“I’m a vegan restaurant owner, an organic farmer—a true environmentalist that cares about the soil, the water, and the air. I employ 350 people. I feel like I should be exactly what California wants … But I literally can’t make payroll,” says Mollie Engelhart.
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A chef, entrepreneur, and regenerative farmer, Ms. Engelhart built an incredible farm-to-table business in California that had eleven years of year-over-year growth before the pandemic. But California’s policies ultimately strangled her business, she says. Now, she’s giving it all up to start from scratch in Texas.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek: Mollie Engelhart, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Mollie Engelhart: Thank you so much for having me.
Mr. Jekielek: Please tell me about your farm.
Ms. Engelhart: This is Sow A Heart Farm. This is in a dream taking shape, and an experience in the world. I owned restaurants. I was a chef and I was creating food waste. I realized that food waste was not the best thing, so I wanted to manage my own food waste. I got a farm so that I could keep the food in the loop. It evolved into this beautiful place where we grow food for our restaurants and for our community, and it became this community hub. People come and get their food here. We also use all the compost from the restaurants and turn it back into new food to send back to the restaurants.
Mr. Jekielek: Where are we right now?
Ms. Engelhart: We’re inside the greenhouse in a windstorm. If you’re hearing wind in the background, you’re not imagining it.
Mr. Jekielek: Why the greenhouse?
Ms. Engelhart: It’s a beautiful place on the farm and it’s a metaphor for anywhere that you can create shelter and grow something beautiful. This is a place where you create shelter and grow something beautiful.
Mr. Jekielek: You’re growing some things in here that you couldn’t grow out there.
Ms. Engelhart: Yes, you’re growing food inside. We have bananas, papayas, coffee, strawberries, spinach, broccoli, basil, things that you could grow here and also in New Zealand.
Mr. Jekielek: Are you roasting your own coffee here?
Ms. Engelhart: No, not yet. We won’t because we’re leaving, but we have a lot of really healthy coffee plants and somebody in the future could roast their own coffee here.
Mr. Jekielek: Let’s talk about your journey. We know that you’re heading to Texas to rebuild. Please chart for us the path of how you got here.
Ms. Engelhart: I grew up on a small farm in upstate New York. My parents were vegetarians. I came to Los Angeles to go to film school. I worked in the music industry, was a professional poet, and did a lot of different things. Finally, I settled into my love of food and my love of serving people.
I love to feed people and I love to serve people. That led me to wanting to get back to the farm and wanting to know where the food that I was serving came from. It was all working really wonderfully for a little while. But now the restaurants are really struggling and the farm needs the restaurants. This kind of farm needs the restaurants to survive. Now, we’re pivoting and shifting and doing things differently. That’s why we’re moving to Texas.
Mr. Jekielek: You were riding high before March of 2020 when the pandemic arrived.
Ms. Engelhart: We had 11 years of year-after-year growth. We were in a deal with a big firm to sell the business for $31 million and we were doing great. We had four locations and a brewery. We had the farm with this farm-to-table concept. It very much resonated with people to know where the food was coming from, to know that when they were done eating that the scraps were going back to the farm, and to know if they had a beer that the grain from that beer went to feed cows.
People liked that. Even the first quarter of 2020 was our best quarter ever in the 11 years leading up to that point. We were on a trajectory to expand to other states and do this on a larger scale, and really bring this kind of service to more communities.
Mr. Jekielek: You would think this is exactly what Californians want.
Ms. Engelhart: Let’s look it up in Wikipedia and find out what a Californian is. I am a vegan restaurant owner, an organic farmer, and a true environmentalist that cares about the soil, the water, and the air. I employ 350 people. I feel like I should be exactly what California wants. I have a medium-sized business that is doing good in the world, caring about their employees, caring about the environment, and caring about their community.
But now it’s impossible, and the pieces no longer fit together here. It used to be that people who worked in my restaurants could live in the same neighborhood, could eat at other restaurants in that neighborhood, and could afford to go on vacation. All of that fit together.
Those pieces no longer fit together. The people that work for me can’t afford to live in the neighborhood. The people that live in the neighborhood can barely afford to live in the neighborhood, so they can’t afford to pay much more for food. Over the pandemic period, the costs for food have gone up so much.
