How Regenerative Farming Can Help Solve America’s Metabolic Disease Problem: Mollie Engelhart

[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] “More than 50 percent of Americans are metabolically unhealthy,” says Mollie Engelhart, a regenerative farmer and entrepreneur.

Engelhart made the difficult decision to uproot her life in California due to heavy regulations and fallout from COVID-19 restrictions. She has since restarted from scratch in Texas.

“All of our food comes from these industrial systems that has been sterilized, and we’re not replenishing our microbiology when we’re eating the foods of the current systems,” she says.

“This is not a future crisis that we need to talk about … this is happening right now.”

In this episode, we’ll take an in-depth tour of the Sovereignty Ranch and learn why Engelhart believes regenerative agriculture is the best way forward for humans, animals, and the planet.

“We can’t just depend on rice from China, and wheat from Ukraine, and lentils from Africa,” she says. Having these hubs that are growing food for the community—that is real resilience, and that is real security. And that is what I want to bring back.”

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:
Mollie Englehart, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.

Mollie Englehart:
Thank you so much for having me.

Mr. Jekielek:
Just about a year ago today, we were actually sitting down at a different farm, your farm in California, and you were about to leave to come here to create a new life. So tell me about what you’ve built here since. You’re someone who goes 150 percent on whatever you’re doing. Just looking around here, it seems like a lot has happened since you arrived.

Ms. Englehart:
I moved to Texas to 250 acres and we built a restaurant in the barn. It’s called the Barn Restaurant. It’s a 2500 square foot restaurant that we can use for retreats and events. We’ve built a series of tidy houses, shipping container houses and some manufactured homes. So we have a series of different configurations for renting to guests.

We’re doing retreats, we’re doing education, we’re doing conferences, anything from a medical conference to we’re doing a women’s retreat that starts today. All different yoga retreats, any kind of different ways that people are gathering and I really want to create a place for people to come eat food of the land and be on a regenerative farm, see the relationship between their food, the ecosystem, and humanity, and then be the ripple effect and take that out into the world and spread the message of nutrient-dense food and how important that is.

And so that’s what we’re doing here in Texas. And I still have two restaurants in California that are struggling, and it’s been hard with California and the regulations and the minimum wage hikes and the rent increases and all of those things.

Mr. Jekielek:
You shifted in your, or you evolved in your kind of philosophy of farming or philosophy of food. I noticed that the farm’s called Sovereignty Farm. I’m sure there’s a reason for that. But tell me about that.

Ms. Englehart:
I was raised a vegetarian, mostly vegan, but my mom didn’t believe in margarine because one time a stick of margarine turned to plastic because she left it in the oven too long. And she was like, no, I’m not feeding my kids plastic. So we ate all vegan growing up except for butter. And so I kind of just grew up in this family that believed in not eating animals. And I didn’t reject that. And I went on to grow up and I started my own businesses.

And one of my first businesses was a vegan ice cream shop. And then that evolved into Sage which became this kind of iconic restaurant in Los Angeles and doing huge numbers and big square footage and brewery and full bar and really fun vegan restaurant where you could kind of have everything and not have to worry that there was any meat or dairy. As I learned about things as far as farming goes, I realized that food waste was a big cause of issues. And we don’t talk about food waste. We always blame cows. But I didn’t have any cows, so I didn’t have to worry about that. But I did make tons of food waste.

So that’s how I started my farm. And as I started farming, I started to realize that maybe the vegan narrative was like so many other narratives where there is kernels of truth but then it’s been co-opted to kind of control and and and make people do what the powers that be want us to do and i also started to realize there is no vegan food all organic food is grown with bone meal and blood meal and feather meal and chicken poop and these things are coming out of ecosystems that I don’t believe in, because I still deeply believe in animal rights and animal welfare and human rights and human welfare. I deeply believe in those ideas.

And so I started to realize that this business model that was really successful prior to the pandemic was a little bit of a lie. That it’s not that we can just say, I’m not going to eat meat and then no death happens. It’s literally that to be alive is to have the reverence for death happening and every time we eat we want to pray over our food as if you’re eating the meat. I’m a vegetarian and I don’t eat meat, but I understand that death. I happen to grow my broccoli and so I want to have the same reverence I would for a steak if that makes sense.

