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A Conservative Regenerative Farmer’s Journey With Mollie Engelhart

Our guest brings a story of radical transition from vegan chef and Los Angeles restaurateur to regenerative farmer, mother of four, and outspoken advocate for soil health and personal sovereignty. Mollie Engelhart joins me to talk about her new book, Debunked by Nature. It details her journey into motherhood, land stewardship, and ultimately, a philosophical and political transformation.

While many in the regenerative movement work to bridge divides and deepen ecological and social justice, Mollie’s story also challenges dominant narratives within both progressive and environmentalist spaces. This conversation will undoubtedly explore where we align and where tensions may emerge across questions of food, freedom, family, and political identity.

Before we get started, remember to follow us on whatever platform you’re picking this up. This will ensure you’re among the first to learn of new episodes. By doing so, you are helping to make the world a little greener and more regenerative because we plant a tree for every follow on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, and in our newsletter at CareMoreBeBetter.com. This is through our partnership with ForestPlanet, which is presently working to restore mangrove forests in Africa. Together, we’ve planted 24,251 trees. That’s only this 2025. Join us. Let’s help Earth regenerate. With that, let’s welcome Mollie Engelhart back to the show.

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Welcome to the show, Mollie.

Thank you so much for having me back.

From Leftist Vegan Chef To Conservative Regenerative Farmer

When we lost connection, you were still dealing with many of the challenges of being a restaurateur in California. We were emerging from the COVID pandemic. It gives people a snapshot to remember where we might have connected in the past. A lot has changed since then. I hope that you can give us a taste of your origin story, referring back to the earlier conversation, as we catch up. What took you from founding Sage Vegan Bistro in LA to running regenerative farms in both California and Texas?

As I have been an environmentalist my whole life, I was super committed to the environment. I had these restaurants, and I realized that food waste was a huge blind spot for most people. Methane from putrifying food is this huge gray area that we don’t talk about. We talk about green new energy. We talk about this. We talk about that. We talk about driving an electric car. Nobody is going to get rich from making sure that people don’t throw their food waste away, so it is a fringe issue.

I started to realize how big an issue it is, and I started to realize how much effort goes into growing food. I owned a restaurant. The massive amounts of food that were getting thrown away. People order 4 or 5 things to taste them, and they’re like, “Nothing is wrong. I just wanted to taste it,” and then throw it away. I wanted to start regenerating soil with that food waste, so I tried to get everybody I know to buy a farm. Nobody wanted to buy a farm. I realized I was the one I was waiting for, so I went and got a farm.

My husband was undocumented when we got married. At the time, I wanted to get a farm. It was very hard for us. Due to his status, we could not get a loan. This all took a long time. Finally, in 2018, I got my farm, and we started regenerating the soil. We started bringing the food from the restaurants back, and I quickly realized that the whole vegan thing was a lie.

I’d been a vegetarian since the womb and a vegan most of my life. There was no vegan food. I’m here, and I got this farm. I’m like, “We need to get some fertilizer. What kind of organic fertilizer can we get?” They’re like, “There’s chicken poop.” I’m like, “Let me find out where that’s coming from.” “It’s coming out of Tyson or Perdue factory farms.” “Let me see.”

How is that organic? Are you looking at organic compost?

I’m like, “This liquid fertilizer is supposed to be so good.” They’re like, “It’s made from fermented cow blood.” I’m like, “Where is the cow blood coming from?” They’re like, “It’s out of the consolidated feedlot system. It’s from processing facilities in Mexico.” I’m like, “Okay.” I’m like, “Blood meal, where’s that coming from?” They’re like, “It’s out of the consolidated feedlot system in America.” I start going through all the organic fertilizer options, and I come to realize that none of them are vegan. There’s some kelp, but we’re not going to rape the oceans in another way to get enough fertilizer to grow our food.

There is death on every plate. There is no way around that.

I’m like, “I need my own cow, so I can make my own fertilizer. I can treat the cow. Nothing is going to die on my farm. It’s going to be amazing.” I got a cow, and her name is Una. Una was already bred when I got her. She has a baby. She has this huge udder. The baby is only feeding off of the two front nipples because her udder hangs low, and he can’t quite get to the bottom ones. We’re milking off the other two udders, and I’m breastfeeding my baby and feeding my toddler organic oat milk in a tetra pack from Costco.

My baby is a year and a half, and I breastfed my other baby for two years. I’m like, “Look at me, three and a half, almost 4 years breastfeeding nonstop.” I’m having some ego moment where I’m acknowledging myself for breastfeeding for so long and how this is going to make their microbiology so healthy. I’m having this thought. I open the fridge because Rio wants milk, take out the tetrapack, and see this half-gallon wide-mouth jar with Una’s milk that my uncle had milked off in the fridge. It’s in a glass jar. I’m looking at the tetrapack, which, for sure, has chemicals and all this stuff.

They are multi-layer. They’re not recyclable. They have so many issues. You can recycle them in certain specialty centers, but almost no one does. It’s trash, and it’s full of other oils. When you start to look at the ingredients in the nut milk, it’s not just nut milk. It’s seed oil and all this other stuff, too.

I’m looking at this glass jar. It came from my cow. I’m a vegan. I’m holding my baby, who is breastfeeding, and my toddler is asking for milk. I thought, “How could my breast milk be gold, and Una’s breast milk is causing cancer and filled with pus? That does not make any sense.” I decide to start feeding my kid secretly raw milk from my cow because I’m thinking, “That’s got to be better. It’s got to have all the microbiology to defend against this exact environment that he lives in because she lives right here.” That was one.

Multiple things led me to believe that there is no vegan food, and that plant food is not the way and the light. It’s not necessarily more ecologically correct. It destroys ecosystems. This is not to say that factory farming is good. What I’m saying is I realized that there’s no way to shift what’s on your plate and saying, “Now I’m going to be good for the environment.” It’s about eating what’s in your environment. It’s about what is locally available and being a conscious, awake person who shakes the hand that feeds you, who is on a small farm diet.

