by privilege. Owning and running your own company is something few people get to do, and we recognize how lucky we are to be able to do a job we love in these hard financial times. I’d also like to recognize that so many of these farms would cease to exist without the dedicated farmworkers willing to work long hours in difficult conditions. My family and I are so fortunate to work with our long-time staff and spend our time working collaboratively with these people. It seems to me that many influencers frame their content through the lens of the individual. It all points to an idea that this is in some way self-made. To me, that is not only a lie but leaves out the very best part of farming; it’s about the people. The very best people I’ve met are working at your local farmer’s market. If we truly desire to connect with this farming content, it will be far more fulfilling to spend your Saturday morning talking to your local vendors than to view a facsimile on a screen.

Amy: Real farmers and ranchers put their heart and soul into their operations and if we are truly working we can’t also be filming. That sounds trite and seems like a marketing slogan, but it is also true. We don’t just do this as a 9-5, 40 hour a week job, we live on our farms, our hobbies often revolve around our operations, we absolutely cry when we lose animals and crops, and if we lose the farm we lose almost everything. Farming and ranching have some of the highest suicide rates because for many people that IS who they are. When they describe themselves, farmer or rancher comes first, spouse, parent, etc., come after. It is as much a vocation as a career.