There’s a top price that people are willing to pay for a burrito or a stack of pancakes, and I'd say it’s $19 or $20. Going above that is having us lose money with each takeout that goes out the door. Those pieces that used to fit so nicely together no longer exist.
Mr. Jekielek: You mentioned that prior to the pandemic, there was a huge regulatory burden to make it all work, but you did somehow. Please tell us what happened through the pandemic that changed things.
Ms. Engelhart: In some states, they were closed for three weeks up to three months. But we were closed to some degree for two-and-a-half years, but the regulations didn’t stay the same. It wasn’t they said, “Now you can get your bearings. You are just doing takeout,” and for two years you would just do takeout and you get your bearings. It would change every couple of weeks.
First, it would be, “We’re only doing takeout.” Then it would be, “We’re going to let people go back to dine-in, but the tables have to be six feet apart. If you put in booze, they could be back-to-back with high backs. Never mind about the booze, we’re going to eight feet apart. Midnight on Friday, there’s going to be no more indoor dining.” It was always that phrase, “Midnight on Friday.”
Then you get your whole outdoors done and you do umbrellas and you put up heaters and you do everything and you expand your outdoors and you get a permit from the city to change parking into seating. Then you get the rails and you get plants and you decorate it and try to make it feel like people are not eating in a parking place outside on the street. Then they say, “Midnight on Friday, no more outdoor dining.”
We would spend a lot of money trying to pivot and go with what they were asking of us, and I never closed. I kept my employees that wanted to work employed the entire time during the pandemic, but we couldn’t recover from that. It was just endless money, spending on outdoor awnings or trying to fix this or that. We said, “We’re going to do a little store. There’s no groceries. We‘ll bring in produce from the restaurant. We’ll sell toilet paper. We have toilet paper. ” We just kept endlessly trying to give the public what they needed through this time, but the regulations kept changing.
Then minimum wage kept going up and all of these other things were very volatile. Takeout boxes went from $30 for 400 up to $150 for $400 within a span of months. Cauliflower was vacillating between $9 a case to $130 a case. It was hard to price anything, and sometimes ingredients would just be gone. Then you couldn’t have these things on the menu and you would have to reprint the menus.
We kept thinking it would recover and it would get better. Really, we have retrained the public to eat at home, to go out less, and to order from third parties that take 30 percent. Now, we have a strike in the film industry, and even the best paid people in LA are not having any income, and all the ancillary and support staff don’t have any income.
Mr. Jekielek: It’s almost like a perfect storm with the prices going up. People don’t have the money to spend on things, and there are these strikes. Is this specific to California?
Ms. Engelhart: I don’t know. I have not been to other places, but I know it’s highly exacerbated here. The workforce is different. The people that are coming into food service graduated high school during the no-school-for-two-years period. They kind of got pushed through. There were practically no expectations of teenagers for two full years, and then they went out into the workforce.
That’s a different workforce than we started the pandemic with. People that have been two or three years into the workforce now once spent two or three years at home on benefits. I don’t want this to be misinterpreted. Everybody deserves the best, but we also need hard work to be a fundamental core principle in raising our children.
Mr. Jekielek: It should be viewed as a virtue.
Ms. Engelhart: Yes, it should be viewed as a virtue. Yes, that changed, so the amount of employees you need to do the same job has shifted. Everybody went through this thing together and it was some kind of trauma. Whether you were afraid of it or you felt it was being foisted upon you, it was a thing that happened.
That is in everybody’s psyche in how they’re responding, so customers can also be less forgiving. This has been a perfect storm and we’ve had to close two of our restaurants. People said, “Can you sell your restaurants?” I replied, “There’s nothing there to sell. How can you sell a business that can’t make payroll? There’s nothing there.”
I’m not alone, because I was just looking at the liquor license transfers. There are 40 liquor license transfers lined up in front of me before I can sell mine to somebody else. I have never seen that. I’ve bought multiple liquor licenses in my life, and I have never seen 40 liquor licenses lined up like that.
Mr. Jekielek: Please remind us of the names of your restaurants.