As the restaurants are struggling post-pandemic, like so many other restaurants, we’re saying how do we get butts in seats? How do we get people to come to the restaurant? I had the thought maybe this restaurant no longer has integrity with what I believe. I’m now over here farming and doing regenerative agriculture and integrating animals into the ecosystem to create healthy soil to create healthy food to create healthy people. Yet I’m still having a restaurant over here that has seed oils that has some processed foods and things I don’t believe in.

So I thought I will try. The restaurants are already shriveling on the vine post-pandemic California but let me at least try to have integrity with what I believe in the world. So on Earth Day we made an announcement that essentially what I believe is that regenerative agriculture is the best pathway forward for human health and planetary health as a secondary thing. But there’s a human health epidemic right now. We can hypothesize about carbon. I don’t need to hypothesize about the human health epidemic that the poisons in our food are having an impact and more than 50 percent of Americans are metabolically unhealthy. This is not a future crisis that we need to talk about could happen if I don’t drive a hybrid. This is happening right now.

In that realization, in that thought that regenerative agriculture is a great tool for moving that forward, I made that announcement on Earth Day that we’re going to add meat and dairy from regenerative farmers mostly from California, a couple from Texas, but mostly from California, local American regenerative farmers organic and regenerative. This is the highest quality grass-fed grass finished dairy and everything like that.

I believed that sure, the vegans were going to get angry. But I also believe that people that want metabolic health that want food without poison and we’re going to rise up into that space where the vegans came out. Unfortunately, that just hasn’t really happened. I thought we’d have a wave of going down and then it would go back up.

But it hasn’t seemed to happen. I’m a capitalist. I believe that if what I’m offering doesn’t serve the community it will fail, and literally, that might be what is happening. So I have to rethink how I can serve the community and how I can serve this message in such a way that has people inspired to support American farmers who are doing the right thing.

Mr. Jekielek:
Basically, the character of your restaurants that remain in California has changed substantially from the vegan perspective. So those people no longer want to eat there.

Ms. Englehart:
No, they don’t. Honestly, it’s a mix. It’s like, there’s this very kind of angry mob, people protesting, shutting down the restaurant, throwing blood on the restaurant. They also got my Google, my Yelp, all of these things shut down to say permanently closed. Because in their mind, the restaurant it was is permanently closed and because these are crowd-sourced things you can have hundreds of people go to their phone and say this restaurant is permanently closed.

But on the other hand, there’s wives that always only ate there without their husbands and now they’re able to have a date and they’re so grateful there are lots of people that are loving it, but not to make up for the amount that are upset at my choices. I understand they’re upset. I was like them. The realization that I had to come through was painful. I’m a vegan chef in Los Angeles. My financial stability and everything I believed was on that. I had to change my mind in the public sphere and have the mob say I’m wrong.

I think that that analogy can go to so many things right now in our life. Like there’s so many mobs trying to convince so many people to believe so many things. And we have to be brave enough to say, I believe regenerative agriculture, healthy soil is the best pathway forward for humans, animals, and the planet. And so I’m going to stand in that and have faith that I’m standing in what I believe to be true and no matter how
loud people scream or what money doesn’t come because I said that I have to believe that there’s a reason.

I’m a vegetarian and I never thought I’d be preaching the benefits of grass-fed grass-finished beef but I just I didn’t ever think that I’d be explaining to people that there’s less death in grass-fed, grass-finished beef than cabbage, and explaining that when you displace an ecosystem and only grow one thing at a time, things are going to die. And when you let cows graze on grass and move, things get to live and flourish, and more life comes out of that. I didn’t expect to be the messenger for that, because I don’t even eat meat.

Mr. Jekielek:
This is the stewardship model of how human beings interact with this thing with the natural environment because there’s these different viewpoints. One is that humans are kind of a blight on the environment and the idea is to absolutely minimize any sort of working together.

Ms. Englehart:
And I believe that that’s a huge psyop or a huge way to control humanity. If we believe we don’t belong here, then we’ll succumb to all different kinds of things. Like, it’s okay if we aren’t able to have babies in 20 years. Oh, it’s okay, we’re the problem. Oh, it’s okay if I can only drive on Thursday. Oh, it’s okay if I can’t only fly to see my relatives once a year, whatever the things that may come down the pipeline if we believe we don’t belong here.
But what if we do belong here? What if we are part of God’s creation and we’re meant to be exactly where we are right now?
What if it’s our job to be the keystone species, like the lion or the elephant that if you take them out of the ecosystem everything else collapses what if we are the keystone species and we’ve just been doing it wrong what if that we can work with nature god land mother earth whatever you want to call it and we can have this beautiful relationship where we are having cleaner water because healthy soil does so many different things.

