Organic & Sustainable Hop Farming in Fillmore, CA with Mollie Engelhart
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In Fillmore, CA, Mollie Engelhart learned how to grow hops organically and brew beer – completely by winging it. As chef of a small chain of restaurants, she discovered food waste is a problem – and she did something about it. Mollie shifted all the food waste from her restaurants and turned it into soil for her organic and sustainable farm, Sow A Heart Farm.
Follow Mollie’s journey into regenerative agriculture and discover why sequestering carbon in the ground is an important business strategy. In this episode, you’ll also learn how she halved her water bill all while increasing crop yields. Mollie consistently pushes the limits of what she can grow and farmers markets and patrons of Sage: Plant Based Bistro & Brewery reap the delicious benefits.
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Transcript: Organic & Sustainable Hop Farming in Fillmore, CA with Mollie Engelhart
Paul Ward:
Hi everyone. It’s Paul Ward here and welcome to another edition of Farm Talk. I’m so excited today. We’re gonna be talking about making beer here in Ventura County and all that goes into it. We have a very special guest Mollie Engelhart with Sow a Heart Farms. Thank you for being here.
Mollie Engelhart:
Well, thank you for having me or coming here and being here to have this conversation.
Paul Ward:
Absolutely. Of course we want to thank our sponsors, The Escrow Hub and The Money Store. So tell us, Mollie, how did you get into making hops or growing hops? Because it’s not really a crop that you think about when you think about Ventura County?
Mollie Engelhart:
No, it is not. I think there’s only two hop yards in Southern California, one here in Ventura County and one in San Diego and all the rest of it- and one more in California. And then the rest is in Washington, Oregon. How did I get into it? So everything in my life was in a roundabout way that was perfect. I ended up where I was meant to be at the perfect time, but we were trying to get a liquor license for one of my restaurants and Echo Park was considered a not ideal location to give out more liquor licenses, because there were already a lot. And so we realized that if we wanted to have brand consistency and serve alcohol at all of our restaurants, we could make a 75, which is a brew pub, which also would allow you to serve hard alcohol.
And so we taught ourselves to brew beer. Me, my brewer, Kim, and my brother-in-law from my first marriage, Trevor, every Monday we would have a family fun day at my house in Granada Hills and we taught ourselves to brew beer. And then we applied for the 75 license and Trevor flew to China and bought some equipment. We just really winged it and learned how to brew beer in order to be able to have brand consistency among all the restaurants. Then everything I do is organic and there’s literally like not a lot of organic hops around. So I started doing the research and we had just bought this farm in 2018 and we’d only been brewing for a year and we were having a really hard time. So we had the conversation of maybe we should start a hop yard .
And I started to do a bunch of research and realized that California used to be a huge hop growing region. Not exactly right here in Ventura, but in Napa and in other regions that have similar weather to here; it was big hop growing areas. This is back when you needed labor in order to pick the hops. And so they had to be close to cities, right? So Napa and Vacaville were close to Sacramento or San Francisco and other places where they were growing hops. As they mechanicalized the way that we pick the hops. They were able to get cheaper land further away in less harsh climates that could grow more different varieties of hops because hops originally come from England and Ireland and places that it’s much cooler and foggier than it is or used to be.
Mollie Engelhart:
Now it’s pretty, I heard last week it was crazy hot over there too. Right. But so we started in 2018 we bought the binds. We had no idea what we were doing. We bought the binds before I even had this place closed escrow, thank God it closed escrow. We put them in pots the first year because we didn’t have the land to put together and we grew them for one year in pots and then we put them- we called everywhere and Somis Pacific was like, “I guess we could try to build a hopyard for you. We’ve never done it before.”
Paul Ward:
Right. And there are tall poles, right?
Mollie Engelhart:
They’re 24 foot poles.
Paul Ward:
Yeah. They’re very tall.
Mollie Engelhart:
Very tall. And actually, because we’re organic, we couldn’t use treated poles. And so actually four years later, all the polls actually, we had to put in all new poles. So I used repurposed concrete light posts this time. Oh wow. And so they won’t rot, but they’re also compliant with my organic certification because they’re not like creatine or whatever they treat stuff with formaldehyde.
Paul Ward:
Just to let our listeners and watchers know- you own a chain of restaurants. Its Sage Vegan Bistro.