Ms. Engelhart: I own Sage Plant Based Bistro & Brewery. There used to be four of them, but we’re now down to two, plus a cloud kitchen that services the Culver City area where we used to have a brick-and-mortar restaurant. We still have Pasadena and Echo Park and the breweries in the Echo Park location.
Mr. Jekielek: Do you think anyone is taking over the type of service you offered?
Ms. Engelhart: Not exactly the type of service that I offered. I have gone to some of these webinars for restaurant owners and listened. What is considered sit-down casual is being hit the hardest, because people from the sit-down casual place are going down to the Chipotle’s and the fast casuals. The fast casuals are going down to fast food. The fast food people are not eating out at all as the money is shifting.
But the people that eat at fine dining are not coming down to the fast casual places. They’re still eating at fine dining, so there’s nobody to come down into the casual sit-down restaurant. That is the market that is being desecrated the most, and you see it all over Los Angeles. Restaurants all over LA that had been open for 10 years with a line waiting outside are now closing with no notice.
Mr. Jekielek: There is also this whole reality of increased homelessness and drug use.
Ms. Engelhart: It’s all intertwined. At my Echo Park location, there are whole encampments of homeless people. I believe that we have to find places for people to live. I don’t know if it works to say, “They’re unhoused, so we can’t move them.” I could be delivering to my restaurant and park right behind this encampment on the street outside. I could forget my meter while I’m unloading pizza boxes and whatever else that I’m taking in.
Then someone says, “Hey, a customer wants to talk to you,” and I get distracted. I get a $52 ticket, but they are ignoring an entire encampment that’s taking up three parking spaces right in front of my restaurant. Someone just set off the fire sprinklers in my restaurant. Someone else got naked on Mother’s Day inside of the restaurant, screaming at the top of their lungs, and spitting in the face of my manager.
We don’t have as much of a late night clientele because people are not as inclined to want to go out late. Obviously, we have to do something. California spends more on homeless resources than any other state and has the most homelessness of any state. But yet, it just gets more intense year after year after year.
In my Culver City location that we shut down, the walking through the neighborhood was all blocked off, because all of the underpasses had become permanent encampments that were sanctioned by the city. It’s a shelter that is cool from the heat because of the overpass, and I understand all of that logic. But then I see guests and say, “Oh, my God, I haven’t seen you in so long.”
They say, “We would always come get a cocktail and an appetizer when we walked our dog at 8:00 pm, but we no longer walk our dog this side of the freeway.” How many other guests that I didn’t talk to now no longer walk in that area? Of course, the condition of the city impacts the ability to do business. It has been getting progressively harder, and clearly, I haven’t been great at navigating it.
Mr. Jekielek: It really does feel like the perfect storm. You were telling me about all the regulations around this farmland here, never mind all the restaurant regulations. Let’s talk about that.
Ms. Engelhart: Yes, there are regulations about everything in California, like who can live on your land with you. I can’t have any accessory dwellings or tiny homes. Nobody could live in an RV here, and I can’t build any guest houses. But that’s only one type of regulation.
Then there is how tall your compost pile can be. There are rules about almost every single thing. If an avocado falls on the ground, you can no longer sell it. If I’m selling parsley at the farmers market, they can come here and measure it to make sure it’s the same parsley I grow, and that I’m not buying the parsley from somewhere else. Yesterday I got fined $150 because one piece of produce that’s on my list of 300 products that we grow somehow got missed by the inspector.
Now, they believe I was selling something that I didn’t grow, so they’re going to come out and inspect and see if I am growing it. Once they do that, it will only be a $150 fine. It would have been a greater fine if I was selling someone else’s produce. It’s just on and on with all these regulations. There are no dairies in this whole county, because the regulations are so difficult.
I have been making hot sauce for years in my restaurants in a commercial kitchen with my professional food handlers license. We did not know it was illegal, for sure. We had been selling hot sauce for years at the restaurants, no problem. All of a sudden, we got raided and they embargoed all the hot sauce and sent it to get tested in Berkeley. Then they realized that nothing had botulism or anything else wrong.
Still, it was thousands and thousands of dollars worth of hot sauce that had to be destroyed in front of them, like a display of how bad we were, even though they tested it and there was no botulism. They wouldn’t even let me eat it with my own family. It’s just on and on, and every little thing is highly, highly regulated.
