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The Homeschool How To
I don't claim to know anything about homeschooling, so I set out on a journey to ask the people who do! Join me as I chat with homeschoolers to discuss; "why are people homeschooling," "what are all the ways people are using to homeschool today," and ultimately, "should I homeschool my kids?"
The Homeschool How To
#129: Vegan to Rancher: Mollie Englehart on Regenerative Agriculture, Homeschooling, and the Raw Milk Revival
What happens when a vegan restaurateur becomes a regenerative cattle rancher and homeschooling mom? In this groundbreaking episode of The Homeschool How To Podcast, Cheryl interviews Mollie Englehart, a trailblazing voice in regenerative farming, food sovereignty, and natural living.
Mollie owned five successful vegan restaurants in Los Angeles—until her journey into composting, soil health, and motherhood unraveled everything she once believed about food, nutrition, and the environment.
🌿 In this episode, we explore:
- Why Mollie left the vegan lifestyle behind
- The truth about how our food is grown—and what it's doing to our health
- Raising and educating kids on a working ranch
- The deep connection between soil health, gut health, and the microbiome
- Raw milk myths debunked—and why it’s making a comeback
- How modern medicine has strayed from nature’s wisdom
- Why Mollie is raising her children to be self-reliant, curious, and resilient
Whether you're curious about regenerative farming, unschooling, or the raw milk movement, this episode will challenge everything you thought you knew about health, nutrition, and education.
🔖 Mentioned in this episode:
👉 Mollie’s upcoming book Debunked by Nature — Pre-order here
👉 Sovereignty Ranch
👉 15% off Tuttle Twins books with code Cheryl15
👉 Enroll now for Excelsior Classes Fall 2025 — perfect for homeschoolers!
🎧 Subscribe and share this episode with a fellow parent or health-conscious friend ready to rethink everything.
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Welcome to this week's episode of the Homeschool How-To. I'm Cheryl and I invite you to join me on my quest to find out why are people homeschooling, how do you do it, how does it differ from region to region, and should I homeschool my kids? Stick with me as I interview homeschooling families across the country to unfold the answers to each of these questions week by week. Welcome, and with me today I have Molly Englehart, a former vegan turned cattle rancher. Welcome, molly.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for having me. I'm honored to be here this evening.
Speaker 1:I'm glad I read over that little part. I'm not sure, like you know, when the requests come in, I'm kind of looking at it and like, okay, yes, let's get you on. And I forgot that. You know, you were the one that said that. So I'm glad I went back to the beginning of our conversation this morning. It makes me sound very organized, which I am. Anything but how, and we will get into homeschooling. But how did you and I think I know because I used to be quite a liberal- myself.
Speaker 2:But how did you go from a vegan to a cattle rancher? So I owned a chain of very well-known restaurants in Los Angeles called Sage Vegan Bistro and they were very, very popular. I had five locations across the Los Angeles area and I started all those restaurants with the most integrity of that. I believed it was what was best for the planet and it was the best diet. And all of that, and through wanting to be the best environmentalist, I started to find out other stuff. My brother started a foundation called Kiss the Ground, which was a soil nonprofit, and he has the movies right?
Speaker 1:Yes, kiss the Ground and Common Ground yes exactly, yes, okay, yep, I've seen him on the high wire so he has really given me a lot of context.
Speaker 2:And so I start realizing that food waste in my restaurants is actually way worse and methane is worse than carbon and carbon is kind of a psyop. And so I start to realize all of these things and I decide I need land so that I can compost all of the food from my restaurants and turn it into soil. So I'm like totally on to wanting to do this. And it's not easy, we can get alone. It takes a lot of time but we finally get our own land and we start composting. Then we start growing vegetables and then I realized compost without animal manure is just not the business and it's not really nutrient dense.
Speaker 2:And little by little I just I'm sitting there breastfeeding my baby and then we get this cow so we can have her poop for the manure. And then I'm like feeding my toddler oat milk from Costco while I'm breastfeeding my baby and I'm looking at my cow, una, who we're milking off because she makes more milk than her baby can drink and we don't want her to get mastitis, and I'm just like, if my breast milk is gold, like the best thing that's ever happened to my child, how could Una's breast milk cause cancer and be filled with blood and pus and be like cancer, causing worse than all the stuff that I've been led to believe about dairy, and so I kind of quietly just started feeding my kids raw milk.
Speaker 2:But I'm like still make my living selling vegan food and I'm still in this vision of like a farm where nothing dies and I then just keep farming and I just keep realizing there's no vegan food. Essentially, everything is dying and feeding things that are living, and whether I have a piece of steak on my plate or not does not absolve my plate from the death that contributed to it. And that's what my book that's coming out in August is about. It's called Debunked by Nature and it really just looks at, if we want to be truth seekers and we want to know what the truth is, we should take these ideas into nature, into farming, into the savanna, into the woods and say, like does that work? Like, do bulls have babies or can we milk a bull? You cannot Just spoiler alert on that one and just start to look at everything.
Speaker 2:Like, every mammal on the planet prioritizes water, food, shelter. Some of them prioritize shelter and then reproduction, and we have somehow we're really good at shelter, but we've abandoned reproduction, we've abandoned our water, we've abandoned our food, and so I just start to see like anything that wants me to not be fertile, anything that wants me to not have clean, healthy basic food, then that's a lie. And then I. So I just start going and realizing that the construct of almost everything that I believed was getting broken by farming. And even though I grew up on a farm and I was and then. But then I went to college at 17 and lived in Los Angeles and totally bought the whole story about the environment and everything and I thought this is the way to help. And then I started to just realize that veganism was another thing that started out with a good intention that has been co-opted for evil. And that was the beginning of my journey.