I realize that you can’t be vegan and grow all your own food. The calories in, calories out doesn’t work unless you have big machinery and you’re using petrol calories to do so. Nothing made any sense. My husband is indigenous. He was like, “Vegan is some very privileged conversation in a world where you can choose to only eat one thing. It’s not environmentally better. It’s just that you’ve been taught that.” He was right, so I shifted.

Once I shifted on something that was such a profoundly held belief around veganism, I realized that I didn’t know what I believed about anything. I believed so passionately. My husband said I was radicalized. Maybe he’s right, I don’t know. I believed that veganism was the right way forward. I believed it was less harm, less death, and less everything. As I started farming, I realized that wasn’t true.

We’re growing avocado trees and protecting them, but we’re killing thousands of ground squirrels for avocado toast. I’m not saying we shouldn’t grow avocados. I want to be clear that there’s death on every plate, and there’s no way around that. That broke open my mind, my heart, and my ideas in a way that I’d never been broken open before.

I grew up on a farm, so I was not exactly a city dweller. I grew up around New York, and then I moved to LA. I had ideas that were formulated in cities. They weren’t conducive to the farm. As one idea fell away, and then another, over the past couple of years, honestly, my whole identity has changed. Everything I believe has changed. I did go from a vegan chef to a Texas cattle rancher. That’s a crazy transition.

While you’ve done this, you’ve still maintained a vegetarian diet, from what I understand.

I am a vegetarian. I do bone broth, and I have taken liver supplements when I was pregnant.

Balancing Personal Evolution And Public Scrutiny

How do you navigate that personal evolution and potentially even the public scrutiny that can come from having this kind of dichotomy in your personal and professional life?

I’ve always been a vegetarian. I’ve never eaten meat. I don’t think that meat is bad, but I don’t yet relate to meat like food. I was asking my son. I was like, “You can’t just have bread for dinner. You need to have some protein.” I was trying to get him to eat ground beef. He was like, “I want bacon.” My brain was twitching because I’ve been told that bacon and eggs are going to give you a heart attack, and it’s not good. Is the bacon from my own pigs from my own farm with no nitrates worse than beef? I don’t know. I’m realizing that all these ideas that I thought I knew 100%, I don’t know. I don’t yet relate to beef or pork as food, but it doesn’t mean that I never will. I just haven’t gotten there yet.

That is one of the things I recognized, too, when I made a transition from being an omnivore to mostly eating a vegetarian diet. It happened somewhat quickly that I stopped seeing meat as food. It didn’t look appetizing anymore. I’ve added back some chicken and some fish, but have not been able to bring myself to consume beef again.

Largely, my perspective was also to eat for the Earth. Eat for the things that have a lower impact. My main criticism of animal farming and animal foods is the CAFOs. Not enough of us are doing everything right yet. I still purchase meat for my entire family. My husband eats all sorts of meat. I buy them from a regenerative farm. It ships to me as opposed to being something more local, unfortunately. That means I have a year-round freezer, half a chest full of these products that are healthier and are better for my family than the stuff that you might go to Costco or to the grocery store and buy.

For those of us who are producing regenerative meat without the consumers, it doesn’t work.

It does cost more. There is a balanced effort in their work. You mentioned things like rodents, which you cover in the book. You covered the explosion of squirrels when you started doing a certain type of farming. You were like, “I need to somehow mitigate this. How are we going to do that?” It’s trapping, moving through nature, and trying to do things in the most friendly way, while also not trying to increase death on the farm.

The reality that you confront is that you have German Shepherds that are on your property taking apart some other animals that weren’t supposed to be part of the food chain. There are these unaccounted-for challenges that you face as a farmer in addition to the things that you might expect. The lay public doesn’t understand that. They don’t run into the mice in the field that have made a home at the base of your crop. They don’t understand that.

When I was a vegan, I used to see these videos of farmers using a forklift to try to pick up a cow. We’ve all seen these. Our reaction is, “This is abuse.” What I didn’t know is that if a cow is down for 24 hours, they’ll die. They get necrosis. Their legs start to fall asleep, and they can never stand up again. If a cow is down because she’s tired, she’s exhausted, or she has a sprained ankle, you have to get her up. Getting up an animal that weighs 1,000 to 1,500 pounds, there’s no other way.

We were trying to save a cow. She did have to be put down. She was my third cow I ever had, Olivia. I was desperate to save her. As my husband had the forklifts and we had these clamps that go on her hips to try to pull her up from the back to get some weight off her legs so she can put her legs down, and we’re massaging her leg and all this stuff, I was thinking I never thought that there might be a reasonable reason that people were lifting up a cow with a forklift. I’ve seen something that looked abusive.

I had a cow get into labor and get upside down on a hill. If cows lie upside down, their stomach can get twisted and they can die. There are things that can kill cows that we don’t think of as being a big deal. Lying down is a big deal if they don’t get up. They can’t lie down for any extended period of time because of how small their legs are compared to the size of their body.

There are so many things as a farmer that, as a vegan, I was judgmental of. I would not choose to use forklifts to move a cow out of the way for no reason. The same cow, Olivia, who had the injury from the bull, and we were trying to save her, we did save her several years ago. She got milk fever and couldn’t get up. We picked her up with a tractor for six hours every single day.

We did a hammock out of straps, held her up so that her blood flow could go to her legs, and then put her back down. We did that for 3 hours in the morning and then 3 hours at night. She was never more than twelve hours on the ground. We saved her. It was a huge effort for seven days. That was in 2019 or 2020. We had to put her down not long ago, but she had five more years of life and all of this stuff.

If you looked at that from the outside and you were just seeing guys strapping straps to a cow, you might think, “That’s abusive.” There are things that we don’t understand unless we’re dealing with them every single day. My way of being has shifted around animals, but my desire for them to be cared for has not. I’m the first to make sure that everybody is okay.

I have probably 200-plus animals on the ranch, not including chickens. There is a lot to care for. You do shift how you relate to every single animal. Every animal on the farm doesn’t have a name as they once did. All the cows do. Not every goat has a name anymore, and things like that. It is different to raise animals, for me, but there’s still a massive amount of reverence and appreciation. My kids have been there during the harvest. We don’t hide death from our children. My children have a much healthier relationship with death than I did growing up as a vegetarian.

