American Thought Leaders - How California’s Policies Forced Me to Give Up My Farm and Move to Texas: Mollie Engelhart

Episode Date: January 2, 2024

“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.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.

You see it all over LA, restaurants that have been open for 10 years that had a line outside just closing with no notice. Molly Englehart is a chef, entrepreneur, and regenerative farmer. She built an incredible farm-to-table business in California, but recently made the difficult decision to give it all up and start from scratch in Texas. Every little thing is highly, highly regulated. I mean, I've even been rated by the ABC, them saying we weren't brewing our own beer when we were. It's rare that someone that has a brick and mortar business thinks that the regulations in California are working. What is the end game? I don't know. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Janja Kellek.

Molly Englehart, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Thank you so much for having me. Well, so tell me about this place. This is Sawhart Farm. This is kind of a dream taking on shape, form and experience in the world. I owned restaurants and I was a chef and I was creating food waste and I realized that food waste was not the best. And so I wanted to manage my own food waste. And so I got a farm so that I could keep the food in the loop. And it evolved into this beautiful place that we grow food for our restaurants and for our community. And it became this community

hub. People come and get their food here. And we also use all the compost from the restaurants and turn it back into new food to send back to the restaurants. And where are we like exactly right now? We're inside of the greenhouse in a windstorm. So if you're hearing wind in the background, you're not imagining it. And why the greenhouse? It's a beautiful place on the farm. And it's kind of a metaphor for anywhere that you are, you can create shelter and grow something beautiful. And so this is a place that you create shelter and grow something beautiful. And so this is a place that you create shelter and grow something beautiful. And you're growing

some things here that you couldn't grow out there, right? Yes, you're growing stuff inside. We got bananas and papayas and coffee, all of that, as well as strawberries and things that you could grow here in New Zealand. Spinach and broccoli and basil. Are you roasting your own coffee here? No, not yet or I guess we won't because we're leaving but we have a lot of really healthy coffee plants and somebody in the future will roast their own coffee here. Well you know and this is why we're here so I want to talk about your journey. I mean, kind of an unlikely path. And of course, now we know that you're heading to Texas to rebuild, so to speak, but we're still here.

We're still here. And so chart me your path of how you got here. I grew up on a small farm in upstate New York. My parents were vegetarians. I came to LA to go to film school. I worked in the music industry and I did a lot of different things. I was a professional poet, but I really settled into my love of food and my love of serving people. I love to feed people. I love to serve people. And then that led me to wanting to get back to the farm, wanting to know where the food that I was serving came from. And 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.

And so now we're pivoting and shifting and doing things different. That's why we're going to Texas. You know, before the pandemic, I understand before March of 2020, you were riding high. 11 years of year over year growth. We were in a deal with a big firm to sell us for $31 million and we were doing great. And we had four locations and a brewery. We had the farm and it was 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, the scraps were going back to the farm to know if they had a beer, that the grain from that beer went to

feed cows people liked that and even the first quarter of 2020 was our best quarter ever in the 11 years leading up to that so we were on a trajectory to expand really bring this kind of service to more communities. And so you would think that this is exactly what Californians want. This is the sort of thing that's exactly what... I always say, if you would think, let's look up in Wikipediaikipedia like what is a californian like i'm a vegan restaurant owner an organic farmer like 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 small to medium-sized business doing good in the world, caring about their employees, caring about the environment, caring about their community. But it's impossible.

The pieces no longer fit together here. It used to be that people that worked in my restaurants could live in the same neighborhood, could eat at other restaurants in the neighborhood, 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.

But the costs over the pandemic for food have gone up so much. I mean, there's a there's a top where people are willing to pay for a burrito or a stack of pancakes, and I'd say it's 19 or $20 and going above that. But that's having us lose money, each food that goes out the door. And so those pieces that used to fit so nicely together no longer can coexist.