Speaker 2:And COVID destroyed my restaurants and all that I had Not COVID. Covid didn't destroy anything and all that I had not COVID. Covid didn't destroy anything. Bureaucracy and bad policies and bad politics around the event we call COVID had us lose our restaurants. So when all these bad policies destroyed my restaurants, we ended up closing three, and then I had the last two restaurants and I had this thought well, if I don't at least try to do them as regenerative agriculture? I've been living kind of secretly not secretly, because I mean, obviously I bought this ranch in Texas. It has an Instagram. I'm on it, but I've been very low key, like never saying like we harvest animals, never saying that anything. I never show my husband eating meat, even though I mean I'd stated in podcasts and stuff that he did and I was. I was literally like afraid of the vegans if we could be honest about it. And so I decided I'm just going to come out on Earth Day 2024. And I'm going to tell everybody that I'm.
Speaker 2:The restaurants are not working in their current form and I think that it's partially because it's not in alignment with what I believe in the world. And what I believe in the world is that regenerative agriculture is the most important thing. Soil is the most important thing. 73% of the DNA in healthy soil is the same as the DNA in a healthy gut. It's clear, god has made us to eat of healthy soil and we're not doing it. So this is what I think is the most important thing and I'm shifting no more veganism.
Speaker 2:And I went hard to do it and like it.
Speaker 2:Just the vegans protested and like clear out the restaurant on father's day, clear out the restaurant on mother's day, throwing blood on the front of the restaurant like all this not real blood, I'm sure, but, and you can look it up, I'm sure, but, and you can look it up like vegan rest if you Google it and you can look it up vegan restaurant turned and then, basically five months later we went out of business.
Speaker 2:I couldn't make it work and it sucks because a lot of the farmers that I was trying to help I now like owe money to and I'm paying like little incremental payments, just from what me and my husband can do, because all the restaurants went out of business and to make the final payroll, we had to sell our bitcoin and our life insurance and to make everybody's final paychecks. So $200,000 to close a business that will never give us anything. And so now me and my husband are without our nest egg, starting over here at Sovereignty Ranch in Texas and it's scary and we're way out on the skinny branches. And I was selling my restaurants at the beginning of COVID for 25 to $31 million, so I thought I was like about to retire and just be a full-time mom, and now I'm like totally starting over, with all of the rug ripped out from under me.
Speaker 1:And did you have any idea that like coming out of the closet as a meat eater now would have that effect? Would you have changed the way you did it? Would you have sold all the restaurants and then just stayed quiet Like if you could do it over?
Speaker 2:I would have sold the restaurants and not stayed quiet, Like I was always had the intention of doing something in the regenerative space, but I couldn't sell the restaurant. I tried to had the intention of doing something in the regenerative space, but I couldn't sell the restaurant. I tried to sell the restaurants. Then COVID happened and we lost the deal. It was like 30 I was going to get 30 between 25 and 31 million dollars and it was three quarters. We had to meet these specific markers.
Speaker 2:Quarter four of 19 I crushed it. Quarter one of 2020 crushed it like all I had to get 31 million. All I had to do is have the most basic quarter I've ever had. Like the lowest quarter I'd had in the last five years would have still got me the 31 million and even if I had worse than that, I was still going to be at the between 25 and 31 million. But the whole deal fell apart and disappeared because the whole hospitality sector went under, kind of, and especially in cities like LA, where two and a half years no indoor dining. Two and a half years no indoor dining.
Speaker 1:That's insanity. It was and it was to close down people that owned their own businesses, because Walmart's stayed open and you know the big box chain places like the Amazon was still delivering, so people were inside amazon it was all about.
Speaker 1:It was all about the independent wealth maker and they absolutely and there's so much about what you just said that resonates with me because, like I said, being before you know, very liberal, and I'm in new york, um, and it took like a shift in my thinking as well during COVID and watching the high wire and realizing, oh man, we've been lied to. And my husband's, like I've been telling you this stuff for years, like you kind of mentioned, with the windmills and being everything going to solar power and batteries, and he would come home from his job and he's like no, I work with this stuff every day. It's not at all better for the environment, I promise you.
Speaker 2:So I was like yeah, no.
Speaker 1:Obama says it is, we got to believe Obama and then once COVID happened and I started actually researching the stuff that he was saying and the high wire was saying, I was like, oh my God, we've been lied to in that. It sucks realizing that and I think that's why your clientele it's easier for them to all gang up together and be mad at you than to confront that you might actually have some knowledge that they didn't have before and they don't want to face it.
Speaker 2:And it, and so, to answer your question, I knew, I knew that the vegans would be like that. I just thought that the people there was more people like me and you that had woken up that would like be like hell, yes, let's support her. And there was. I mean, I had people from drive up from San Diego, like I saw you on this podcast, and I had to drive up here and help you and like support you, and there was those people. But there, la is just so.
Speaker 1:LA, yeah, yeah, I've never been, but I'm sure it's like New York, very like New York, new York but more spreadable.
Speaker 2:I mean, I'm in upstate but yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:So okay. So how many kids do you have?
Speaker 2:I have four kids that I birthed out of my body, and then I took guardianship of someone who came as an unaccompanied minor during the first Trump administration and he was already in high school when he came to live with us and he has parents, um, that were here that he was trying to reunite with and, through various circumstances, he ended up, uh, with us. So, him and he's 22 now, and then, uh, I have four that are 10, eight, 10, eight, five and two.
Speaker 1:Nice, that's fun. So you're kind of living this farm life now, which you didn't think you were going to be raising your kids in that environment, but you're homeschooling them on the farm.