This whole world of regenerative agriculture, in particular, somewhat relies on having animals responsibly tended so that you can rebuild the soil. It’s not just blood meal. It’s also their excrement. They poop where you want them to, or you can take that and put it somewhere else if you need to. I have friends in the horse business. They have very fertile gardens because they’ve got that rich manure on site all the time.

Forming A Coalition On Both Sides

I know in our earlier conversation we talked about the fact that your brother, Ryland Engelhart, who cofounded Kiss the Ground, was also instrumental in shaping your relationship and understanding of regeneration and soil, and also this community building around that. I wonder if you could detail a little bit of how he helped you on this journey, and if you have differing views about regeneration, what they might be.

My brother Ryland, who cofounded Kiss the Ground, has been very instrumental in how I view the world and regenerative agriculture. We live together here on the ranch. We’re doing this project together, and we see the world very similarly. We have different ideas about different things. He still has much more faith in the political system than I do. He worked on the RFK campaign. He’s working in Washington, lobbying for soil health.

He has a new organization that’s a 501(c)(4), the lobbying kind of organization. They’re trying to lobby for soil health advocacy in this administration and future administrations. I philosophically don’t disagree about regenerative agriculture. We disagree on whether the government can make things better or not. I’m a hard, “No, they cannot.” He still has faith that we can have some awesome change through government. That’s the difference.

I’m in the natural products industry. I go to Expo West each year. I saw at the Expo West a MAHA booth, for Make America Healthy Again. In viewing this, I appreciate the movement. I have my own reservations and doubts about whether they’ll make a difference. I know you’re also connected to Kelly Ryerson, who has also been on this show. We’ve connected a few times in person, as well as electronically.

She has a big hope and faith that RFK can do some things and will move things forward so that we have fewer pesticides in our systems, and that we are not facing the same troubles we have with glyphosate. Yet, what do we see? Suddenly, you have states ruling that you can’t sue Monsanto. They don’t want you to be able to go up and say, “I have cancer now because of what you’ve done in these fields.”

I’m cautiously optimistic when it comes to RFK, but I would say this. We’re having a lot of conversations about chemicals in our food, regenerative agriculture, and the future of agriculture on a government level, hearing after hearing. Your viewers are probably going to have a little throw-up in their mouth for me to even say this, but I’m going to the Heritage Foundation to talk about soil health.

We cannot be focused on things we do not agree on. We have to come together for the farmers and create a coalition on both sides of the aisles.

The truth is that if you’re still in a mindset of left and right or you’re still in a mindset of there are good guys and there are bad guys, you’re still in the psyop that has us divided as humanity. We’re not going to make the pathways forward that we need to. It has to be a coalition. For the first time in history, there’s an opportunity for the coalition of both sides of consumers to be a soft landing for farmers to make those transitions that need to be made. Instead of us figuring out how to do that, we’re arguing with each other, like, “The left has always been about this. The right is in this.”

This is what I say to people, “Would you like me to point out everything that the left did to destroy my business and how hard they made it to farm in California, or do you want to work from this moment forward on how we can have solutions?” I have no illusions that right or left is better. I know that they’re both corrupt, all funded, and all an illusion. We have to come together as human beings.

Some people believe that you should be able to have an abortion, and some people don’t, but those people could both believe that there should be no chemicals in our food. We could come together for the farmers and stop being divisive with each other. I went to a Texas family association for small farmers, and it was clearly left-leaning. There were groans when I said that we were showing this film at the Heritage Foundation.

This conversation is so much bigger. We are being poisoned into extinction. We are being poisoned into infertility. The coalition has to be on both sides of the aisle, and we can’t be focused on what we don’t agree on. We have to come together for the farmers and be that soft landing for consumers of a coalition on both sides of the aisle.

This is one space where you and I agree. I am probably as far left-leaning as you can be. Environmental issues should not be partisan. We’ve made them partisan, which is bullshit. Let’s call a spade a spade.

I understand it’s easy to point fingers on either side about what someone has done, but it isn’t. It should not be partisan because it’s affecting all of us equally, no matter who we voted for.

The sad thing, though, tends to be that in Republican environments where we have a Republican in that leadership position, we have loosened restrictions when it comes to the EPA. Some of the restrictions on clean air are starting to disappear. I have a friend who finished her dissertation, her PhD, specifically having to tackle an issue related to how they put these machines on coal-fired plants to capture the methyl mercury that would otherwise be oxidized into the atmosphere.

It’s somewhat expensive to do, but it’s a one-time fee. You have to buy the machinery to do this to make sure that the methyl mercury doesn’t end up in the air. It’s a simple solution, because when it does, it comes down in the rainwater. When it comes down in the rainwater, you suddenly have fish that are so high in mercury. They are in your streams, rivers, and lakes. You can’t consume them because they have too much mercury present in them. They have too much methyl mercury, which is hugely toxic, especially to the brain.

We loosen restrictions to the point where it looks like this regulation has been lifted, so that coal-fired plants don’t have to do this. Meanwhile, it’s like, “Burn, baby, burn. Get that energy cost down. Let’s go ahead and do more coal, more gas, more oil, more fracking, more this, and more that.” We’ve created a problem for future generations, or even those people who are looking to do subsistence consumption of food.

These are huge problems, and they should not be politicized. We deserve clean air, clean drinking water, and clean food. We deserve foods that are free of glyphosate so that we can have healthy environments. We are in complete agreement. We need to put enough pressure on these individuals from both sides of the aisle so that change happens. That has been the main frustration that people have across the board.

Why We Should Rethink Our Regulations

I fundamentally agree with you that the commons should be regulated, but ultimately, nothing else should be regulated, in my opinion. People who are not farming and people who do not own brick-and-mortar businesses in the real world love to pressure about how regulation should be, where they never have to navigate those regulations themselves. As someone who has run restaurants and farms in the most regulated state that there is, I disagree.

I get it.