What sequesters carbon I’m not that concerned about, because plants sequester carbon in more organic matter that’s in the soil. It filters water better so there’s gonna be cleaner water. It’s also going to sequester more water because it’s spongy and the water doesn’t run off and go into the ocean. It goes down into our aquifers then there’s all this microbiology that creates the healthiest food on the planet and then that creates healthy humans, healthy animals. There’s no downside to regenerative agriculture.
There’s just no oligarchy that can get rich off of it. So it’s not being promoted like solar panels and windmills and electric cars.

Mr. Jekielek:
I’m getting a hint as to why this place is called Sovereignty Ranch now.

Ms. Englehart:
I was really fed up in California. I was pregnant or breastfeeding. and I couldn’t go into a restaurant cause I didn’t have papers. I just think about a world where you’re going to tell a pregnant lady it’s too dangerous for her to come into a restaurant and use the restroom. I mean, that’s, and that was happening all over Los Angeles. And before you had to show papers, they just weren’t even letting people in to use the restroom. You were getting your food at the door. You’re like, I’m so sorry, I’m so pregnant, I need to pee. No, that’s too dangerous.

Mr. Jekielek:
This is under Covid restrictions?

Ms. Englehart:
Yes. So sovereignty came out of a response to that. I did this event called Sowing Sovereignty at my farm in California and it just resonated with me, sowing the seeds of sovereignty. Actually, the full name of the LLC is Sowing Sovereignty. And so the idea would be that we could plant resilience and plant independence and plant Those ideas that we can start to rely on ourselves and on our communities. I think American sovereignty is important. I think being able to have American energy independence.

I think all of these ideas are important ideas but the idea of having healthy food that comes from where we are is foundationally important to security. If something were to happen and our very weak supply chains got disrupted, I want to know there are farmers in my area growing food. This is an agricultural area that I’m in, but it’s still like 90 percent of the food is imported. We grow one kind of food and then we export it and then we import all the other foods instead of having these hubs of farmers that are growing food for the community that is real resilience and that is real security.

That is what I want to bring back the kind of farms where we have some pigs we have some cows we have some goats we’re opening a dairy and so we can really provide nutrient-dense food to the hill country to the neighborhood and then hopefully I don’t want to be this huge thing and take it across the country. I want to be small and support my community and then I want to inspire someone else over there to do the same thing. And then that person inspires someone else and that we each could have these hubs of farmers like it used to be feeding our own neighborhoods.

We can’t just depend on rice from China and wheat from Ukraine and whatever lentils from Africa and think that one day there’s not going to be a disruption and then we’re not going to have any food. I was on a call the other day with multiple producers of regenerative agriculture, and everybody is kind of struggling with the same thing. We’re testing our food, and it’s got 38 times the flavonoids and 8 times the antioxidants. The food is just crazy more nutrient-dense coming out of a regenerative system, but the customer is not really educated yet about it.
So I’m hoping by having this space where people can eat the food be nourished and be in the space that we can up that education about why the connection of healthy soil and healthy humans is so important somewhere between 25 and 50 percent of all life on the planet there’s been different studies that have come up with different numbers but let’s even just use 25 of life on the planet is in the topsoil of our planet.

If we have a mass extinction event of that microscopic life people say well what’s the big deal well the interesting the other interesting thing is healthy soil and a healthy gut have like a 70 crossover of this healthy microbiology so it’s clear that we were meant to eat of the soil to replenish that microbiology but now all of our food comes from these industrial systems that’s been sterilized and we are we are not replenishing our microbiology when we’re eating the food of these current systems or food-like substances. We’re getting this industrial microbiome which is causing all types of metabolic dysfunction and also mental health.

There’s a huge connection between your gut health and your mental health and another interesting thing to think about is we’re only 50 percent the our body the skin bag that houses our soul and we’re 50 percent microbiology and so when you take something like Roundup and you say well it has no impact on the human body sure has no impact on the skin bag housing my soul, but everything that has a shikame pathway, which is the other 50 percent of me, that microbiology that’s keeping me healthy, has a shikimate pathway, and the way Roundup works is it kills anything with a shikimate pathway.