Mollie Engelhart:
Yeah. It’s a small chain of restaurants in Los Angeles. Agoura Hills, Culver City, Echo Park, Pasadena, I’m the chef and founder. And that’s actually how I got into farming; I realized that food waste was the problem, as a vegan, I thought cow farts was the problem; I got corrected and realized that actually cow farts are not the problem. Food waste is really big; methane is the worst thing that we’re doing in the environment. So I wanted to shift all the food waste from my restaurants and make it into soil. So that’s why I bought this place and started farming.
Paul Ward:
Right. And so all the food waste comes from your restaurants back to your 18 acre farm and is turned, turned into a mulch, right?
Mollie Engelhart:
Yeah. Mixed with cow poop and bedding from the chickens and everything like that and gets turned into compost in windrows. Or we also have a big 50 foot Verma composter. W it into soil. Right. And so rather than being methane in the environment, it is carbon sequestered. It’s feeding soil. I haven’t bought any fertilizers in three years. We’re fully- the only input that I would say that we buy would be hay to feed our animals. I wish we had acres and acres of land, but it’s California who can afford that.
Paul Ward:
Right. And so your mulch that you’re creating your compost, that you’re creating, you’re using a lot less water than the average farmer in the area. Yes. You’re growing a lot more.
Mollie Engelhart:
Yes, actually, you know this because you helped me with one half of this deal, but I bought a property just down the street. That’s almost the exact same acreage. So I got to present to their water bills and how much they were spending and how much they were making. So for using double the water I was using, they were selling about between 14 and $25,000 of produce a year and I’m using half the water and we did about $431,000 in produce last year.
Paul Ward:
That’s incredible.
Mollie Engelhart:
So we’re using every bit of space. If we have avocado trees, then there’s kale growing in the middle, cabbage growing in the middle, tomatoes growing in the middle, jalapenos growing in the middle. So we, the whole fence line, isn’t a vineyard, we just harvested 3000 pounds of grapes today, but they don’t actually take up any acreages. It’s only on the fence line.
Paul Ward:
And you got those grape vines for free, from some farm that was shutting down in the desert
Mollie Engelhart:
Half of our grape vines. Yeah. We did get from a desert, a place in the desert where they were gonna bulldoze them to build Airbnbs. I mean it wasn’t free cause we had to go dig ’em all up and bring them here. But yeah, I did get adult grape vines. Those are the second ones we put in, but the first ones we put around the fence line. So yeah, I’m very interested in pushing the limits of what we can grow. Of course there’s a view out there that we need GMO, we need monocropping and that’s how we’re gonna feed the world. I’m of the belief that more people on land growing food in this way is how we can feed the world.
Paul Ward:
Just to clarify for our listeners, what is GMO and what is monocropping?
Mollie Engelhart:
Oh, so GMO is a genetically modified organism. So it’s where we basically crack the code of life. We say, this is the genome. Then we’re like, okay, and this is the genome of a rat or a fish or whatever. If we put this in there, this little part, it’ll make it not wilt as fast, it’ll make it more heat resistant. It’ll make it travel better. So some of our primary crops that we all eat very much have been genetically modified and we’ve also genetically modified them to be able to spray chemicals on them. You know, I’m a proponent of eating food without chemicals and I’m not, I have no didactic position. Like everybody should do what I’m doing. That’s what I’m committed to. So I think that if we put more people on more small farms with high diversity- high biodiversity and bureaucracy in the government can get out of the way, we can produce a lot of food, like massive amounts, more food than just doing monocropping, which you asked to explain just one thing.
Mollie Engelhart:
So even our hops in the early years, hops grow for 25 years before they have to be replanted. So they’re an awesome crop for regeneration because the concepts of regeneration are that you want the soil to be replenished. You want to give more than you’re taking. So one is: don’t disturb the soil, no tilling and plowing. Keep the soil covered because the soil covered by the mother is modest. That there’s always more life under. If you take up a piece of plastic or a rock or pull up some thick sod, you’ll see a lot of life underneath it.