Speaker 2:Yes, well, we had a farm and no, so I got out of farm in California too. So my kids have almost always the second two were born on the farm in California and then, um, the first one took her, took her, I mean, the second one took her first steps on the farm. So my kids have kind of always been farm kids. Yes, we do. I'd say 75% unschooling and 25% homeschooling, and so we have a. I have a teacher that comes in three days a week and helps me three mornings a week for three hours to get the really structured math and reading and all of that. And, and then an additional lady that comes in on Wednesday afternoons for additional tutoring for my one son who is behind, in quotation marks, they tell you everything about a duck-billed platypus, but he's not that good at reading. Um, he could tell owners be telling you all this information like whoa. But yeah, reading is not his thing.
Speaker 2:But I'm also learning disabled in reading, I was dyslexic, and so, you know, we'll see I, I think it'll work itself out. Um, so, yeah, we do about, I'd say, seven percent like farm school. You, you know, helping pull calves, dealing with, you know, sick animals, bottle feeding calves, making products for the farm store. They have some of their own specific products that they make in the farm store and they make revenue from, and then they help like overall with other stuff, checking on, you know, animals collecting eggs, all of these kind of other working in the restaurant, working on the POS, figuring out how to ring customers up. So it's like it's like that it's a combination of unschooling, entrepreneurial school, and then regular like classes where they're doing workbooks and all of that.
Speaker 1:Yes, cause in California I assume you probably have stricter regulations, like we do, where you have to report every quarter and what you're doing and how they're doing, and probably some testing at some age.
Speaker 2:In California, yes, but now I'm in Texas so I got to as of. Well, I stayed with the California program to finish out their year, so we had all the documents. But then, yeah, in Texas you just have to have a curriculum that you're doing and then so, and then you have to say that you're homeschooling. I think that's it's very much less, it's very, it's much more homeschool friendly. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's awesome and you got to think of the backend stuff that your kids are getting exposed to, like when you want to introduce them to. This is how we do taxes. This is how we you know set this up. This is how we set up our k's or retirement or you know that sort of stuff. They can really be part of all of that. They're learning and it's it's so funny with the raw milk go ahead the other day.
Speaker 2:Rio goes outside and he goes oh, it's a nice day. You think that god made it, or the wet, or the government is controlling it. And I said oh, we're all indoctrinating our children, whether we like it or not. That's clearly like we're only like my mother Somebody would say something like that. That got into him. But he's like oh, it's a nice day, is it God made or government made? Oh goodness.
Speaker 1:He's not wrong. And every movie will tell you, even the kids' movies, that you know they're manipulating the weather. And they tell us that during Vietnam they were manipulating the weather, so why wouldn't they be doing it now? You know, I have a sister in Hawaii and she was like oh yeah, no, the Hawaii fires were not.
Speaker 2:Well, my mom's in Hawaii, yeah, she's like they were not natural events.
Speaker 1:Not natural events, events for sure, and it's scary. And so, yeah, we have to now raise kids in a world like this. And there is that fine line when do you step with Like, do you want your child to sound like a crazed human being out in the, I would say, real world? But I guess the public is the better way to put it, because they're not in the real world. But I guess the public is the better way to put it because they're not in the real world, but the majority of the people. But then, you know, I also want my kids to understand why we're not in the school system and why I want them to know how to build a fire, find water, you know, build shelter, like. I want them to have those skills because, even if they never need them, their kids might, their kids might, you know, know. You can just never tell what the future will bring and we've, in a generation or two, gotten rid of knowing how to do anything on our own.
Speaker 1:You said it in the beginning of this episode. You said animals, you watch them. They have a need for survival and they look for shelter and water and food and then procreation, and the government has literally taken away all of that from us. And then we wonder why people are so depressed and have no purpose in life. It's like, well, that we are comfy here. You know they tell us to. You know you can order Amazon to come to your door. We're all comfy, we're not in any wars. Knock on wood right now and then your food can come right to your door. And you know, they have totally disconnected us from even knowing where our food comes from. And they don't want us procreating, like you said before. They're. Oh hey, you, you, you want your hair shorter. You must want to be a girl and let's put you on medicine right now, at eight years old, so that you can never have a child of your own.
Speaker 2:It's, it's so crazy and my kids are getting so much knowledge that is just from observing like humans and being in the world that I feel really proud of them. My friend passed away last week from breast cancer and the second person that my 10 year old, my best friend died in 2018 of breast cancer as well, and we found out she was going into hospice last Friday night and then she passed away less than a week later and when we found out my husband we were all. We have a big double king bed, two California kings. We're a big co-sleeping family, so we have all six of us were in the bed and we I got a text message that said she was going into hospice and my husband turned off the tv right away and said let's pray for Wendy and her family.
Speaker 2:My son, my 10 year old he started weeping so hard and I said what is it right now, like, what is it that you're feeling sad about, or what are you feeling about Wendy's death? And he said well, when there's a really strict dad, you need a mom to make balance, and now those kids only have a dad with no mom and I thought I love that that he sees that and I can see that too and I'm sure that this is going to soften Dana. Losing your wife, I assume will. I don't know. You know, and I trust that God totally has it handled and he's going to do a great job. But I just noticed in my 10 year old that he's observing or noticing things that I don't notice all other 10 year old, that he's observing or noticing things that I don't notice all other 10 year olds that are on their screens or watching, you know, just scrolling or watching TikTok videos, are necessarily present to and I just think that that's beautiful.