You mentioned that prior to the pandemic, there was already, and I'm interpreting here a little bit, a huge kind of regulatory burden, so to speak, right? To make it all work, but you did. So what happened? Just tell me what happened through the pandemic that changed things. Well, in other states or some states,

they were closed for three weeks for three months for but we were closed in some degree for multiple years two and a half years and it didn't stay the same it wasn't like okay now you can get your bearing we're just doing to go and for two years you just do to go and you get your bearing it was every week it would change every couple weeks it would change it would first be okay we're only doing to go and then it's like okay we're gonna let people go back to dine in but the tables have to be six feet apart oh well if you put booze they could be back to back with high backs oh never mind about the booze we're going to eight feet apart midnight onnight on Friday. It was always midnight on Friday. It's going to be no more indoor dining. And then you get your whole outdoor done and you do umbrellas and you put up heaters and you do everything and

you expand your outdoor and you get a permit from the city to change parking into seating. And then in 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. And then they say no more out, midnight on Friday, no more outdoor dining. And so we'd spend a lot of money trying to pivot, trying to 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. Like, well, it was just like endless money spending outdoor awnings or trying to fix this or, okay, 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 a little store there's no groceries we'll bring in produce from the restaurant we'll sell toilet paper we have toilet paper there's no like what like we just endlessly trying to give the public what they needed through this time but it kept changing um the regulations and then you know minimum wage kept going up and all of these other things were very volatile to go boxes from $30 for 400

to $150 within a span of months. Cauliflower was vacillating between $9 a case or to 130 something a case. And so it was hard to price anything or to know how much or whole ingredients would just be gone. And then you couldn't have these things on the menu and you have to reprint the menus. We kept thinking it would recover. It would get better. And really, we've retrained the public to eat at home, to go out less, to order from third parties that take 30 percent. Now we have a strike in the film industry. even the best paid people in LA were not having income. And then all the ancillary and support staff don't have income. It's almost like a

perfect storm. I mean, you know, they were saying the prices are going up. People don't have the money to spend on things. And there's these, you know, strikes. And is this specific to California, do you think? I don't know, I have not been other places, but I know it's highly exasperated here. And the workforce is different. The people that are coming into food service are, they graduated high school during

the no school for two years. They got kind of pushed through. There was no expectations of teenagers for two full years, practically. And then they went out into the workforce. And so that's a different workforce than we started the pandemic with. And people that maybe had just been a few years into the workforce, two, three years, now spent two, three years at home on benefits. I don't want this to be misinterpreted. I think everybody deserves the best. But we also have to have hard work be a fundamental core principle in raising our children. Viewed as a virtue. Viewed as a virtue, yeah. Right, right. principle in raising our children viewed as a virtue viewed as a virtue yeah right and so though

that changed and so the amount of employees you need to do the same job has shifted wow everybody went through this thing together and it was some kind of trauma and whether you were afraid of it or you felt it was being hoisted on you it was some kind of thing that happened. And so that's also in everybody's psyche and how they're responding. So customers can be less forgiving. And so all it's, it's kind of just been a perfect storm. And we've had to close two of our restaurants and people say, Oh, can you sell your restaurants? And it's like, there's nothing to sell. Like, sell a business that can't make payroll? It's not, there's nothing there.

And so, and I'm not alone. I was looking at the liquor license transfers, and there's like 40 liquor license transfers before mine get transferred that I'm selling to somebody else. And I've never seen that. I've bought multiple liquor licenses in my life. I've never seen 40 liquor licenses in front of mine. Remind me of the names of your restaurants, just for the benefit of our viewers. I own Sage Plant-Based Bistro and Brewery. There used to be four of them, but we're down to two.