Paul Ward:
Here, soil is living opposed to the neighbors whose soil is not living
Mollie Engelhart:
Yeah. But 25% of all the biodiversity on the planet is below the plant on the surface. It’s below that. So if you think about it, imagine a coral reef- If we just plowed a coral reef and then put the water back and threw some extra coral in there and was like, throw some nitrogen on there, it’s fine. Well, that’s what we’re doing, but we just can’t see it. So we don’t think about that. So with the hops in the early years, it’s a lot of acreage. So we grew corn in between them. We grew all types of stuff. We grew beans, we grew cover crops. And now there’s a permanent cover crop that keeps the aisleway covered. And it’s a desert mix of, you know, drought resistant grasses. Then we run the sheep in there. So we bring the sheep in and the sheep eat the bottoms of the hops. They eat the grass, they poop, they pee, they fertilize it. They, you know, do the bovine thing where they stimulate the seed growth in the top two inches of soil. Then we move them out and move ’em somewhere else.
Paul Ward:
And they don’t eat the vine to where it kills the top.
Mollie Engelhart:
They don’t. So we wait till the vine is up to a certain height then we let them come in and eat the shoots that are coming off because that has focused the energy upward. In commercial hops, they often put a plastic barrier and weed whack around it. The sheep are doing the same thing but they are also fertilizing all of that. So that’s excellent and integrated. That’s another principle of regenerative agriculture; it integrates the bovine, grazing animals. We’ve overgrazed. So sometimes it has a bad name, but if you do what we call regenerative or mob grazing or holistic planned grazing, which is a very short amount of time on a small area and then move them and move them and move them. You’re kind of redoing what the buffalo did. So they would poop, pee, stomp, eat about 50% and leave about 50% stomped and then go on. That is the best way to grow soil. So we have these little tractors that are basically gates put together with wheels on them and we push like four or five sheep down the rows, clean up all the veggies, get it all cleaned up, fertilized and then get it ready to plant the row again. So it’s our baby version of holistic planned grazing
Paul Ward:
That’s great. So no Roundup at your place.
Mollie Engelhart:
Never. I believe that I’m about 50% me and 50% the microbiology inside of me. Although I don’t have a Shikimate Pathway. All of that microbiology inside of me does. How Roundup works is it kills the Shikimate Pathway. I believe that my immune system foundationally starts in my gut. If you look at healthy soil and you look at a healthy gut, there’s like a 75% overlap in microbiology . So it’s obvious that we were meant to eat the earth of healthy soil to replenish that microbiology.
Paul Ward:
Very cool. So getting back to the hops?
Mollie Engelhart:
Sorry. I digress.
Paul Ward:
No, it’s all very exciting. Getting back to the hops, how is your harvest doing? I mean, I imagine they’re just flourishing from the healthy soil.
Mollie Engelhart:
We are growing four varieties and two of the varieties are totally flourishing and the two (others) this is not the ideal heat, so we may swap them out.
Paul Ward:
Too hot, too cold?
Mollie Engelhart:
I think it’s too hot. Cascade is our superstar and we really love that Cascade is our superstar because it’s for aroma and for bittering. So we can use it in a lot of different ways. We actually grow enough for our brewery to use it all year long and for multiple other breweries like here in Ventura County, Poseidon and Pedals and Pints, and then just right over the hill Talco and then many in LA.
Paul Ward:
So you’re selling your hops to other local beer breweries.
Mollie Engelhart:
Breweries that want to make a wet hop beer, want to make a local hop, organic beer. So that is really exciting. In the beginning, we didn’t have enough. So we were a little like, “Nobody can share,” but now we’re like putting it on the internet, inviting people. If you are a brewery, you can come out and pick with us and we give you a discount. If you help do that because it is labor- even with the equipment, which is expensive, it’s still labor intensive.
Paul Ward:
So you’re getting free labor from local beer makers if they come to help harvest?
Mollie Engelhart:
They get a discount on their hops.
Paul Ward:
Very cool. And are you using some of your other fruits that you’re growing in your beers?
Mollie Engelhart:
Oh yeah. We’re doing all types of fun. We have a carob stout from carob that we’re growing. We did a sour squeeze with kumquats. We have the Kiss the Ground beer that has oranges and lemon verbena from the farm and lemons. I think almost all of our beers have some kind of citrus from the farm. It wouldn’t be right to have a beer without citrus citrus, because we have so much of that. We have a natural Cola that uses the coffee cherries from myself and from Lisa who you’ve also interviewed before.
Paul Ward:
Local coffee grower.