Mr. Jekielek:
What is that?

Ms. Englehart:
It’s the way that plants and other organisms move their lymph system. And so Roundup or glyphosate dries that up. And so when we are eating food that’s been treated with that we’re also killing that microbiology. So it’s twofold. We have to get back to healthy soil and eat whole foods of healthy soil. Then we also have to stop ingesting chemicals that are destroying our microbiology. We can worry about whales, and we can worry about polar bears, but if the microbiology of the soil dies it will be catastrophic. It’s catastrophic for the bees, and more catastrophic for humanity.

Mr. Jekielek:
What about the farm itself? What is the farming that’s happening here?

Ms. Englehart:
We have a dairy herd of cattle which we’re doing holistic planned grazing which is a staple in regenerative agriculture where you move the animals every single day. They don’t damage the soil, they’re really spreading their microbiology out evenly and we move them and move them and move them and so by the end of this year we’ll have our permits for our dairy we’re under construction there. We’ll be selling raw milk and pasteurized products here from the farm. We have a pastured pork program. We’re doing in the forested areas we have some different heirloom pig varieties that we’re growing here.

Then we have a small herd of dairy goats right behind us that will also be part of our dairy. They get moved every single day as well and so do the sheep. We have sheep, goats, pigs, and cows. Then we also have a beef herd but it’s on leased land, it’s not here. But we do the same thing. We move the beef cattle every single day so we have all that and then we have greenhouses where we’re growing fruits and vegetables and then I have a beautiful fruit orchard and we’re doing amazing things with using the spaces between the fruit orchards to double use the water and double use the fertilizer.

So we’re growing popcorn or vegetables between the rows of the pears or the pecans and that. So we’re really a very diverse operation and we really want to show different kinds of ways that you can stack functions. Just like we did at Sow A Heart Farm on a smaller scale, we’re trying to do that on a bigger scale here, really having these different offerings. So if any one thing goes bad, we don’t lose everything.

If we have a bad hospitality time or we have a bad fig year, we don’t want that to be our whole everything is vested in figs or everything in pecans.
And we’re really doing a lot of experimenting because there’s not much agriculture outside of hay and cattle in this region of Texas. So I’m really experimenting and I’m interested to see what is going to be thriving and what is not going to be thriving.

Mr. Jekielek:
I can’t wait to see some of this.

Ms. Englehart:
I’m excited for you to see some of it as well.

Mr. Jekielek:
Man, do I ever love fresh figs. This is as fresh as it gets, right?

Ms. Englehart:
Fresh as it gets. There’s a lot of arguments people have like, should you get organic? Of course organic is better than non-organic, but whenever you have a big, huge bureaucracy, there’s also ways to manipulate it in your favor. And so knowing your farmer and buying local food is your best bet.

Mr. Jekielek:
Okay, let’s go get on the people mover.

Ms. Englehart:
It was actually illegal in California, so I bought it for really cheap and made it into our safari mobile.

Mr. Jekielek:
Alright, so who rides on this vehicle normally?

Ms. Englehart:
Guests. We’re having 60 women coming for a conference today. So it’ll circle around the ranch throughout the day so they can move from the showers, down to the restaurant space, out to their tiny house village, to the pond to go swimming, and to the sauna. This is how the holistic planned grazing works for the dairy cows. We walk them back and we just use one electrical wire, so they have about 11,000 square feet at a time.

We move them twice a day so this is very high stock density, but then there’s no damage to the field. You can see where they ate yesterday, and this is where they’re going to eat later today. We’ll just move them across the field until they reach that end, and then we’ll start them back on another field over there. This is really the foundation of regenerative agriculture. It is to move animals on grass every single day replicating what buffalo or bison did a long time ago.

There used to be millions of bison in these prairie lands and they would move every day due to predator pressure. So we are just recreating that, and that is what creates the most healthy soil possible. This is our dairy herd, and we’re going to have a raw milk dairy probably by December. It’s under construction right now. I think that raw milk is a powerful superfood if it’s done right in a clean environment where you have cooling set up and bulk tanks and everything to get it chilled quickly. We want to make milk raw again, but we want to have a system set up for that to work.

Mr. Jekielek:
When pasteurization was used you know to basically make the milk safe for drinking at a time when you couldn’t do these things very well or very effectively.