There’s significant evidence that with the Nord Stream pipeline, we either were complicit in it or did it ourselves. There is plenty of evidence that we have done a lot of shady deals around solar and wind that aren’t making a difference. I have dear friends here in Texas who have a ranch. They put all their money into it. They made it self-sufficient. They had chickens, cattle, and everything. They bought a section of a bigger ranch, and then the rest of that ranch was sold to a solar farm.

The solar farm was spraying something to keep the dust down while they were installing it. Whatever they were spraying contaminated all their ponds and their well. Their cows and chickens are dying. They’re leaving and moving to another state. They’re starting over. They’re devastated. They’re going to have to sue the solar farm.

They have to prove that it came from them. That process is also hard, expensive, time-consuming, and lengthy. It’s a lengthy process.

In certain ways, we love to regulate. In other ways, we think it’s green, so we want to push that through. We need to think about the impact on air, water, and soil in everything. I mostly think everything else should not be regulated. The conversations in the Green New Deal or most green policies coming from the left are highly focused on renewables, electric cars, wind power, and solar batteries. These things have their own environmental costs.

We will push many other countries into poverty that are more than already in poverty if we try to impose our regulations around oil and gas onto other people. We are going to stop drilling in Los Angeles as of 2030 or whatever year it’s going to be, but we’re not stopping the use of oil and gas in Los Angeles. I’m a fan of if we are going to use these things, we should be mining them and doing them in our own backyard. If we want to use lithium, then we should be mining it in Texas, Arkansas, or wherever. If we want gasoline, we should be mining it here at home and have it be the cleanest and best version.

We love to make regulations in the United States, mostly fueled by the left, and then we still utilize dirty places around the world. We’re harming indigenous people, poor people, and children all around the world. We don’t have any intention of stopping using our cell phones, our computers, gas in our cars, and lithium batteries. We do love to regulate it and then push the production to places with less regulations and harm indigenous people, people of color, young people, and the water supplies in these other countries that do not have the power to fight back. We have to be more responsible and more resilient at home in every way.

Addressing Chemical Pollution As Soon As Possible

I don’t disagree with you there. If you talk about California, we have some regulations that piss me off. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve lived here for most of my life, since I was about thirteen at this point. There’s one that happens to be something I came across because I was looking at chemical pollution and how chemical pollution can have a greater impact in some cases than things like driving a million cars for a year.

One of those is the tenting of homes in Southern California every time they’re sold. It has become common practice because before you sell it, you have to make sure that you don’t have termites. Termites are a problem here, so we tent the homes. The chemicals they use to tent the homes have a half-life that’s much stronger than CO2 for how long they stay up in the atmosphere. They are released every time the home is not tented. There’s no system for capturing those chemicals. It’s akin to a million cars driving for a year on our roads, which is what happens every year in Southern California, not even including Central California or Northern California.

We have technologies already that exist that could reduce our need to even use these chemicals in the first place. For instance, heating the home to something like 160 degrees, which, especially in the summer months, isn’t that hard to do. If you were to put a few reflectors on the home for a period of time, then you wouldn’t have the issues of having those chemicals accidentally kill a family pet that got left behind, or things along those lines as well. There are other solutions in place.

The regulations are such that these things are embedded technologies. They’re industries that exist. We don’t want to look at it. It’s like, “Don’t look at this problem behind the curtain, but let’s go ahead and work to make that by 2030, there’s no new car sold in California that is not electric.” You’re going to have people who go out of state to buy a vehicle who are going to have a challenge registering here and might choose to move out of state, too. These things are going to create other challenges, because guess what? A work truck that you need is likely to be gas or diesel.

The people that I was talking about had a business of cutting all the trees on the power lines. In Northern California, that’s what they did. They started getting regulations that they had to use electric chainsaws and, by a certain year, electric trucks. That’s not feasible, for when you’re cutting all day long, you have an hour and a half battery life, and you have to have 100 batteries in the truck. I have an electric chainsaw. I love it. It’s like my size. It’s not for every job. There are electric chainsaw jobs, and then there’s “my husband needs to go get the big chainsaw” jobs.

It’s time and place. It is common sense. There are some of these things that don’t make a ton of sense. For instance, the infrastructure doesn’t exist here from a power perspective for every home to have a place to plug in an electric car, and also maintain air conditioning in the summer months. How many planned brownouts have we had because the wind was blowing or because too many people were plugging in their electric cars, and therefore, we had a power outage?

We’re going to use more coal power.

We don’t have the infrastructure to manage those things because that infrastructure has not been built. These are complex issues. There’s only so much cobalt that’s being used in these electric cars. I’m not confident that we have perfected the technology to the point where we can be in this space. We need to be looking at the broader industry. We need to be looking at food systems. It’s not just cow burps. That’s one part of the problem.

Your earlier conversation when you were talking about all the food waste that creates methane, food waste that creates methane is a major problem. It’s also what makes your trash stink. If we can compost virtually all of it, then we can create new soil and new life instead of having stinky garbage and poorly regulated and poorly managed waste centers.

There’s not a lot of money to be made by that. That’s why it’s not a big thing. The solar industry is printing millionaires. That is the reality. In the electric car industry, there’s money to be made, but regenerative agriculture, composting, recycling your food waste, and keeping your poop in the loop are not ways that anybody can make any money. You can make some money, but it’s not going to get a big push. That’s my argument.

On both sides of the aisle, there are all these subsidies for certain things. Are those things helping the people, or are they just another way to make some other people rich? For me, it occurs on both sides of the aisle that there are a lot of these subsidies and carve-outs for certain industries. I don’t agree with certain industries, and I don’t agree with either side. I want better things for the people.

In my opinion, there are a lot of conversations about inequity, farming, who is farming, and who has access to land. That could be solved with a banking product. If we want to subsidize something, why don’t we subsidize a 3% down mortgage for land instead of needing 30% to put down on land? A lot more people would start farming if you could get on land for 3%. There are already tractor loans and stuff. For tractors, there is already 0% financing, like Kubota has, and stuff like that. If you could get odd land for not having to put 30%, do you know how many more people would have access to land? Every different race, gender, and creed will be going on land.