I am an entrepreneurial spirit, and I have ideas that I want to put into action. In California, say I want to start doing a CSA [Community-Supported Agriculture] box. I need a walk-in cooler. Think about the amount of years it would take me to get a permit for a walk-in cooler. Then finally, I actually put in a walk-in cooler, because we’re going to be selling produce to the community. It’s going to be awesome. Then I’m in trouble with the county because my walk-in cooler is not permitted, and on and on and on.
In Texas, I’m free to create something out of nothing. There are regulations that exist around your septic tank and your water wells, and that’s good. I agree with both of those things, water and soil. I do believe in protecting the environment. These other rules that supposedly are to protect us are really inhibiting us from being creative and creating great things in the world.
Mr. Jekielek: I would say they are inhibiting human flourishing.
Ms. Engelhart: Yes.
Mr. Jekielek: Whatever government regulation is out there, it should actually be there to foster human flourishing.
Ms. Engelhart: Of course, because wherever there is a flourishing community, it’s good for everybody. There are farms that have come into neighborhoods where there was nothing, no gas station, no anything. Take the White Oak Pastures farm in Georgia as an example. They revitalized the whole neighborhood and now the gas station is open. There’s a feed store and the whole community is thriving.
If it is a farm with one man on a tractor spraying chemicals for hundreds and hundreds of acres, the local feed store, the local restaurant, and the local gas station cannot flourish. It is really with innovation and creation that the whole community can flourish. But if there is so much regulation that you are stopped every time you try to take a step forward, you can’t create that beauty in the world, and I believe that’s what we are here to do.
Mr. Jekielek: Let’s talk about regenerative agriculture, which we have not covered on the show yet.
Ms. Engelhart: Regenerative agriculture is agriculture that is fostering the soil first, and the priority is the soil. There are many principles of limited disturbance, no till or low till, and then bringing animals in to do rotational, holistically-planned grazing. Imagine how the buffalo used to come in and eat and pee and poop and stomp, and then they move on to greener pastures. They don’t eat it down to the bare ground.
That is what we’re trying to reproduce with regenerative agriculture. It’s not an extractive economy. It’s where we’re leaving more in the soil than we’re taking out. By doing that, you create this ecosystem. Here, we haven’t paid for any fertilizers for almost four years, because I spent some years building great soil and getting that soil and microbial food web together.
The microbiology in our gut, which is very integral to our entire health system and our brain function and mental health is all connected. It’s 70 percent the same microbiology in healthy soil as in a healthy gut, which means it is obvious that we were meant to eat directly from the soil. When we eat food that comes in a plastic container that has been sterilized for our health, yes, we’re not getting any of those bad bacterias. But we also are not getting all the good microbiology that our body is dependent on that is replenished by healthy soil.
One of the most important parts about regenerative agriculture is really caring for the soil. It’s not like, “Let’s be afraid of climate change.” It’s a foundational way that says, “Healthy soil equals healthy plants equals healthy food.” It’s a logical way. We grow food for our restaurants and we have about 350 subscribers to our CSA. They get a veggie box delivered to their house once a week, once every two weeks, or once a month. We grow food for other restaurants locally, and then we do farmers markets as well.
We really try to provide the healthiest food possible to the community and to my family. I want them to have the healthiest food as well. But regenerative agriculture as a whole is looking at how we farm for the future so that we are not looking at Dust Bowl type of conditions where our topsoil can just blow away. It’s very windy here today. You might have noticed that when you’re driving up here that you will see big plumes of dust blowing across the road.
You will see much less of that here, because our soil is connected and is mostly all covered by a living root. It’s very simple. The carbon in the atmosphere is just carbohydrates. The plant takes the carbon out of the atmosphere, turns it into carbohydrates on its roots, and feeds it to microbiology in the soil. Then the microbiology in the soil turns it into waste, which is food for plants. Then plants use that in order to make a tomato, a cucumber, a strawberry, or coffee.