And a Cloud Kitchen that services the Culver City area where we used to have a brick and mortar restaurant. So we still have Pasadena and Echo Park and the breweries in the Echo Park location. Do you think anyone is taking over from the type of service you offer it? I mean, I don't not exactly the type of service that I offer. I, I have gone to some of these webinars or whatever for restaurant owners and listened. And I guess what's considered sit down casual is being hit the hardest. Um, because people from the sit down casual place are going down to the Chipotle's and the fast casuals. And the fast casuals going down to fast food and fast food people are not eating out at all as the money is shifting. But people that eat at fine dining are not coming down to the fast casual place. They're still eating at

fine dining. And so there's nobody to come down into the casual sit down restaurant. And so I believe that that is the market or the space that is being desecrated the most. And you see it all over L.A. restaurants that have been open for 10 years that had a line outside just closing with no notice all over Los Angeles. Yeah. And I mean, there's there's also this whole reality of, you know, increased homelessness and drug use. It's all intertwined. On my Echo Park location, there's whole encampments and, um, I'm not someone who doesn't, like, I believe that we have to find a place for people to be. I just don't know that this like, oh, they're unhoused, so we can't move them program works. Like if I'm delivering stuff to the restaurant and I'm parked right behind this encampment and I forget my meter while I'm unloading pizza boxes and whatever else that I'm taking into my restaurant.

And then someone says, hey, a customer wants to talk to you and I get distracted. I get a $52 ticket. But then there's an entire encampment that's taking up three parking spaces that's just getting ignored right in front of my restaurant. Someone set off the fire sprinklers in my whole restaurant or got naked on Mother's Day inside of the restaurant, screaming at the

top of their lungs, 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 homelessness resources than any other state and has the most homeless of any other state but yet it just gets more intense year over year over year and in my culver city location that we shut down the neighborhoods were just walking were blocked off because all of the underpasses had become permanent encampments that were sanctioned by the city because it's shelter and it's cool from the heat because of the overpass, which I understand all of that logic. But then I see guests and I'm like, oh my God, I haven't seen you in so long. And they say, oh, well, we would

always come get a cocktail and an appetizer when we walked our dog at 8 p.m., but we no longer walk our dog this side of the freeway. Well, how many other guests that I didn't talk to don't walk that way? So the condition of the city, of course, impacts the ability to do business. It's getting progressively harder, and I clearly haven't been great at navigating it. It really does feel like the perfect storm. When we were talking offline a bit earlier, you were telling me about all sorts of regulations around this land, right? So never mind the restaurant reality, but actually the farming reality. Let's dig into that a little bit. Yes, there's regulations about everything in California from who can live on your land with you. I can't have any accessory dwellings,

no tiny homes. Nobody could live in an RV. You can't have, I can't build any guest houses, but that's like one thing. But then there's how tall your compost pile can be. There's, you know, 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 farmer's market, they can come here and measure it to make sure it's the same parsley, that I'm not buying parsley from somewhere else. I could get fined $150 for yesterday. I got fined $150 because one piece of produce that's on my list of 300 produces that we grow somehow got missed by the inspector. And so now I was selling something that they believe I didn't grow. So they're going to come out and inspect and see if it's here to sell.

And then, then once they do that, it'll only be $150 fine. It would have been a greater fine if I was selling someone else's produce, but it's just on and on how much regulations there's no dairies in this whole County because it's so hard to be regulated as a dairy. Um, and you know, I've been making hot sauce for years in my restaurants, in a commercial kitchen with my professional food handlers license and everything. And all of a sudden we did not know it was illegal for sure. We'd been selling hot sauce for years at the restaurants. No problem. We got raided by people and they embargoed all the hot sauce and, and they sent it to get tested in Berkeley. And then they realized that nothing had botulism or anything, but then