Ms. Englehart:
That happened because people were getting sick but people were not getting sick necessarily from the milk but from the conditions in which the cows were kept in. We want to go back to having healthy cows on grass,
in an environment that is meant for a cow, and then harvest that milk in a safe and clean way. I think that that’s highly beneficial because we talked about soil microbiology being 70 percent compatible with the human gut. Raw milk is 94 percent compatible with the human gut, so it’s really setting up that healthy microbiology.

Mr. Jekielek:
I’m a huge fan of dragonflies, and there’s an unbelievable amount of dragonflies around here.

Ms. Englehart:
If you have a field of kale or a field of cabbage, there’s almost no life in this field. But when you look at this field, you look at all this life, and there’s bunny rabbits that we probably can’t see, and there’s dragonflies, and butterflies, and there’s dung beetles, and all of this life. It’s actually creating more life and more in the ecosystem. These cows are only in any place for just a few hours and they go on to the next place, and then the next place,
so we’re not dismantling anybody’s ecosystem. We’re actually making it a more healthy ecosystem.

So this is a young fruit tree orchard that we planted just two years ago and we tried to plant some popcorn between the rows the first year and it just didn’t work but this year after grazing the chickens and getting the fertility of the chickens. These are pumpkins and now we’re able to have this beautiful garden between the rows and that’s just from the fertility of the chickens just grazing chickens between so this is popcorn and then these gardens between the young trees are actually protecting them in the heat of the summer.

This is aspirating moisture. We’re operating like little air conditioners. And so this is popcorn and watermelon and butternut squash. The garden is almost as tall as the trees, whereas, the first year I was here, we couldn’t grow anything. Just moving our egg laying chickens through the orchard to create this garden. These are the chicken houses. This will be the fall garden up here where the chickens are now. We’ll move these guys into the pecan orchard shortly. We have 350 chickens, and some of them are hiding. I must warn you, we feed the chickens meat and skins because chickens are not vegetarians. But because the whole veg-fed chicken thing came from the idea of not feeding chickens to chickens, which of course we shouldn’t do, but we get deer and beef off-cuts from the butcher. Whatever’s left over from the meat that we feed the chickens.

We will come in this row and we’ll flail mow it get all the grass whatever they left and then we’ll plant our fall garden into this and we’ll move them further up and then after they do this again in the upper orchard we’ll move them to the pecan orchard and we’ll continue to plant like that. So the chickens are fertilizing with their poop. The meat and the bones that are left over are also fertilizing the ground and building healthy soil.

Mr. Jekielek:
We’re getting a real picture of how this regenerative agriculture process works.

Ms. Englehart:
Our tiny house village starts right about here. We brought all these tiny houses from California. They made us remove them. They were all farm worker housing originally, and so now we have them. Then these are our shipping container village behind you. For just five thousand dollars you can get something that’s watertight and it’s sturdy. We have seven tiny houses and six glamping tents and four shipping containers and then three farmhouses that we rent out. These are all different options for renting.

Mr. Jekielek:
Let’s check out one of them. It’s a lot cooler in here. You’re running air conditioning in here, right?

Ms. Englehart:
Yes, for sure. We have 60 guests arriving today, so air conditioning is on in all of them.

Mr. Jekielek:
Look at this bath, amazing.

Ms. Englehart:
We have an outdoor bath. You can take a shower out here. Here’s a bunch more tiny houses.

Mr. Jekielek:
What is your vision for the future?

Ms. Englehart:
I would like to continue to grow the conversation around regenerative agriculture in the world. And we’re building a brewery as well here. So we’re going to try to have the first beer with no pesticides or chemicals in it. Because a lot of these pesticides and chemicals are water soluble. So when you make your beer or your kombucha, it ends up in your beverage.
And so we’re doing that. and we’re doing this restaurant and I hope to get a farm stand on one of the main highways around here soon.

We will continue to do the education and do the work of high quality nutrient dense food until that’s just a normal thing that everybody’s talking about. Then I’ll move on to something else. But I really want the understanding of the connection that we have to nature and how powerful we can be, and how powerful our purchasing power is. We want to inspire people to stop training our resilience for convenience and just you know beg people to go for a little less convenience, and for a little more resilience.

Mr. Jekielek:
Mollie Engelhart, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Ms. Englehart:
Thank you so much for coming all the way out here to visit us.

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