The more living plants we have, the more we are cycling carbon. There should be no fear conversation about carbon because plants are here to cycle carbon. They are meant to do that. The reason we talk about carbon a lot is because it can sell batteries and solar panels. But we don’t talk much about methane, because there’s nothing to sell by telling people not to put their food waste in the trash.
Regenerative farming helps with carbon because it’s cycling and intentionally drawing more carbon down than you’re taking out. But it also helps with methane, because food waste is the greatest maker of methane. But when you compost it into soil, then it becomes sequestered carbon, and it never putrefies and becomes methane.
The old way of farming with a few animals and then making your own compost and then putting that compost back on the field, that’s the way we’re meant to do it. We’ve tried to out-science nature and we forgot that we belong here. We have to steward what is here.
Mr. Jekielek: As you said, these conditions don’t work for you anymore. Basically, you can’t make ends meet.
Ms. Engelhart: I cannot.
Mr. Jekielek: So, you’re moving to Texas.
Ms. Engelhart: It’s hard to even say that without wanting to cry, but yes, I am moving to Texas. I’m excited and brokenhearted at the same time, if that’s possible. I love what I created here and I love my community. I love my neighbors, but I literally can’t make payroll. I’m selling things off to make it all work. It’s not a regenerative system anymore, and it’s just not working.
I was able to get much more land in Texas, and so I will be able to practice more of these regenerative principles on a larger scale. I will be able to feed more people free of excessive regulation. A few regulations can go a long way, but there’s no need for the way it is here. If they have chased me out of California, I don’t know what their endgame is. I have been here 20 years and I am deeply rooted in the community. What is their endgame? I don’t know.
Mr. Jekielek: There is an ideology that believes that humanity is a pestilence on the world, and we need to bring it back to nature. That’s actually what the endgame is.
Ms. Engelhart: Yes. It’s 30 x 30 by 2030, which means to rewild 30 percent of the United States. First of all, where are you going to get that land? You’re just going to repossess it from farmers. But secondly, if we really think carbon is the problem, then let’s use this lens. I can sequester much more carbon than rewilding can—just me in partnership with my animals.
The psyop, though, is to make us believe we don’t belong here, and to make us feel like we are the problem, because then we become helpless. But when I learned about regenerative agriculture, a light went off in my head that said, “Wait, we’re not the problem.”
But I had been apathetic and was living in liberal Los Angeles. I was driving my hybrid vehicle and had my reusable bags, but I was apathetic. I said, “The whole world is burning down and there’s nothing we can do. Ah!” Then I learned about regenerative agriculture and the cycling of carbon and how we can facilitate, how we can steward, how we can be part of that, and how we can be the apex species on the planet.
At that moment, I realized that we are the ones we’ve been waiting for. Regarding that rewilding idea, you can look at that mountain over there and then you can look at this soil right here. There is no question who can sequester more carbon. We can, and it’s through regenerative farming.
If that’s really the conversation, and we are looking through that lens, rewilding makes no sense. What makes sense is having us know we belong here, and then taking our role as stewards very seriously. But as long as we think we’re the problem, we‘ll be apathetic. We’ll be malleable to policies around climate change that are going to be similar to policies around Covid. They will tell us when we can drive, what we can do on certain days of the week, and how we must try to reduce the amount of carbon we’re putting in the atmosphere.
People will agree to it, because they will have believed that they are the problem. They had too many children, their parents had too many children, and the baby boomers had too many children, but none of that is real. We are here and we are meant to be here.
That 70 percent compatibility between the soil and our gut biome is an obvious sign that we are meant to coexist with healthy soil. If we could take that seriously, then we wouldn’t have to talk about all this nonsense about rewilding 30 percent of the land by 2030. No. Rewilding only works to draw down carbon in places like England or New York where there’s a rainy season.
The thought leaders that are coming up with this mindset are coming out of think tanks in New York or London. Because in an arid climate like California, you’re not going to get any carbon drawdown from letting it go back to desert. You’re just not.
Mr. Jekielek: You’re on record saying there are seven different agencies coming after you. Please explain that to us.
Ms. Engelhart: At any given time in California, there’s a practice of making some part of your business illegal and then charging you for that illegal activity. The Inside California program from The Epoch Times has even reported on this. This is actually a revenue-making practice for California.