they still thousands and thousands of dollars worth of hot sauce had to be destroyed in front of them, like a display of, I don't know how bad we are. And then, uh, even though they tested it, there was no botulism. They wouldn't even let me eat it for my own family. So, you know, it's just on and on. Every little thing is highly, highly regulated to the point that I'm an entrepreneurial spirit. Like I have ideas that I want to do something in California just to do something like, oh, I want to start doing a CSA box. I need a walk-in cooler. The amount of years it would take me to get a permit to get a walk-in cooler. And then I just 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 permanent and on and on and on. And in Texas, it's like I'm free to create out of nothing. And the regulations exist around your septic tank and your wells. And I think that's good. I agree with both of those things, water and soil. I do believe in protecting the commons. These rules that are to protect us are really inhibiting us from being creative and creating great things in the world. I would say, you know, inhibiting of human flourishing. I love that. I love that term, actually. Because, you know, ostensibly, whatever government regulation is out there, right,

it should be there to foster that. Of course. Right. Because where there's a flourishing community, it's good for everybody. If you look at, there's farms where they've been in a neighborhood where nothing, there was no gas station, no nothing. And they've revitalized this farm, like White Oak Pastures, for example. They revitalize. And now the gas station's open and there's a feed store and the whole community thrives. When you have a farm where it's just one man on a tractor spraying chemicals for hundreds and hundreds of acres, the local feed store, the local restaurant, the local gas station, none of that can flourish. It really is inside of innovation and creation that the whole community gets to flourish. But if there's so much regulations that you just feel stopped in every time you try to take two steps forward,

we can't create that beauty in the world. And I believe that's what we're here to do. Well, let's take a moment to talk about what you're doing here, which is regenerative agriculture. And it's not something we've covered, I think, on the show yet, but it's something that I love the idea of. So tell me a little bit. So regenerative agriculture is agriculture that is fostering the soil first. The priority is the soil. And there's many principles of limited disturbance or no-till, people call it, or low-till. And then integrating animals. So bringing animals in to do rotational,

holistic plant grazing. Like if you imagine how the buffalo used to come in and they eat and they pee and they poop and they stomp and they do, and then they move on to the greener pastures. They don't eat it down to bare ground. And that is what you're trying to reproduce in the regenerative agriculture. And what I think of it as is it's not an extractive economy. It's where we're leaving more in the soil than we're taking. But by doing that, you create this ecosystem. And here we haven't paid for any fertilizers in three and a half, almost four years, because I spent some years just really building great soil and getting that soil 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 and all of it's

connected. It's 70% the same microbiology in healthy soil and in a healthy gut, which is obvious that we were meant to eat of the soil. But when we eat all food that comes in a plastic container that has been sterilized for our health, Yes, we're not getting any of these bad bacterias and all that, but we also are not getting all the good microbiology that our body is dependent on to be replenished by healthy soil. And so I think that is one of the most important parts about regenerative agriculture is really caring for the soil and not in a woo woo like let's be afraid of climate change kind of way but like in a foundational healthy soil equals healthy plants which equals healthy food like it's just like logic way and so we grow food for our

restaurants and we have about 350 subscribers to our CSA. They get a veggie box delivered to their house, whether it's once a week or once a month or every two weeks. Um, and we grow food for, you know, other restaurants locally that want, and then we do farmer's markets as well. Um, and so we really try to provide the healthiest food possible to the community and to my children and my family. I want them to have the healthiest food possible to the community and to my children and my family. I want them to have the healthiest food as well. But regenerative agriculture as a whole is looking at how do we farm for the future so that we are not looking at dust bowl type of conditions where our topsoil can just blow away. And it's very

windy here today. And you might notice when you're driving up here, you'll see big plumes of dust blowing across the road or whatever. And you'll see much less of that here because our soil is connected and is mostly all covered by a living root. And it's very simple. Carbon in the atmosphere is just carbohydrates. Like, so the plant takes the carbon out of the atmosphere, turns it into carbohydrates on its roots, feeds it to microbiology in the soil, microbiology in the soil, turns it into waste, which is food for plants. And then plants use that in order to make a tomato or a cucumber or coffee or a strawberry or whatever. And so the more living plants we have, it's cycling carbon. And there should be no fear conversation about carbon because plants are here to cycle it.