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Speaker 2:The other day I was doing a farm tour and I wasn't being that present to the animals, I was just like talking and doing my blah, blah, blah, blah blah and my son is like hey, mom, that goat had a baby and the baby is missing. And he was totally right. The goat had a full udder, there was blood on her vagina and there was a missing baby. And we never found the baby. It seems like a predator got it, but I didn't even notice that and we all went into like finding the goat and and he did, he saw it. And so I think there's ways that he's more perceptive and there's other ways he's totally checked out, like he doesn't have any idea about wanting to be cool or like if these shoes are, like everything is about comfort, like he doesn't care if some clothes are cool or he just wants to be comfortable, and so there's other ways that he yeah, it doesn't fit into society or maybe could be made fun of from other kids, but he can drive a bobcat, he can drive, excavator he can drive. He has a little golf cart like a little jeep looking golf cart that's a stick shift that he can drive, and he's 10 years old, you know what I mean. He can do things in the real world and he's really into roses. He plants rose bushes, he names them, and so I think he's observing in a way that other people are maybe not observing because they're so in all of the devices and in all of the educating to get them to know facts. And I just noticed that he's observing in other kinds of ways and I think that that is really great and I think that I feel good about that. And people say they're going to be socially awkward. Even my own brother was like don't you feel like Rio needs, because he's the oldest, and so like, don't you think he needs more kids his age? And I was like maybe I mean we can work on trying to get him to hang out with more kids his age. But I'm so grateful that my oldest is my. He's like my rule follower. He is like I'm gonna have to teach him to be rebellious, it's not in his nature. But I'm so grateful that my oldest one is the one that's like, sees danger and is like yo, no, solely, don't jump off the cliff, because if my five-year-old was the oldest, we'd be in big trouble, because he's always like smashing something, jumping off something complete, just like a ball of testosterone in the world. And so you know, I feel really grateful that my kids get to play in this world of the farm and there is real dangers. There's rattlesnakes, there's other driving vehicles. They're doing all this stuff and I think that it's important for kids to know how to do stuff in the real world and if we don't allow them to do dangerous things carefully, then what are they going to be able to do when they get older? Write a lot about this in my book about.
Speaker 2:We have a culture of people that literally think being uncomfortable means something is wrong. But literally being uncomfortable is the human experience for the last thousands of years, and we have just gotten to a point in the last hundred and fifty years where comfort is like a thing. Last 150 years where comfort is like a thing Like you think that people that like took wagons across the whole United States and died of dysentery were shot in between the battles and like all of the things, like in order for each one of us to be here, we had relatives that were like excellent at hunting and really hard fighters, workers, whatever to get us here, and I think a lot of us are not doing any justice to our predecessors that survived so much to get us here. And as an employer, you know people are like oh, I don't want to go to that table. They're making me uncomfortable. And I think to myself did they hit on you? Did they smack your ass? What happened? Well, no, I forgot their appetizer and I got them the wrong soup, and then I dropped their drink, and so now they don't. They're annoyed with me and I feel uncomfortable. Okay, well, go fall on the sword, apologize, get them a free dessert and tell them you're not committed to this kind of service and you're going to make it better. And then, literally, the employee is like well, if you're not going to have my back, then I don't want to work here because I don't want a boss that doesn't have my back. And I'm thinking to myself like where did we get this idea that being uncomfortable is wrong? We have to be able to push through discomfort. I pushed four babies out of my vagina and you know what? It's really hard work and it's really uncomfortable.
Speaker 2:And we need to be training people to be good at being uncomfortable and pushing through things, or we're just going to have a society of people that want to suck on the tit of the government and not be sufficient in any ways. And I don't mean self sufficient, I mean community sufficient. We can't be self sufficient. There's no self sufficiency. That's another PSYOP Like. Nobody self-sufficient. You're just either more sufficient in your community or you're more sufficient with DoorDash and Amazon and Instacart, but you're still depending on a community like, committed together to support each other, and you may still be paying those people as well, but those are the two ways that we can do it. But no man is an Island. Nobody is self-sufficient, and so what I really hope is that I'm training my kids we live with 22 people on the land that I'm training them in how to navigate human beings, because navigating other human beings is the hardest part of the world.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you don't learn that in school because you're just told to sit down, shut up and obey, not really questioned. This is the way it is. I mean, we never even think like, well, who wrote this textbook? How do we know that this is the right way? This is just one side of the story. I'm sure the people on the other side have a difference.
Speaker 1:Even during, you know, world War II in Germany, I'm sure there were Germans that had a different perspective than what we see in our textbooks today. You know For sure. I'm sure we leave out a lot of our own stuff too. But yeah, and I love what you're saying too about like I didn't think we needed this stuff anymore either back when I was, you know, in the matrix. But now that I'm in the homeschooling community and I have friends, you know we get together every week and you know they have gardens where they actually garden together and share the stuff. I have my own garden here which I just kind of like dabble with, see what works and what doesn't. But I I did take the step in the last year or two to start getting my meat and poultry from local farmers. I didn't even know that that was a possibility.
Speaker 2:I was like what do you mean you?
Speaker 1:get a half a cow. What do you do with half a cow? And now it's like okay, well, I do use chat, GPT to figure out what I do with this cut of meat, because I, you know, never worked with this before or you know. But it is just knowing, like if a crisis were to happen. And this is what I like to say. I want my kids to not have to depend on FEMA coming If there was a wildfire or a hurricane, or you know, China invades or aliens come down. It doesn't really matter what it is. You can't, like you said, like you can't, we can't do it all ourselves. So we have to know the local farmers have to know somebody that grows vegetables. We have to know where water, clean water, is.
Speaker 2:I literally want to read you this, um, this comment I got today. Let me see, and because this person was literally like they said, in this day and age, we don't need to grow our food. Guns are lame christ, lame Christians are out. You've lost your way. And I'm like, wow, oh my gosh.