It could be something as small as an electrical violation, but then they’re going to charge you for that. We had outdoor seating for Covid, but you were not allowed to have heaters outside or umbrellas, only tables and chairs. Then they would charge you for having heaters and umbrellas for your customers while they’re eating outside in a parking lot.
There’s code enforcement and then there’s different kinds of street enforcement for restaurants. I’ve even been raided by the ABC [Alcoholic Beverage Control], with them saying we weren’t brewing our own beer, when we actually were. There are so many different regulatory hurdles to get over at any given time.
Then there’s all the agricultural regulations. I got in trouble for any kind of thing. We were selling flowers at the farmers market, and we put the olive branches and eucalyptus as the greenery in the bouquets of flowers. I didn’t register eucalyptus as something that I’m growing. I got fined $150 for having eucalyptus in the bouquets of flowers at the farmers market.
Mr. Jekielek: Mollie, it’s astonishing that someone actually noticed that.
Ms. Engelhart: Yes. My tax dollars are going to someone coming to the farmers market and investigating my booth and looking through my CPC [Certified Producer’s Certificate] trying to find something. It’s onerous to do any kind of thing here. Sometimes I have a personal assistant, and it often feels like their job is just compliance and licensing. It feels like that is their whole job, because there’s a license for almost everything.
We worked it out one time for Echo Park, which also has a brewery, so there’s a little bit more licensing. There are 16 licenses required to exist. Of course, there are the big ones like a liquor license and a health permit. But then you need an outdoor patio seating license, and you need all these different permits for all these different things, and then you need a cannery license for making your hot sauce. It just goes on and on and on.
The thing about the cannery, when they destroyed all those thousands of dollars of hot sauce, I had to pay them $150 an hour. It was $500 to watch me destroy hot sauce that was perfectly safe to eat, and which had been tested by UC Davis.
They find these ways to fine you if you’re not in compliance with these different regulations. It’s not just me. I have a neighbor who had too many head of cattle for his amount of land. If he had just a quarter-acre more, he could have an unlimited amount of cattle, and there would be no regulations. But because he’s just a quarter-acre less than the threshold for having no rules about how many head of cattle he could have, he’s getting fined.
It’s just on and on and on about so many different things. It becomes like why would anybody want to be a business owner? When I talk to people that are very pro-regulation and pro-the way California runs, I often ask them, “What do you do for a living?”
You can bet that they are an educator, a lawyer, they have an online business, or they’re an influencer. It’s rare that someone that has a brick-and-mortar business that’s doing something physical in the real world thinks that the regulations in California are working.
Mr. Jekielek: Just imagine the infrastructure you need to enforce all this compliance. I wonder how big it is. I need to find that out.
Ms. Engelhart: It’s huge, and government is supposed to be small. It says so in our Constitution. It is so overreaching and overarching, and it never makes any sense. Every time I get one of these letters that says I’m in trouble for this, that, and the other thing, I then call my dad. I say, “You want to hear about California? It’s never logical and it’s never helping anyone.” I never say, ”That law makes so much sense that I’m so sorry that I broke that law.”
Mr. Jekielek: Right. It just feels arbitrary.
Ms. Engelhart: It feels arbitrary.
Mr. Jekielek: Please tell me about this concept of radical trust.
Ms. Engelhart: I believe that if we can live being totally responsible for our lives. Then we have to look at how we got here with a government that’s telling me whether someone can live on my land or not, and how many people can live in my house. How did we get to this point?
We got here because we don’t trust each other, we don’t trust God, and we don’t trust our gut. We just don’t trust ourselves. We have invited the government to be in every transaction. I could say, “Jan, I’m starting a business. Do you want to invest $20,000 in my business?” Then you'll go pay a lawyer $5,000 to look at the contract that is investing your $20,000 to make sure that I’m not going to do something wrong to you. It’s a level of needing all these layers, because we don’t trust each other and we don’t trust anything.
I had a lesson around my family and choosing to marry my husband and have the life that we had, really trusting that there was a plan from God or divinity. There was a plan. I’ve tried to live my life trusting my gut and trusting that even if I feel sad or I feel scared or I feel alone, it doesn’t mean it’s not the best thing to do. Right now, the best thing to do for my family is to move to Texas. I’m taking a big risk at 45-years-old and I’m starting over.