Mollie Engelhart:
Yeah. Local coffee grower. And I don’t have as much coffee as her, but I have a little, so we have a natural Cola that uses those coffee cherries. Then we have Kombucha that uses, you know, we have a whole line of Kombucha and seltzers that use other fruits. You’re doing a apricot and peach seltzer right now. And we always have a couple seasonals on and we have a couple foundational ones that use things that we have. Oh we do a persimmon and pumpkin beer in the fall time.
Paul Ward:
Oh, very cool. So now do you have enough hops to keep you good for 12 months?
Mollie Engelhart:
Yes we do. So that’s been great and we just are finishing up harvest. We’ve been harvesting for seven days of the Cascade and then Nugget is the other variety that’s really done well here. And that is gonna be another couple weeks until it’s finished. So it’s still hanging. It doesn’t look as grandiose as the Cascade does, but it’s still really good and we all use it in three varieties and it is doing better than the Mount Hood just never took off here and the Centennial as well; just didn’t do good here.
Paul Ward:
Okay. So the hops that you’re growing, is there a certain type of IPA that’s kind of being successful or what kind of beers?
Mollie Engelhart:
There’s all different kinds of beers that people are making with it, but people love to do IPAs with the very hoppy beers and because ours can be used for aroma or bittering people are using it all different styles of beer from hazy IPAs to more like lagers and they’re being used in many different styles. Right? So, and then the really common thing that so many breweries are doing that’s really special is right now at this time of year, they’re doing the wet hop beers. So in a like a month from now, you’ll be able to go to Poseidon and get this beer that will only be available because a wet hop beer- you have to put the hops in within 48 hours of it being harvested. So it’s very hard for breweries to do that unless you live close to a hop yard. Sure. And so this year there’s 10 or 11 breweries doing a wet hop beer with our hop. So if you were, in a month, to go to Poseidon, you’ll be able to see that they have this wet hop beer and they won an award. The first year they did our wet hop beer with it. So everybody’s been very, very happy with our hops that has bought it.
Paul Ward:
That’s awesome. Do you see yourself growing more, putting more acreage in hops production or you’re kind of maxed out with everything else you got going on?
Mollie Engelhart:
I think that we have enough if I would like to put some rows, I think that we could do more rows in between the rows but…
Paul Ward:
Mixed with other crops?
Mollie Engelhart:
Well, right now the rows are 15 feet and I think we could do seven foot rows and still be able to get a mower in there and stuff like that and put extra posts in. So I may condense and do more high density planting, right where we already are, but putting it a hop yard is pretty expensive and the labor this is not a making venture, let’s say as far as the overall I think that overall it’s, it’s an advertising thing. We’re making really great hops. We’re making really great beer and the brewery is a money making thing and the farm overall is, but hops is a passion project and it’s hopefully gonna be break even. it is still labor intensive even without, even with the mechanical equipment.
Paul Ward:
And the help of the sheep!
Mollie Engelhart:
The help of the sheep; and chickens are awesome for weed control because they don’t need workers comp for minimum wage <LAUGHTER!>
Paul Ward:
Right. Absolutely. They just do it!
Mollie Engelhart:
They just eat and that’s it.
Paul Ward:
That’s awesome. So how did you get into the restaurant business?
Mollie Engelhart:
I’m competitive and my dad went into the restaurant. No, I’m just kidding. My dad, funny story. My dad and Woody Harrelson are friends and my aunt and his wife and everyone; we’ve been family friends since I was like 13 or 14 and Woody Harrelson and my dad were on like a raw food kick for a while. Like only vegan, only raw food. Like this was whatever my dad’s into. It’s like, he thinks that’s the way he’s very didactic. And then two years later he’s like a Buddhist or two years later, he’s a Republican and two years later he’s an agnostic, you know, like that. So anyways, he was really into raw food at the time and so was Woody so they were doing like a raw food challenge and I started making ice cream, raw ice cream out of like ground up nuts. Then my dad decided to open a raw food restaurant and I opened an ice cream shop.
Paul Ward:
In the same town?
Mollie Engelhart:
Nope, he was in San Francisco and I was in LA. And so he opened Cafe Gratitude and was doing Cafe Gratitude in San Francisco, which then eventually came to Los Angeles. Then I realized that raw vegan ice cream was like this narrow and you can’t make money on a market that’s this narrow. So I decided to open a vegan cooked food restaurant and I met these guys that already had one and I partnered with them and then I ended up buying them out and then expanded and expanded and my dad was doing Cafe Gratitude at the same time. So it’s kind of our family business, all these vegan restaurants. Then we grew up as farmers. My dad was a farmer when I was growing up. I grew up on a farm and then my dad went back to farming in Vacaville and then I ended up buying this place and had to relearn or re-remember farming again. So my family business is for sure restaurants and for sure farming. All the way through, and my mom’s a farmer in Hawaii as well. She has a restaurant that’s kind of making fun of my dad’s restaurant. It’s only open one day a week and it’s called Cafe Attitude.