Speaker 1:I got a similar comment.
Speaker 2:And we don't need to grow our own food. It's 2025, he started with.
Speaker 1:You don't need to grow your own food. Where do they think the vegetables are coming from at the grocery store?
Speaker 2:I love that because I'm like they're all from Bill Gates' lab. I guess People always say, like what's the big deal about farmers? Everything you need is at HEB or at Vons or at Wegmans. Like really, really, how did it get there? Where do you think that came from?
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, they think Bill Gates made them all in a lab, and pretty soon he will. But is that what you want? Do you want all those chemicals in your body? And then we don't know why we all have autism. We don't know why we're all getting cancer. We don't know why we all have Alzheimer's and dementia. I mean, come on people, I didn't have this stuff 200 years ago.
Speaker 2:I'm not even into hydroponics and this is going to upset some people, but I literally think hydroponics is an abomination. We are 73% the same DNA in our gut as soil. We are meant to eat from the soil. Stop it. Stop growing in water with chemicals, even organic chemicals. Soil is an intricate part of the food process. We cannot just take out healthy soil and think that we can pour nutrients on dirt, or pour nutrients on some sort of growing medium or just water and think that it does the same. In a handful of healthy soil there is more living beings than there are human beings on the whole planet and we are literally acting as if it is not an important part of the planet and it is so everybody. That's a bobblehead for the environment and carbon, carbon, carbon, carbon carbon. My question is like do you, what are you doing to save the soil? Because if the soil goes, we all go, like the bees. If the bees goes, we all go. There is no world where we can just live without soil and we already have a highly industrialized microbiome and it starts like this. So it's not just the food in the supply chain, it starts with birth.
Speaker 2:Now, c-sections are somewhere between 40 and 70 percent of births in this country, depending which hospital. Now I want to say this is not a judgment. I had a hospital birth. My first birth was emergency. Go to the hospital. Vacuum episiotomy I'm not judging, but there's a cascade once we start implementing pitocin and then you're going to need epidural and then all this cascade of hormones that needs to happen in your body to have a natural birth has to happen and by us intervening we end up with much more c-sections. And now I'm not saying there isn't times where you just need to have a c-section for emergency. I'm not saying that. So anyway, it's out there. It's already offended by me, calm down, but we don't. We definitely don't need 40% and definitely not 70% C-sections.
Speaker 2:But so when you have a C-section the baby comes out back to microbiome into the hospital room. This is the operating room where someone had a heart surgery a week ago and someone had a leg surgery and a boob surgery and whatever. What kind of microbiology is in the air in that room? Gnarly stuff that can survive all the chemicals in the hospital. Now that is what inoculates the baby. But the baby should go face out, coming facing the anus, out the vagina and get squished the juice from the birth canal into eyes, ears, nose, mouth, vagina, penis, butt, everything. All is getting inoculated with the perfect microbiology from the mother. And do you know that there's microbiology that lives in our colon, that doesn't ever leave our colon, that migrates to the vagina right before birth and then somehow we magically don't get an infection from this stuff that's that shouldn't be there so that we can inoculate our babies and then so that's the first thing, so we do that.
Speaker 2:Then we start poking with lots of pokey things immediately as soon as they come out, and then we try to try to breastfeed and we didn't have the correct hormonal cascade for bonding with the baby. We didn't have the correct hormonal cascade for breastfeeding. And I know this because I had a traumatic like I tried to have a home birth and my coccyx bone was broken. They had to, actually surgically, they had to reach in me and break my coccyx bone to get him out, because it had healed in a bad position and the baby couldn't get out. So I was like emergency go to the hospital. And I know because I didn't feel connected to my first child for months and so if I wasn't already like totally indoctrinated into that, breastfeeding was the so the most important thing I could do for my child and I was feeling so disconnected and so exhausted and migraines from the epidural and all this stuff I definitely wouldn't have breastfed him. I just had was like had already made up my mind a hundred percent that there was nothing that was going to stop me, and cracked nipples and didn't have enough milk and all that like, just keep trying and the body's going to sort it out. But if I didn't have that commitment, if I was like I'm going to try breastfeeding and see how it goes, I definitely wouldn't have followed through, because I didn't have any of that. Where my other children, that I had them at home in the comfort of my own bed, with the cascade of hormones, it all, the connectedness, the breastfeeding, everything came so much easier. So with that cascade of things that happens in the hospital, creating traumatic birth surgeries, then that cascades to less breastfeeding, which then cascades to less microbiology. And so by the time kids are getting to even eating solid foods, they already have missed out on the majority of the microbiology that was supposed to create the foundation for them. And then we're getting older and we're feeding them food that was grown hydroponically or was dipped in bleach before they got it.
Speaker 2:How can we have a healthy microbiology? How can we have a healthy immune system? We really have to go back to that and I recommend and I'm going to say this out loud and please tell the other mothers if somebody does have a c-section birth somebody the dad, the midwife, somebody swab the vagina and get it in that baby's mouth, nose, eyes and ears around their genitals, get it everywhere on them, because that is what is meant to start their microbiology. That is God's perfect plan and we can't just skip it and have a baby into a sterile environment, because it actually is not meant to be in a sterile environment. It's meant to come out through the birth canal and over the anus. That's the way it's meant to come out.
Speaker 2:Anyways, I'm really into microbiology and healthy guts, and I could even go on that we can keep going that healthy soil operates more powerfully than SSRIs and so we're so disconnected from the soil, and then we can look at every single shooting, mass shooting that's happening. All of them are on SSRIs or other pharmaceuticals for mental health. Would we need those if we had healthy microbiology? I'd be interested to see the statistics and I don't know the answer to this, but on formula-fed babies C-section babies then how much of them end up on SSRIs, and then you know how does that all connect?