I literally thought I was about to retire a couple of years ago and just raise my children and be a mom. That’s not going to happen. I’m definitely going to be working for the next however many years, and that’s okay. It’s a reframe. I can trust that whatever’s on this next journey is going to be powerful for me, for my husband, and for my family. I’m trying to have radical trust in myself, in my community, and in God.
Mr. Jekielek: I sense your spirit of entrepreneurship and your desire to contribute to the community. Earlier in this interview, I heard about how you are involved with the people around you. I imagine that’s exactly what you’re going to foster in your new adventure in Texas.
Ms. Engelhart: It is what I will foster. I was having a conversation recently with a gentleman and we realized that during Covid people that were making a big contribution with their lives were less likely to buy into the fear and the narrative of, “You have to be masked. You have to be vaccinated. You have to do all these things.” Because as human beings, we want to contribute, we want to make a difference, and we want to be part of something bigger than ourselves.
The masks, the vaccinations, and staying at home became a thing that you could belong to that was bigger than yourself. People that were steeped in community and making a difference every day were less likely to fall for the allure of that, because they were profoundly connected to their contributions, and the difference they were making every day. I love community, and I will foster it wherever I am. But it’s also heartbreaking to leave a community that you’re deeply rooted in.
Mr. Jekielek: What is that characteristic that makes some people see through all of it and other people not see through it? Of course, many people came to it over time.
Ms. Engelhart: Over time, yes.
Mr. Jekielek: What’s in store for Texas? How is Texas going to feel the entrepreneurial spirit of Mollie Engelhart?
Ms. Engelhart: We are really excited. We’ve started a ranch in Texas called Sovereignty Ranch, and we are currently building a brewery there. We'll be growing grains, brewing them, and then feeding the grain right back to the cows right there on the ranch. There is an event space where you could have weddings or parties or education or different kinds of seminars. We have 30 tiny houses for people to rent. You could have a wedding or people could just stay for the evening like in a hotel. We have a commercial kitchen with a restaurant-type environment there. All of this is going to be on the ranch.
It’s going to be hospitality, but it is steeped in agriculture. Rather than going to the restaurant and seeing me on the screen talking about our farm, and how this food came from our farm, it’s going to be a little different. You'll make the effort to come to the farm and have a farm-to-table dinner or brunch or stay the evening in a hotel that’s a little tiny house and be really steeped in the agriculture and remember our connection to the earth.
When you got here today, you said, “It smells so amazing.” I can’t tell you how many people get to the farm and have emotional experiences. They get teary and say, “I smell my grandma’s house,” or, “This is what my grandpa’s house smelled like.” There’s something really powerful about connecting with our agricultural past, which is not that long ago. A hundred years ago, practically all of our families were farming. Now, it’s a very small percent, just a couple percent.
I want to create a space in Texas where people can come and immerse themselves in regenerative agriculture for an evening, for a weekend, or for a week. It will be a destination brewery with an event space. It is in Bandera, Texas, a beautiful place outside of San Antonio. I’m excited to be there, and I hope the community welcomes me.
Mr. Jekielek: When do you expect all of this to launch?
Ms. Engelhart: The event space is already open. We had our first event for the eclipse a couple of weeks ago, and 150 people stayed on the ranch. The tiny houses are not all finished, so we had glamping tents for 150 guests. We had different speakers talking about different things, everything from journalism to germ theory and everything else in between about the world that we’re living in. We had both interesting speakers and guests.
That was our first event, and it was very affirming that people will travel to go to something like that. We’re in the money-raising phase for the brewery, but we are hoping to have the brewery open early next year. The event space is already open. With the tiny houses, we have about four of them installed, and hopefully, we'll have 30 by sometime in 2025. It’s already open to some degree, and it will continue to evolve. Once I get there full time, I’m sure it will kickstart faster, because I like to see results.
Mr. Jekielek: I am absolutely certain of that. Mollie Engelhart, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.
Ms. Engelhart: Thank you so much for coming all the way out here to see my little piece of paradise before we transition it to other stewards.
Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Mollie Engelhart and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.
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