They're meant to do that. And the reason we talk about carbon a lot is because it can sell batteries and solar panels and stuff. 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. And so I say that both 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 carbon sequestered. It never putrefies and becomes methane.

And so the old way of farming, the way we all used to do it 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. And we've tried to out-science nature and we forgot we belong here, but we have to steward what is here. I mean, so now you're, as you said, the equation doesn't work anymore. Basically, you can't make ends meet doing this. I cannot. And so you're moving to Texas. And I'm excited and brokenhearted at the same time, if that's possible. I love what I created here. I love my community. I love my neighbors, but I literally can't make payroll.

I'm selling things to make it all work. It's not a regenerative system anymore. It's not working. And 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'll be able to feed more people free of excessive regulations. A few regulations can go a long way, but there's no need for the way it is here. And I don't know what the end game is. If you chased me out of California, I've been here 20 years. I am deeply rooted in the community. What is the end game? I don't know. Well, you know, there is this, you know, ideology, which seems, you know, I've become more and more aware of over the last several years.

That kind of believes that it's humanity that's a pestilence on the world and we need to bring it back to nature. That's actually what the end game is, right? Yes, that the 30 by 30 by 2030 to rewild 30% of the United States. Like, first of all, where are you going to get that land? You're just going to repossess it from farmers. But secondly, rewilding doesn't, if we really think carbon is the problem, let's use that, we're going to use that lens. I can sequester much more carbon than rewilding me in partnership with animals. The PSYOP is though, to make us believe we don't belong here, to make us feel like we are the problem because then we're helpless. But when I realized, when I learned about regenerative agriculture, a light went off in my head. Like, wait, we're not the problem.

I was apathetic. I grew up, I lived in liberal Los Angeles and I was driving my hybrid and my reusable bags. And, but I was apathetic. Like the whole world is burning down and there's nothing we can do. And when I learned about regenerative agriculture and the cycling of carbon and how we can facilitate, we can steward, we can be part of that, how we can be the apex species on the planet. In that moment, I realized we are the ones we've been waiting for.

And that idea that just rewilding, you look at a mountain over there and you look at this soil right here. There's no question who is sequestering more carbon. We can. And so if that's really the conversation, looking through that lens, rewilding makes no sense. It's having us know we belong here and then taking our role as stewards very seriously would be the ask. But as long as we think we're the problem, we'll be apathetic and we'll be malleable to policies around climate change that are going to be similar to policies around COVID, telling us when we can drive and what we can do these days of the week, whatever they're going to do to try to down the amount of carbon we're putting in the atmosphere. And people will agree to it because they'll have believed that they are the problem, that they had too many children, that their parents had too many children, 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% compatibility between the soil and our gut biome is an obvious sign that we are meant to coexist with healthy soil.

And if we could take that seriously, then we wouldn't have to talk about all this nonsense about rewilding 30% of the land by 2030. Like, no. And rewilding only works to draw down carbon in places like England or New York, like where there's like rainy season and all of that. And the thought leaders that are coming up with it are coming out of those mindsets, those think tanks of New York or London, I think. Because in an arid climate like California, you're not going to get any carbon drawdown from letting it go to desert. You're just not. So I think you're on record as having said there's seven different agencies that are coming after you. So explain that to me. In 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. And I think that you guys have even reported on this on Inside California about how this is actually a revenue making for California. So it could be something as small as there's a electrical violation or whatever, and then they're going to charge you for that. Or we had outdoor seating for COVID, but you were not allowed to have heaters outside or umbrellas, only tables and chairs. So then they charge you for having heaters and umbrellas for your customers while they're eating outside in a parking lot or whatever. And so there's kind of this, so there's, there's code enforcement and then there's, you know, different kinds of street enforcement for restaurants. And

then there's different, I mean, I've even been rated by the ABC, them saying we weren't brewing our own beer when we were. I mean, it's, it's, there's so many different like regulatory, um, hurdles to get over in any given time. And then there's all the agricultural stuff. And I've got in trouble for any kind of thing. Like we are selling flowers at the farmer's market and we put the olive branches and eucalyptus as the greenery in the bouquets of flowers. Well, I didn't register eucalyptus as something I'm growing. And so I got fined $150 for having eucalyptus in the bouquets of flowers at the farmer's market. You know, what's astonishing, Molly, is that someone actually figured that out.