I hear people in all spectrums of life wanting to be on land, wanting to connect with nature, and wanting to grow their own food, but we don’t have a banking product for that. We print money out of thin air. Why don’t we print money out of thin air to secure our local food systems, which is a national security issue largely ignored by both sides of the aisle? We are outsourcing every bite of our food to the cheapest hourly wage from all around the world, just like we do with our fashion, tech, and so many other things.

You speak to a problem that we have because it’s the cost of labor. We’re in a situation where a lot of these farms are having laborers who don’t show up for work out of fear of ICE raids and things along those lines. We’re seeing that in California and my area. I have personally seen that the selection of produce seems to be dropping. I’m having entire farming stands that don’t show up. I go to the farmer’s market every weekend on Saturday. Some stands aren’t showing up with their bounty because there aren’t enough people there to pick the produce and bring it to the market.

The United States relies on an undocumented population to support the food prices we are currently at. If you do not think that, you are disconnected from reality.

These are real problems that we’re having to face. As a country and as an entire populace, it’s also something where we have to come together and create solutions. You write in your book that in your family, patriotism isn’t optional. It’s a core value. Some people are having a challenge, in a way, connecting with their own patriotism, even those who may have been very patriotic in the past. We still put our flag out every holiday, but I’ve got to tell you that some days, I’m having a hard time in my stomach with it because I’m seeing so much abuse in my community.

Solving Issues On Border Security And Immigration

I speak extensively about what I think about immigration. My husband was undocumented when we got married. I took custody of a minor, Osmar. He got married and moved away from us. He was with us for the last five-plus years. I feel like I’ve worked in hospitality and farming for many years. I want to say three things. The system is broken. Both sides of the aisle have had both sides of the House and the presidency, and have not made a change. I can tell you what the changes need to be pretty clearly from a very rounded perspective. The border does need to be secured. That’s not racist. That’s not crazy. That’s what a country needs.

We need a pathway for the labor that we need. We do need labor, so we need a pathway. It cannot only be H-2B and H-2A visas that are 6 months and 10 months. We need a long-term low-skill. I want to be clear about what I’m saying about low skill. I don’t mean it in a diminishing way. I mean that we have these long-term permits for people who have doctorates, etc., but not for factory workers, manual labor, farm labor, and kitchen labor. These are the things.

Here’s my proposal. We secure the border. The border is secure. Anybody who thinks the border is not secure isn’t integrated into the community. The border is secured by the cartels. The cartels are charging $10,000 to $13,000 across the border. When you see all those lines of people and you’re saying it’s a humanitarian crisis, it is a humanitarian crisis, and the person that’s abusing them is the cartels. If you don’t want that to stop, then you’re part of the problem as far as I’m concerned.

This is something you wrote about in the book, which was news to me. I had heard about people paying fees to come through the borders illegally. Not that that was related to asylum seekers. I didn’t think that was the case at all. In reading your book, you referred to anybody who came across the border, at least the Southern border of the United States.

Can I give you an example? I’m not going to give names, people, or whatever. If you’re in El Salvador, Guatemala, or Honduras and you’re going to walk from there or take trains and multiple things, you are paying somebody to navigate through cartel territory through the border to get up. They’re not walking at the port of entry. Where are you seeing people walking at the port of entry and saying, “I’m claiming asylum. Here I am.” They’re intentionally coming through where they know they’re going to get caught, but they’re already on US soil when they’re claiming asylum.

They’re also all being robbed at a certain point. There’s a planned robbery along the way. These people are walking with everything they own. They’re being raped, they are being robbed, and they are living in fear. Over 100,000 people a year or something are not showing up on the other side of the border. There are 600,000 children. It was 345,000, and then I heard that it’s higher than that. We don’t know where they are.

They never made it.

These are people who made it here. We handed them out to a non-relative, and we have lost track of them. They’re undocumented. They’re unaccompanied. They’re in this country with we don’t know who, and we didn’t follow them along. Where I’m standing is that it is a humanitarian crisis. Women are getting murdered, raped, and so many terrible things.

I am deeply rooted in the undocumented community in LA. I am married to someone who was an undocumented person in Los Angeles. He’s now an American. I have firsthand accounts of horrific brothers watching their sisters being raped at a young age. I know one person who paid multiple times and thought that he could navigate it himself. He didn’t pay after doing it multiple times. I do not know a single person who didn’t pay to cross, whether they were an asylum seeker or not.

That’s devastating. That’s terrible.

The wall is not racist. It’s going to create some order. I don’t even care if it’s a wall. It could be drones. We talk about defunding everything else. Why don’t we defund this criminal organization that is hurting children and bringing drugs into our country? On the other side, they are doing nothing. On the Republican side, it’s like, “I don’t want anybody. Replacement theory. American jobs.” Those people are not farmers. They’re not restaurateurs. I don’t care. You meet a conservative farmer who has row crops, and they’re not going to look you in the eyes when someone starts talking like that because they all know what the reality is.

They rely on them for the strawberry picking and the work.

Every one of us who eats food in the United States of America relies on an undocumented population to support the food prices that we’re at. If you don’t think that, then you’re disconnected. There are people who have been here for 25 years, or maybe not, because Reagan did a sweeping thing, but I do know people who have been here, and they started with Reagan. People who have been here for more than 5 years or 10 years and are paying their taxes, I don’t think you should make a pathway to citizenship. You need to make a pathway to safety and security so that they don’t have to be living in fear as they’re paying social security, paying taxes, and contributing to society.

I believe we need to make a 10-year work permit that can be renewed once for low-skilled or manual labor, and it costs $10,000. That’s less than the price to pass with the cartels. That money goes to our government. That money goes to cover many of the things that people claim are burdens on our society. It’s not going to the cartels.

This is a way that we fund the government. We give these work permits. People have to check in. They have to stay employed. They can’t drive drunk, beat up their wife, or whatever. They get to be here, and they get to go home with dignity to see their daughters’ quinceañera or go home for Christmas. They’re not left 24 years without seeing their children.