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Speaker 2:Because I think it's a cascade that we have in our culture right now. And then there's the sanitizer. Mothers are just obsessed with sanitizing everything and it just goes on and on and on. And essentially, breast milk is the perfect foundation for all of the perfect microbiology and we can't reproduce it like we literally can't. And if you can't get breast milk because you don't have it or it's the same sex, marriage or whatever the things are adoption, I highly recommend raw goat milk over formula, because it's just aren't. We are not doing any services by not setting up the proper foundation.
Speaker 2:And I had a whole epiphany about this and I ended up doing 46 days only drinking raw milk because I was having such a hard time losing weight after I had four kids after 37, right so I gained weight with each of them and I had this epiphany like, oh my God, I need to reset my microbiome like a baby.
Speaker 2:And so I did 46 days and I lost 40 pounds and I totally reset, like my cravings and everything. I feel great and I feel like my skin looks better. I feel like everything I just had and I was breastfed and I was a vaginal birth and all that. But I just had this thought like bifida bacteria, there's certain things that start to wane in our older age. And how could I reset that and how could I get it back? And so I did this 46 days raw milk, fast and was amazing 3000 calories, not even coffee. Huh, I did I get. It was Lent and I always give up coffee for Lent, so I gave up both, but you could do it with coffee. I think that that wouldn't be a problem.
Speaker 1:Coffee and raw milk, raw milk in my coffee, so. But yeah, I was just at a conference. Uh, max Cain was the conference like head of it, and Del Biggry was there. I was telling you about that. But yeah, the whole thing was about food farm, farm freedom and knowing where your food comes from and the raw milk. And I'm in New York. It's illegal here, so we have like an underground like system with the Amish where they drop off raw milk and raw yogurt, raw cream and stuff, butter, cheese. It's like it's crazy that I had a meme last year too that was like oh, this was me at 19 trying to buy alcohol and here's me at 42 trying to buy milk.
Speaker 2:I just I designed a t-shirt that everybody's too scared for me to put up on the website but it says raw milk, the real white privilege. And because it's white and it's a privilege because it's illegal in 20 something States, and so I think it's funny and my husband thinks it's white and it's a privilege because it's illegal in 20 something states, and so I think it's funny and my husband thinks it's funny and he's like, just do it. But my sister-in-law and my brother and they're like I don't know, there's no reason to stir the pot and just put a racist shirt on the website. I'm like it's not a racist shirt, it's like, literally true, raw milk is the real white privilege. It's white and it's a privilege to get it.
Speaker 1:It is. I'm much happier and yeah, and I was, I'm someone who I had a vaginal birth for my son, but I, like you, said I wasn't gung ho, that I was definitely going to breastfeed. I was like, let's see how it goes. And three weeks in got mastitis and okay, here's your formula. I did get the formula from Germany, which was much better than where we had here. But and then my daughter they told me I needed a C-section because they were like your placenta is covering your cervix, placenta previa, and yes, you have to have this C-section. And I guess, knowing what I know now, maybe I would have gone to some other. I went to get another opinion, but it was like the person that my doctor sent me to, so I don't think that counts.
Speaker 2:And he told me with every child that I had partial placenta previa, every single child. And I didn't even go get a scan With my last kid. I didn't get an ultrasound, I didn't get anything, I didn't do anything. But by the end it was still fully covering at 40 weeks or whatever.
Speaker 1:No, I don't think it was fully, it was like half over. So I think, they made it sound like it would have ruptured and I would die.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but I don't know, I don't know either, but they always told me it was partial and then, and then they'd want me to do come in for extra scans so they could watch it and see if it was moving out of the way.
Speaker 1:And then I was just like, by the third, yeah, I always wondered if, like, had I gone to someone else, would they have said like oh no, we, you know, we can do a vaginal and switch to C-section last minute if we had to, or something. You know what I mean. They don't walk you through the steps. It's kind of the same with, like, the mammograms and the breast cancer stuff. Like I haven't gotten a mammogram yet, even though they keep telling me I need to And'm like I don't know, because what are you gonna do? Then you're gonna tell me I need chemo and radiation. Well, I'm gonna kill me.
Speaker 2:There's no, did you know that there's been studies you can look this up that the groups that get mammogrammed and the groups that don't get mammograms there's no life expectancy difference. There might really there's some indicators that in some things that it might even be in the mammogram group that there's a more death now, but there's no significant, there's no benefit. There's no like you're not gonna die if you get mammograms. It's just, there's just not. And I will say I lost a friend to breast cancer this last week and my best friend of 14 years that started the restaurants with me and everything died in 2018. And Mimi, my best friend on her deathbed said I wouldn't have done any of it, I wouldn't have even done the mammogram, but maybe once, if I could go back now, I just wouldn't even have done the mammogram. But let's say, I even just did the mammogram and they said it looks like cancer. I would not have gotten a biopsy, I would not have poked it, I would not, I would have radically changed my diet. And she said. She said, even if she said it was the size of a date and I'm dying right now and I've been in the bed for the 80% of the last three years sick from treatments and she said I would have, even if it took me out in three years. Let's say it took me out in three years. Let's say it took me out in three years. And I don't think this little tiny thing would have taken me out in three years.