Paul Ward:
One day a week? Attitude and Gratitude
Mollie Engelhart:
My mom, she’s like Cafe Attitude, be grateful or get out. It’s very hippie like, open mic one day a week, kind of donation-based restaurant. All of us are into land and all of us are into restaurants. So that’s how it happened. One, as I said, (with) my life, one little thing led to another, and when I started making that ice cream, it wasn’t until a couple years later, my best friend had a baby and she was like, “We need to start a business. I can’t be an actress and have a baby. You get paid and that no money for however long.” And so she was like, “We should remember that ice cream, you used to make, we should open an ice cream shop.” And that’s how it all started.
Paul Ward:
And did you always have a passion for regenerative or you didn’t even know what it was or you stumbled into it or?
Mollie Engelhart:
Stumbled into it. There was a guy, Graema Sait. I highly recommend anybody who is interested in regenerative agriculture watches, his Ted talk, Graeme Sait.
Paul Ward:
Do you spell that? S-A-T-E?
Mollie Engelhart:
It’s not spelled like that, but I will get it for you. Then you can put it up on the bottom of the screen. I can’t remember right now, but he’s from New Zealand and it was unbelievable that I was like super liberal, super, like bringing my bags to the grocery store, driving my hybrid; I thought I was doing everything right. Owning a vegan restaurant, like drinking my oat milk latte. Like I really thought like that I was on the path, but I was pretty apathetic that we were just gonna burn up and it was gonna be this terrible, like end of days. One pointed out some super simple science about soil in such an accessible way that for the first time, I don’t know how many years I had hoped . And I was like, went out of the kitchen to every person I thought that had enough money and just told them all about regenerative agriculture and told them they needed to buy a farm. I could bring all the compost from the restaurant. It would be amazing. And then I realized, “Oh, I’m the one I’ve been waiting for. I can’t expect the coach of the Clippers to buy a regenerative farm or whatever actress is in today.” So I just started looking and you know, my husband was undocumented at the time. So it was very hard for us to get a farm because no bank would approve us. Finally we found a piece of land with a desperate seller that had a 1031 exchange. And that’s how we ended up with this place.
Paul Ward:
It all fit into place. Right place, right time.
Mollie Engelhart:
Right place, right time. And it was good for the seller and it was really great for us. And I’m super grateful for that.
Paul Ward:
Absolutely. And you’re showing it in your results because you’re growing way more than everybody else and producing a tremendous amount of food.
Mollie Engelhart:
240 different varieties are on my CPC or on my organic certification.
Paul Ward:
And you’ve got the food boxes going on.
Mollie Engelhart:
Oh yeah. We’re doing really great with the food boxes; we’re delivering them all over Ventura County and all over Los Angeles County. You could order this on our website “Sow a Heart.” You would just get fresh regenerative produce, no chemicals, no Roundup, no nothing- right to your door the same day or the day before it’s picked. So it’s just basically getting harvested and getting to your door. And a lot of the leafy greens and stuff, they may look really fresh when you see them at the grocery store but they are like packed with, you know, argon or different kinds of gas and to make them stay fresh, but they actually are losing nutrients over time. So it’s really healthy to get our food right to your door, like the day after it was harvested. So that is awesome. And it’s a great way for us to use all these different kinds of crops. And then people are surprised like, oh, we got Canary melons this week. Oh, there’s guava this week.
Paul Ward:
Some of the staples are in there, but there’s also stuff that’s like, what is this?
Mollie Engelhart:
There’s gonna be broccoli and celery and like, you know, whatever the staples of the season are tomatoes and cucumbers in the season. But yes, there’s, and then there’s different, you know, every once in a while there’s dragon fruit or watermelons or whatever the different stuff is. Still try to get you to buy them for all your new clients after they close escrow a nice box present you can send.