They’re afraid to leave because they don’t know if they can come back again. That is exactly the problem.

That is a humanitarian crisis, too. People are having four grandchildren and have never met any of them, or watching their father die on FaceTime, is also a humanitarian crisis that the Democrats are fully complicit in, because they have never done anything to fix it. I don’t think this is a partisan issue. We love to make it a partisan issue, but Obama deported more than anyone else has. Trump might beat him. He’s trying.

This is not a partisan issue. This is an issue of the need for labor. We do need to be good neighbors. I believe that Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras should be prioritized. Our neighbors should have financial security and stability. It makes us more secure as a nation. I feel very strongly about this. I write about it a lot.

I write for Epoch Times. I’ve written pretty extensively in Epoch Times about it, and people don’t like what I’m saying. I write in more liberal magazines, and people also don’t like what I’m saying there. We have to have a compromise and come to a place in the middle. That place in the middle is going to need more order and is going to need some security at the border. It is also going to need a long-term solution for people who are here and for labor moving forward, which is not just a temporary visa for a six-month season on a farm or whatever.

Why do you preclude or not want to include a pathway to citizenship and some sort of compromise solution like this?

Everybody that’s DACA should probably get citizenship because I know that it has to be something that both sides are going to vote for. We have to make compromises.

It used to be that marriage was a pathway to citizenship, but that seems to be something that is of the past. You have so many people who remain undocumented after becoming married and even having children.

I beg to differ. They didn’t do the work to do it. It’s a lot of work. Marriage is still a pathway to citizenship. I saw this interview with this woman, and I was like, “I don’t understand why you have five children and have been married eleven years, and your husband got deported. What were you doing?” It takes time. It takes effort.

They didn’t go through all the hoops, is what you’re saying.

Maybe not even started the hoops. My husband got a work permit and a social security number, and then he became a green card holder, and then he became an American citizen. It took us seven years. It is a pathway, so I call that not true. Marriage should be a pathway to citizenship. You should be able to be with your family. What I’m saying is that we blanket and say everybody that’s here that’s undocumented is 11 million to 15 million to 21 million. There are a lot of statistics out there.

The numbers don’t agree. I know. It’s like, “Who are you reading it from?”

You’re never going to get conservatives to agree to swipe this with a stroke of a pen. What’s very interesting is that younger Latinos who were born here or came here when they were very young are largely left-leaning statistically. I was so indoctrinated into the left-leaning ideology that I assumed that my husband was liberal because he was Latino. He’s Catholic from Mexico. He’s not liberal. He was like, “Get in the kitchen.”

All of my family on the East Coast are East Coast Italians, and you better believe 100%.

I’m an East Coast Italian. Pizzolo is my mother’s maiden name. Staten Island is the one Red Borough of New York City. I believe that. What I’m saying is there’s a missed opportunity for Republicans with Latinos because culturally, there is a huge drift towards conservative values, but they have largely been left out of the conversation when it comes to the conservative party. I would say that both sides are culpable. What’s happening in LA and California is not happening here in Texas. Not at all. I have no relationship to it. Personally, it is disgusting.

I’m here in Texas, and we’re searching for bodies in the river with Mexicans, White people, and Black people. At the Hunt Store, which is the worst, messed-up area, there’s an American flag, a Texas flag, and a Mexican flag flying on the flagpole. In my day-to-day experience here, there’s no ICE anywhere. Nothing is like that, so I don’t have experience with it. I do have restaurant owner friends who have called me and are like, “What are they doing? They’re raiding restaurants on Friday night.”

I don’t know, but I suspect it’s a strategy for division. I suspect it’s to cause inflammation. I suspect it’s from us being distracted from something else. It doesn’t make sense politically for Trump. There’s 75% approval for DACA kids to get citizenship or a pathway to stay here. Nobody was like, “We need to tackle the guy on the corner selling watermelon.” It’s not a good look for anybody. I feel like it’s a false flag or something else is happening.

Always try to navigate situations without losing the love or causing division.

Increased division with California. Trump does have a thing against Gavin Newsom that’s evident.

It can also be anything to stop us from looking at pictures of what’s happening in Gaza.

It can also be to stop us from talking about the Epstein files.

I agree. What I would say is that whatever we’re thinking it is, we probably don’t know. It doesn’t make sense. It’s not a good political move. It’s not what he ran on. It’s not what he’s committed to, and I don’t think it’s what Americans are committed to on either side of the aisle.

Not Shying Away From Difficult Conversations

One of the things that you said on an Instagram post had to do with war and the fact that we seem to be funding more wars than we ever anticipated, and that we are funneling resources outside of the United States to these efforts against Iran. The war in Ukraine is still not over. We have given so many supplies and financial resources to that arena as well. When does it stop? When does all of this warmongering stop?

I think about something like the Southern border and the cartels. Understanding how strong the cartels are in Mexico, we would be initiating another war if we were to attack that issue in that way. How it would be fought, who knows? How much of this could be managed politically with the Mexican government, who knows

There are so many uncertainties around the world with our hand in some of these pots that it creates this sense of complete lack of control or ability to influence by most Americans. What we see at the same time is a certain disengagement with politics. It’s like, “What can I change? I’m not able to stop us from sending bombs to these countries instead of aid. Why can’t we send the aid that was needed instead?” It’s so maddening.

I probably come from an empathy-first perspective when it comes to a lot of this stuff. That’s the thing that drives a lot of my personal desire to talk about these big issues. Even if I can’t directly make an impact, I’m going to do something. I’ll get people thinking, even talking about it with you. That can be part of what initiates an idea shift or a movement away from the things that we might have been doing wrong, towards something better for everybody.

I want to acknowledge you. I hired my old assistant to go through all my old episodes. On the spreadsheet next to your episode, it says, “Too woke?” I put on the spreadsheet, “No, go ahead.” I want to acknowledge you for being somebody who’s like, “This person’s ideas don’t necessarily align with mine. I’m interested in having this conversation with her because she’s someone who may have squarely 100% agreed with me before, and now she doesn’t. This is an interesting conversation.” I want to acknowledge you for being someone in the world that doesn’t shy away from a conversation that you know going into you’re not going to agree on. I want to say that that is a beautiful quality, and it’s one that I want to teach my children because it’s getting rare in this world.