Well, yeah, my tax dollars are going to someone coming to the farmer's market and investigating my booth, looking through my CPC and making sure that that and so it's just it's onerous to do any kind of thing here. And sometimes I've had, I have a personal assistant or executive assistant, however you want to put it. It often feels like their job is just compliance and licensing. It's, it feels like that is their whole job because there's just a license for almost everything. We worked out one time, it was like for Echo Park, which has a brewery. So there's like a little bit more licensing that there's like 16 licenses to exist. So like, of course the big ones, like a liquor license and a health permit, but then you need, you know, license outdoor patio seating license. And you need like, just, you need all these different permits for all these different things and a cannery license for making your hot

sauce and a this and a that. And it just goes on and on and on. And like I said, in the thing about the cannery, like when they destroyed all those thousands of dollars of hot sauce, I had to pay them $150 an hour. It was like $500 to watch me destroy hot sauce that was perfectly safe to eat that got tested by UC Davis. And so they find these ways to, to monetize the ways that you're not in compliance with these different rules. And it's, it's not just me. I mean, I have a neighbor who's, you know, he had like too many head of cattle for the amount of land. And he he's, if he had a quarter of an acre more, he could have an unlimited amount of, there would be no regulations, but because he's just a tiny bit, a quarter of an acre less than the threshold for

having no rules about how many head of cattle he could have, he's getting fined for that. And it's just on and on and on about so many different things. And it becomes, why would anybody want to be a business owner? And when I talk to people that are very pro the regulations and pro the way California is running, I often ask them, what do you do for a living? And you can bet that they are an educator, a lawyer, or they have an online business, 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.

You know, the one thing that just really strikes me as you talk about this, just like imagine the infrastructure you need to enforce all this compliance. I mean, this is I wonder how big it is. I need to find that out. It's huge. And government is supposed to be small. I swear it says it in the Constitution. And it's it's it's so overreaching and overarching. And it never makes any sense. Like every time I get one of these letters or one of these, I'm in trouble for this, that, and the other, I call my dad. I'm always like, you want to hear California? It's never logical and it's never helping the whole. I'm

never like, oh, that law makes so much sense that I'm so sorry that I broke that law. Right. It feels arbitrary. It feels arbitrary. It feels arbitrary. Something else we talked about offline. Tell me about radical trust. I believe that if we can live like I'm totally responsible for my life, then we have to look at how did we get here with a government that's telling me whether someone can live on my land or not, whether how many people can live in my house, how many, where did we, how did we get here? And we got here because we don't trust each other and we don't trust God and we don't trust our gut. We don't trust ourselves. So we've invited the government to be in every transaction. You know, I could say,

Jan, I'm starting a business. Do you want to invest in my business? $20,000. And then you'll go pay a lawyer $5,000 to look at the contract to invest $20,000 to make sure that I'm not going to do something wrong to you. That kind of level of needing all these layers because we don't trust each other, we don't trust anything. And so 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, that God or divinity, that there was a plan that God or divinity, that there was a plan. And 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. And so right now, the best thing to do for my family is to move to Texas. I'm taking a big risk. And at 45 years old, I'm

starting over. And I didn't think, I mean, I literally thought I was about to retire a couple of years ago and just raise my children, be a mom. And 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. And I can trust that whatever's on this next journey is going to be powerful for me, for my husband, for my family. And so I'm trying to have radical trust in myself, in my community, and in God. You know, Molly, I come from a family where, you know, so many of my family members, you know, my forebears, you know, where everything was taken, a lot of people were killed, and often left with nothing, destitute through war, through everything. And then somehow they made it work and they actually developed something great and I you know I kind of