Speaker 2:She goes. I would have had three years of my daughter take her to Disneyland, go on an RV trip, like be living life, and instead I was sick and weak and needing people to bathe me and help me and cook for me. And she said it wasn't, it wasn't worth it. And she said, looking back, I would not have done a biopsy, I would not have done any of the treatments, I would have radically changed my diet, I would have done a water fast once a year and I would have radically changed my diet no carbohydrates, no food, no highly processed food. I'd go to like a meat, bone broth and greens diet only. And that's what she believes she. She felt very strongly at the end. That hindsight is she said and I can see now that I may there was a moment for me to make a choice and I made the wrong path. I took the wrong path.
Speaker 1:But. But she took the path that they forced down your throat because they tell you you'll die without doing it. And so I understand. And she had a daughter, she had a five-year-old daughter.
Speaker 2:Her mother was in the medical industry. But I'm going to tell you what her mother has had some of her own health challenges and literally has basically told the VA, even though she's a nurse and everything like you can keep your medicine and they gave her, you know, diagnoses and timelines and we are way beyond any of those. And so I'm going to say that I think and my friend that passed away she did all the stuff because she didn't want to, but she felt that she had children and she had to do everything to try. But I'm wondering, is the doing everything to try what is actually taking people out?
Speaker 1:Well, like you bringing it back to the microbiome and your gut biome. I mean, it's killing everything in there. So I had a woman on my podcast a year or so ago, emily Krupa, and she said you know the chemo again, she had a small child. The chemo radiation that was all that was going to kill her. Her husband ended up taking her to Germany where she did a fecal transplant. So you're like getting the fecal matter of a healthy person and inserting it I don't know where. I assume the rear, I don't know you can do it up or you can take pills of it down.
Speaker 2:But yeah, I know some people that have done fecal transplants for Crohn's disease and fecal transplants are only legal in the United States for like one thing, but they can actually fight a lot of different things. And people are literally going into indigenous villages where people are still living close to the earth, cooking their food on fire, sleeping in a hammock, walking barefoot on the ground, you know, and they are growing their own food and they're getting those people's feces to do these fecal transplants. And there's a there's a movie on Netflix called like hack your health and literally it's so interesting it follows these four people educating them about their gut microbiome.
Speaker 2:And there's this woman who's done all these like out of desperation and lack of money and inability to digest almost any food and depression and all this stuff. She's done her own fecal transplants, like DIY, and this sounds crazy, but so she did her brother's and she did feel totally better. She was able to digest food, but she got all this acne in the exact same pattern that her brother has acne on his face. So then she tried her boyfriend's instead, or her fiance, who suffers from depression, and she got his depression, but she was able to digest food, so she's like you have to be careful. She's now trying to find someone that's like emotionally healthy and also has a healthy microbiome, because she doesn't want all the acne of her brother and she doesn't want the depression of her boyfriend.
Speaker 1:You know, my husband would be a good candidate for this. He could quit his job tomorrow and just give away his manure. We would never even have to. He wouldn't have to get up for work.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so the fecal transplant thing is legit, real. You know there's so many ways we are doing this food is medicine conference, september 20th through the 28th on the ranch, and we're having will harris from white oak pastures, we're having courtney from the real foodology podcast, and we're having so many really great speakers, and one of them is logan devall, whose son had stage four cancer and he cured it with all local food. Basically, the concept was that the local food has coherency in your body and the sun and the water and the environment is actually telling your body how to heal in the environment that you're in and that we don't eat any food that's local that much anymore. And so we don't have coherency because we're getting information from sun and water and air and earth and soil from 3000, 5000 miles away from the other side of the globe where it's winter. We're eating broccoli in the middle of the summertime, like broccoli doesn't grow here in the middle of summertime, and so that is crazy. And so Logan Duvall is going to do he has a me and McPhee market. It's like a grocery store in, um, I think, the Carolinas, but maybe Kentucky, but anyways, he focuses on local foods and so it's really an interesting talk he's going to do at the food is medicine conference. And there's all these people that have healed themselves from all different things.
Speaker 2:But I had never heard about that. But it makes so much sense because water has memory and water has so much information in it. And food many foods are like 80% water, just like we are like 90% water. So it totally makes sense to me and it's really interesting.
Speaker 2:And I just had Veda Austin here at the Confluence Festival who's a water scientist, and I was talking to her about it and she's like it totally makes sense. It totally makes sense that the local food would have coherency and information to heal you in your local environment. And I noticed with local fruit, like when we're growing our own, I'm never thinking like right now, like oh my God, I want a pomegranate right now, I just want to dive into a pomegranate. But when we have pomegranates like dripping off the trees, I just like wake up, like, oh, I want a pomegranate, I want to eat that. And then when the season's over, I'm not like trying to go to Costco and buy pomegranates. I never even think about pomegranates again for the rest of the year. So I do think there's something in that the local food has coherency in healing us.