You write about this in your book. You write about the fact that you have maintained friendships with people who are across the aisle, and that some of them might make fun of you for one reason or another. I have the same situation. Somebody I consider a dear friend who’s an actor in LA is as right-leaning as I am left.

He teases me and will say things like, “Go get in your Subaru, you blue-haired lesbian.” I’m not a lesbian, but he jokes around because I’m on that left side. I tell him, “You’re too old to be a has-been actor, so good luck making it or something.” We rib each other. That’s a healthy way to get over the uneven bumps in our friendship, but I also consider him one of my most valued friends. He’s a cheerleader and supporter for everything I’m doing in this space of sustainability in another way, or through this show. I appreciate that. I appreciate him. I appreciate you.

I think that we need to have more discourse, not less. We need to have more conversations that are sometimes uncomfortable, not less. It seems that through bite-sized social media things, we’re all aggravated all the time. We get used to it. Instead of listening to one another, we think we know everything that that person is about without ever getting to know them. That’s my soapbox for the day. Especially as it comes to this common-sense approach to agriculture, you and I agree more than we disagree. I want to see real solutions in place. I want to be able to see real food on people’s plates, not something that just came out of a box and microwaved.

I’m out here doing that, trying to create real solutions. Most people who are very angry on the internet who have a lot of time, and I make up this because I don’t know my trolls in real life. I’ve met one of them, but I don’t know what they’re doing with their life that they have time to tell me every single thing that I’m doing is wrong or bad. I don’t have time.

I have a beautiful family that I love. I have a beautiful farm. We’re trying very hard to make this project work. I am releasing a book. I’m trying hard to get out into the atmosphere and help us have people come and buy meat and see other ways that the book can interact with people. I don’t have time to be angry. I feel like I was led to this place through a deep spiritual connection. I could be wrong. It could not be true, but this is my truth.

I love anybody who is true to their truth. Many people’s truths are different from mine. I want to be in the conversation, and I want us to be able to share ideas. A lot of ideas that I was totally closed off to make sense to me now, but I would never have been able to hear them at a different time. Honestly, I love that you have that friend. Besides my family in Staten Island, I didn’t have day-to-day conservative friends at all in LA. My whole world, prior to moving to Fillmore, everybody agreed on the same thing. We believed everything was the same.

COVID was very shifting for me, mostly because I had never been vaccinated ever in my life. I’d never been vaccinated. I was pregnant and breastfeeding. There was no chance I was going to take that injection, and this weird thing happened with friends that I’ve been friends with for my whole life. I thought there was nothing that could come between us.

What it taught me is that I want to be able to navigate situations like that in the future in such a way that love can still be present. We don’t divide. We see each other with empathy and compassion, and we can say, “I can get it. You’ve never had a childhood vaccine. You’ve never had any vaccines. You don’t go to the hospital. You had your kids at home. I totally get why this wouldn’t resonate with you.” I can be like, I totally get that you’re a school teacher and they want you to do this. You feel good about it. You’re going to make that choice.”

I got hurt, and I said things that maybe weren’t as nice as I could have said them. I don’t ever want to be in that place that I was during COVID. I’ve hurt and separated from people I love over ideology. I want the soul that I am and the soul that they are in our hearts to always have a connection, even if our ideas differ. As I’ve seen over the last few years, my ideas on so much have changed, but my heart and my foundational commitments to earth, the animals, and my family have not.

What you’re saying is that your core hasn’t shifted. It’s how you see the structure around the world, but political structure, more than a lot of things, and control.

Also, how I see nature.

Future Plans For The Sovereignty Ranch

As we get ready to close this episode, I wanted to offer you the opportunity to provide a snapshot of what your vision for Sovereignty Ranch in Texas is. I understand it’s a model for others to potentially follow. It’s also a deeply personal experiment, perhaps, in self-reliance. I saw some examples of hosting weddings on the site, and things like tiny homes, and along those lines, that can be rented by individuals. They’re curious to come through and explore it.

I no longer want to get something that I’m going to scale up and sell for millions of dollars, or whatever vibes that I was doing with my restaurants in LA. I want something that’s small and beautiful and creates a ripple effect that inspires other people to do things that are small and beautiful. In our local environment, we can make the most impact.

We all feel somewhat impotent when we look at the structures of the world and how messed up everything is. I can look out at these 200 acres. I can live in a community on these 200 acres. I can serve 100% regenerative and organic food every single weekend with the highest quality and the highest intentions. I can go on a farm tour with the guests and share my heart out about regenerative agriculture.

We have 40 beds on the ranch. We have a restaurant on the ranch. We have a venue in this field. You can do small festivals here. You can do yoga retreats. We do church retreats. We do men’s retreats, women’s retreats, and couples retreats. We do soil classes and all different kinds of farming education. We have a yurt. We have a conference room for 300 people or a yurt for 50 people. It depends on what your size is.

We want to be the ripple effect in the world. We want you to come here. We want you to eat a meal that was made with love, grown on the farm right here, feel the coherency of what it feels like to eat local food, and see that food growing in the field or in the greenhouse. I want you to take that home with you, and I hope that you’re then inspired to shop at your local farmer’s market, support a regenerative farmer near you, or mail order from a regenerative farmer that’s a little bit further away from you.

We rely on mail order for a lot of things. It has been hot. We’re not shipping meat until it boils down a little bit. I make tallow balm. I make eye shimmers, ChapStick, bug repellent, deodorant, and all those things with tallow. I depend on people to buy those mail orders over the internet. Support people who are doing things that you’re inspired by because it only works. You might not be inspired by me. You might be like, “She has voted for Trump. I’m not going to buy a tallow shimmer from a Trumper.”

Newsflash, a lot of people in the farming community did and are supporters.

That’s not a newsflash to me.