I sense that I guess a spirit of entrepreneurship and desire to contribute to community and I think that's a huge part of it actually earlier in this interview there are many points where I heard how you're involved with the people around you and I imagine that's exactly what you're involved with the people around you. And I imagine that's exactly what you're going to foster in your new adventure in Texas. It is what I will foster. And it's interesting. I was having a conversation recently with a gentleman. And what we came to in this conversation is that people during COVID that were a big contribution in their lives were less likely to buy into the fear and buy into like, you have to be masked, you have to be vaccinated, you have to do all these things. Because we as human beings, we want to contribute, and we want to make a difference. And we want to be bigger, part of something bigger than ourselves. And so the mask, the vaccinating, the staying at home became that thing that you could belong to that was bigger than yourself.

And people that were steeped in community and making a difference every day were less likely to have the allure of that because they were profoundly connected to the difference they were making every day. And 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. I mean, that's a very fascinating observation to me, you know, because I've always often wondered, what is that characteristic that, you know, made some people kind of see through all of it and other people not? And of course, many people came to it over time, right? Yes. Like, like myself. So what, what's in store for Texas? I mean, what's, how, how is Texas going to feel the,

the entrepreneurial spirit of Molly Englehart. So we're really excited. We've started a ranch in Texas called Sovereignty Ranch, and we are building a brewery currently there on the ranch. So we'll be growing grains, brewing them, and then feeding the grain right back to the cows right there on the ranch, as well as an event space that you could do a weddings or parties or even education or different kinds of seminars. And we have 30 tiny houses for people to rent.

So you could do anything from a wedding or even just people could just stay for the evening, like a hotel. And we have a commercial kitchen with a restaurant type environment there. And so all of it is going to be on the ranch. And so it's going to be hospitality, but steeped in agriculture. So rather than you go to the restaurant and you see me on the screen talking about that we have a farm and this food came from a farm, you're going to, it's going to be a little different and you'll make the effort to come to the farm and have a farm to table dinner

or brunch, um, or stay the evening in a hotel, like little tiny house and be really steeped in the agriculture and remember our connection. Um, when you got here today, you said it smells so amazing. And I can't tell you how many people get to the farm and say like, even have emotional experiences, get teary like this. 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 far away. A hundred years ago, all of our families, somebody was farming and now it's a very small percent, a couple percent. And so I want to create a space in Texas where people can come and immerse themselves in regenerative agriculture for a weekend, for a week, for an evening.

And it'll be a destination brewery with the event space. And so that is in Bandera, Texas, outside of San Antonio. And it's a beautiful place. And I'm excited to be there. And I hope the community welcomes me. And, you know, I think you're going to have at least one guest, but, um, or a couple, you know, my wife and I, but, uh, when, when do you expect all this to launch? Um, the event space is already open. We had our first event for the eclipse,

um, a couple of weeks ago and 150 people stayed on the ranch. The tiny houses are not all finished or anything. So we did glamping tents and 150 guests. And we had different speakers talking about different things, everything from journalism to germ theory, kind of everywhere in between. And just about the world that we're living in. And we had interesting speakers and guests. and so that was our first event and it was very affirming that people will travel to go to some things like that. We hope we're in the money raising phase for the brewery part but we're hoping to have the brewery open early next year. The event space is already open and the tiny houses are, we have about four of them installed and we'll have 30, hopefully by sometime in 2025. And so it's already open to some degree and it'll continue to evolve as we, once I get there full time, I'm sure it'll kickstart faster. I'm, I like to see results.

Well, I am absolutely certain of that. Well, Molly Englehart, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. 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. Thank you all for joining

Molly Englehart and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.