Speaker 1:That makes a lot of sense. And they were talking about that at the Food Farm Freedom Conference as well, like, do you really need a banana all year long, or it should just be? And the other thing about the raw milk that they said there too. It was so funny. They were like, well, you know? One guy asked the question. Well, I'm an adult, I get that. You know you breastfeed babies and so maybe a baby needs the raw milk, but why would I as an adult need one and it's from another species than I am. And someone said well, god gave cows four udders and it's one for their baby and one for the other babies on the farm that maybe aren't getting enough to eat, and one for the family and one for the family's neighbors. And when you had to walk across the country, like little house on the Prairie style, you could bring that cow and that milk was going to be good for you every single day. And that is why we drink milk, raw milk.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and there is no native indigenous people that have chosen for veganism. It does not exist. And PETA tries to talk about this Tibetan tribe that lives really high up in the mountains, but they make ghee and they cook everything in ghee first of all, and then they eat meat and dairy sparingly on special occasions. So that's not vegans. There's literally no indigenous people that have self-chosen for veganism, and this is what I have to tell all my vegan brethren. When I started to try to grow all my own food for my family, I realized how hard it would be without animal protein and calories in calories out. The amount of calories I got to put out to grow a tomato is not in that tomato, sorry, just like tomato is an excellent garnish, it's an excellent sauce, it's excellent additive to other things, but you can't grow tomatoes. You don't have enough calories. You could not just use all your calories to grow tomatoes and eat tomatoes, but you could raise a cow and that cow can eat grass that humans cannot eat and then make four or five, seven gallons of milk a day or turn it to beef. That's amazing and people say well, what if we just put all that land that's in grazing cattle and put it into lentil production or whatever. Well, I graze cows on land that you can't grow lentils. Have you been to the Texas Hill Country? Nobody's growing anything except for hay and grass and beef and goats. Like it's hilly and rocky and you can graze cows on areas that are not. You can graze goats. You can graze sheep on areas that are not ideal farmland, and so this idea that cows are taking this land, that we could just switch it into this other thing, is totally made up. It's like a statistic from a back of a box that someone did math and it's not based on reality and how things work. And so the beauty of beef, and grass-fed beef specifically, is sunlight and water and wild plants that are just going to grow, no matter what, can turn into beef and also can turn into milk if you're willing to walk the cows back and forth to the milking. So that is amazing.
Speaker 2:Now, is there so much abuse in animal agriculture? Yes, do I think that we should do everything in our power to buy from somebody that you know? Shake the hand that feeds you? Yes, do I want you to go on Sovereignty Ranch's website right now and order some bacon I do, some sausage I do. And can I tell you why my sausage is better than the one you're going to buy at the grocery store? I can, because there's not plastic in it, because there's not PFAS in it, because the pigs live outside in the forest and they eat high quality, nutrient dense food and they're monogastric. And you want them to eat high quality food because that's going right into that pork and I want you to buy beef from me and I want you to buy sourdough from me. And why is that important? Because I was a vegan and so you can believe that the animals on my farm are treated really, really well and I don't even eat meat.
Speaker 2:You said that I went from a vegan to a meat eater. The craziest thing is, I don't eat meat. I haven't gotten there. I eat dairy and I eat bone broth and I take liver in the pill form, but I never ate meat.
Speaker 2:I was raised vegan. It's very hard for me to look at it as food and not as a dead animal, but I recognize that it's the most nutrient dense food on the planet and I recognize that if I want my family to be eating the most nutrient dense food on the planet, I want to be fully responsible for it. I was talking to a farmer today I'm struggling financially right now with all of our new endeavors and he was like you should just get rid of the raw milk thing. There's no way to make it work. And I was like well, until my kids are grown, I'm committed to having raw milk, and so we're going to do it for now. And it is a loss leader. We don't make money on the raw milk, but people come to the farm because of it and then they maybe stay at the restaurant, they buy a popsicle in the farm store, they take some veggies home, they buy some T-bones, whatever else is happening.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so okay. So your book comes out soon. Tell us where we can find that.
Speaker 2:Acres USA is a farming publisher and if you'll know who Joel Salatin is. Joel Salatin wrote the foreword to my book and it's going to be on Amazon. It'll be at Barnes and Nobles, it'll be at Acres USA online farm bookstore. It will be on my ranch, in my farm store, if in August people could set it in their calendars. In August it will be for pre-order on Amazon and it will really help me if people would order it pre-order and you can read it with your kids.
Speaker 2:I mean, there's a few things that maybe you would might want to self-edit, but mostly it's really awesome lessons about god and nature and how we can see truth. We can figure out the truth of the world by watching what nature does, and there may be some subjects that you think are too adult for your kids and you can skip that chapter or skip that part, but mostly it's really beautiful stories that include my children and include things that happened on the farm and how I awakened to God's perfection in nature and then awakened to that mother nature is conservative and that I still am an environmentalist and I always will be, and I think that to honor God's glory and abundance in nature, we actually have to honor how it works, and so it's an awesome book, and it starts from how I went from a vegan chef to a cattle farmer, but then we address all different ideas that are in the world right now and all of different conflicts of what's true, and we look at it through the eyes of mother nature.
Speaker 1:Awesome, yeah, and to round that out into homeschooling, it's like when you send your kids to school every day, are they getting nutrient dense foods? I mean, you can send them with all of the organic meats and dairy and fruit and vegetables that you want to send them with, but most schools today have free breakfast and lunch that they offer to all the children in the school. So your kids can throw out what you sent them with and they can get the chemicals that are in all that food the dyes, the injections, the hormones. It's awful. So, molly Englehart, thank you so much for coming on today. I will link all of your websites and everything in the show's description so people can check that out, and I just want to thank you for being this voice. That I'm sure was not easy to become, but thank you, this world needs it.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much. I'm honored to have been here. You know, I just want to tell the truth and I want to inspire other people to know that it's okay to change your mind. It's okay to believe something and then, when something else makes more sense, to change our mind, because I actually think that's a sign of intelligence that you can understand something and then understand it newly and say I was wrong. And so that's what I am. I'm a living example of someone who's willing to say I was wrong and I have a new idea now that makes more sense.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Thank you so much for that. Thank you so much. Thank you for tuning into this week's episode of the homeschool how to. If you've enjoyed what you heard and you'd like to contribute to the show, please consider leaving a small tip using the link in my show's description. Or, if you'd rather, please use the link in the description to share this podcast with a friend or on your favorite homeschool group Facebook page. Any effort to help us keep the podcast going is greatly appreciated. Thank you for tuning in and for your love of the next generation.