I know, but for some of the people who are reading. I have interviewed so many people in the regenerative space. I’ve had Josh Tickell on. We’ve interviewed and talked to him about Common Ground, for example. One of the things I asked him during that interview was what his perspective was on the politics of what the food systems are and where we are with the political dynamics.

He came through with a very diplomatic answer about the fact that we all need to eat, we all need to do these things every day, and these should not be political issues. We need to be more concerned with the fact that the farmer is getting $0.8 on the dollar of the profits that come from the food systems. They’re squeezed with their margins every day and asked to do more with less. We need to change some of these dynamics. I completely agree with that.

Having been somebody who grew up on a hippie commune where we tried to do a lot of our food procurement ourselves, raised rabbits and chickens, and had animals get into the hen house and decimate them, you experience the challenges and realities of running a small farm that supports a single, two, or three households. This changes how you see things. You do need to understand that some of these things are not political. There’s no situation in which a food can be completely vegan. Even when you look at food ingredients, how many parts per million of fly parts are in that flower? Not zero.

Why We Are Meant To Eat Of Healthy Soil

I want to invite one other perspective on why it may be that a lot of farmers lean to the left or the right. You have to imagine what it is to have a job where 85% of you or us have an off-farm job. We’re working eight hours a day, and then we’re coming home and working another 8 to 10 hours a day on the farm. We’re leveraging our land every year to get to harvest. This level of stress and this level of white knuckling it just to hold on to the family land and have the privilege of feeding America is hard.

We are meant to eat of healthy soil. We are not the scourge and plague on the planet.

We look out and see people on the news who are talking about, “I had to work for three hours before I got my first 20.” The world has completely forgotten how hard it is to farm and how hard it is to provide food to America. I think farmers feel left by the left, if I were to guess. There has always been a divide between the organic consumer and the organic farmer. Acres struggled with that when they canceled Joel Salatin at the Acres Conference. They have the biggest ecological conference. Farmers were like, “I don’t want to come to a conference if you’re canceling Joe Salatin.” This is before the new ownership of acres, and they’ve brought Joe Salatin back to their thing.

There have always been two sides. This is the first time that the Republican Party, all of a sudden, is super interested in food, chemicals in our food, and all this stuff. Whether it’s real or not, it’s happening. I’m going to take every opportunity to get in front of every senator. I’m happy to go to the Heritage Foundation. I’m happy to go on their podcast.

As much as we can talk about soil health as the best thing that we can do, I will go on every podcast that I can, no matter which side of the aisle they are, and evangelize that healthy soil is 73% the same DNA as the microbiology in you. We are meant to eat healthy soil. Whether you believe in the Bible and that God picked up some soil, made man, and blew his breath into it, or you believe in evolution, either way, I’m telling you that 73% is the same DNA. When you do a scrape swab of your mouth or something, 10% is your DNA, and 90% is your microbiology. That microbiology is 73% the same as healthy soil. We are meant to eat healthy soil. We come from it. We need to get back to it.

A lot of the ideas in the green movement in this day and age have created apathy because we think that we’re the scourge, the problem, or the plague on the planet. I want to remind every person listening to any podcast that no matter who you voted for, you belong here. You need to interact with nature as if you are the keystone species, because you are.

Step into your role and interact with nature. You cannot just go to the cities, separate from them, and try to out-science them. We have to re-engage because we are part of the ecosystem. I don’t want people to think they don’t belong here. The underlying message that I was receiving for many years, whether I was hearing it wrong or not, from the environmental movement, is that we are the problem. In that conversation, we start to think, “It’s okay if we get poisoned because we’re bad,” but we’re not bad. We just have to shift our relationship with nature.

You’ve revealed one of the dark underbellies of any movement. The reality is that there are those on either side of the aisle, but there are better ways to do farming. You can do so regeneratively. Animals are part of that, too. We need to do better. Thank you so much for joining me. This has been my pleasure. I hope that you’ll be willing and able to come back.

I will. Everybody, my book is out for pre-order. I don’t know when this is coming out, but it’s out for pre-order. It’ll be out on Amazon, the Acres USA website, and my website on the 25th of September 2025, but it’s out for pre-order. You can order it if you’d like.

As always, I’ll put it in my Amazon shop as well. I believe you can do the pre-orders for $9.99 on Amazon for delivery to your Kindle.

They have to have the physical book to put it on because they have to check it, so right now, it’s only for Kindle. Soon, it’ll be for the book, too.

A reminder for those who do care about the environment deeply, a single page of paper can be as much as two gallons of water to process. If you can buy on your digital device, you get no delay. It’s directly in your inbox as soon as it’s available. You’re also being kinder to the environment. Thank you so much for joining me.

Thank you.

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Episode Wrap-up And Closing Words

I so appreciated Mollie joining me to share her views, sitting with complex questions that are both personal and political. Whether you agree, disagree, or find yourself somewhere in between, your journey into regeneration, to family life, and deep inquiry is something that we should all be focused on.

I look forward to following the continued evolution of Sovereignty Ranch and to listening to how Mollie’s voice grows, adapts, and even changes with time. The fact is that none of us should be completely stagnant. We should continue learning. This is something that should be part of each of our DNAs.

To all of those tuning in, if you enjoyed the discussion, I encourage you to check out Mollie Engelhart’s new book, Debunked by Nature. It’s available on Amazon for pre-order on Kindle. You can always set an alarm to review it again on September 25th, 2025, I believe. Until next time, stay curious, stay connected, and keep learning. When we approach learning with care and a collaborative heart, we create a better world. We do that together. Thank you.

• Sovereignty Ranch
• Debunked by Nature on Amazon
• Debunked by Nature on Acres USA
• Mollie Engelhart on LinkedIn
• Mollie Engelhart on YouTube
• Mollie Engelhart on Instagram
• Mollie Engelhart on Facebook
• Kiss the Ground
• Care More Be Better on Apple Podcasts
• Care More Be Better on YouTube
• Care More Be Better on Spotify
• ForestPlanet
• Freeing The Soil of Glyphosate with Kelly Ryerson
• Pushing Regenerative Agriculture To The Mainstream With Josh Tickell