How California’s Policies Forced Me to Give Up My Farm and Move to Texas: Mollie Engelhart
American Thought Leaders
The Epoch Times
4.9 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 2 January 2024
⏱️ 44 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
“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.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You see it all over LA restaurants that have been opened for 10 years that had a line outside just |
| 0:05.3 | closing with no notice. |
| 0:07.1 | Molly Engelhardt is a chef entrepreneur and regenerative farmer. |
| 0:11.4 | She built an incredible farm-to-table business in California, but |
| 0:15.5 | recently made the difficult decision to give it all up and start from scratch in |
| 0:19.9 | Texas. Every little thing is highly, highly regulated. |
| 0:24.4 | I mean, I've even been rated by the ABC, them saying we weren't brewing our own beer when |
| 0:29.2 | we were. |
| 0:30.2 | It's rare that someone that has a brick and mortar business |
| 0:33.6 | thinks that the regulations in California are working. |
| 0:36.7 | What is the end game? |
| 0:39.2 | I don't know. |
| 0:40.3 | This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Yanya Kellick. |
| 0:46.0 | Molly Engelhart, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. |
| 0:50.0 | Thank you so much for having me. |
| 0:52.0 | Well, so tell me about this place. |
| 0:55.0 | This is so a heart farm. |
| 0:56.5 | This is kind of a dream taking on shape, form, |
| 1:00.2 | and experience in the world. |
| 1:01.9 | 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 |
| 1:15.6 | so that I could keep the food in the loop and it evolved into this beautiful |
| 1:20.2 | place that we grow food for our restaurants and for our community and it became |
... |
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