Paul Ward:
And that’s www.sowaheart.com
Mollie Engelhart:
(Yes) www.sowaheart.com
Paul Ward:
You can see all the different boxes and…
Mollie Engelhart:
All the options and we deliver it right to your door. You can add eggs.
Paul Ward:
Oh, you can add eggs. And that’s anywhere in Ventura?
Mollie Engelhart:
Anywhere in Ventura, anywhere in Los Angeles. So that’s awesome. It’s an awesome service that we provide.
Paul Ward:
So what are the challenges about harvesting hops?
Mollie Engelhart:
Well, the labor, but we’ve kind of figured that out with the volunteers and the different breweries contributing, but the other thing is it just kind of comes at the same time of the year as our grapes and olives are right behind it. And some, you know, our regular harvesting of everything. So it just kind of becomes 5 weeks of what seems to be nonstop tedious harvesting. Then you’ve gotta get the wet hop, like our own wet hop beer besides the other breweries has to be brewed right away. And then the grapes have to be crushed and start fermenting right away. And so there’s, you know, a lot of different moving parts to this time of year. We also had to, you know, we had to bottle all the wine from last year and get it out of the fermenters and get them ready. So there’s a lot of different things at least in this climate that kind of come ready at the same time. So it’s not necessarily a problem with harvesting hops, but if I was planning a farm in the future, I’m not sure that I would go so heavy on olives, hops, and grapes. Right. Because they all kind of converge at the same time. At the same time, they all need to be harvested.
Paul Ward:
And then the different breweries kind of make demands on you and say, “Hey Mollie, we want so many pounds or tons this coming season, because last year was so great.” Is it kind of like starting to feel like that?
Mollie Engelhart:
The wet hops beer, the wet hops, the pressure is we have to plan it with them because they “have, has to be picked the day before they brew. So then like today we picked for Poseidon and then yesterday we picked for Talco, but so we have to pick a certain amount each day and then to make sure everybody has the wet hops. And then the extra that we pick, we put drying in the OST (a food dehydrator) and then we’ll pelletize it. Then be frozen in vacuum sealed bags for the rest of the year. But it’s a little bit, it’s nice to be able to sell the wet hops and do that. But it used to be that we just used to harvest over kind of three or four days nonstop, long days and we just pound it out. But now we have to plan with the brewer schedule. And so we give them certain dates and muds out and then we say these are the possible dates and they need to have a fermentor open to be able to do it and have a recipe written. Then they tell us, okay, my recipe calls for 50 pounds, a hundred pounds, 500 pounds, whatever. Then we have to have that ready. But if it’s something we can only really harvest like 150 pounds a day. So if someone needs 300 pounds, then we need two days just to get their order done. Then we gotta put argon gas or we have to put nitrogen to keep them fresh and greed for the two days to get ’em into the thing.
Paul Ward:
But you’re letting ’em know, “Hey, in advance, be ready to come out and start picking.”
Mollie Engelhart:
Yes. That we have a whole, yeah, like a whole sign up sheet and people have to tell us their brew date and then they pay in advance and then they get the refunded money if they come out and pick.
Paul Ward:
You’re the only farmer that I know that has the client actually you picking themself, that’s pretty cheesy.
Mollie Engelhart:
Well, you know, early on people just wanted to come out and take Instagram pictures. Sure. And I was like, that’s cool. But then I’m paying all these people over time. I mean the first year we did hops, I don’t know, it was really pathetic. We had like $700 of hops and like $9,000 in labor. It wasn’t that much, but it was like 10 times it might have been $7,000 in labor. Because it was just like these long days and then the pelletizing and….. And so we had to figure out a way to make it work for everybody. So that was the wet hops. It’s a better deal for the farm because it’s heavier because it’s still wet. Then it’s and then it’s getting used right away and all that.
Mollie Engelhart:
And so we can discount it to the brewery if they come and help. So it does work out- it’s a win-win-win for everybody. I don’t know, I think, especially during COVID and everything, we now have a volunteer day. You can sign up on our website every other Sunday and people come out and just weed or whatever. You would think, why would someone want to come and do manual labor for free? But I think like, as we’ve gotten our whole day is on zoom and our whole day is you know, on the phone and in our little box, in our car, driving down the freeway or yeah, whatever. It’s nice to just be outside with people, hands in the soil. We make them a farm lunch with whatever’s going off on the farm. I think more and more, not just breweries, I think more and more people are interested in agro-tourism or agro-life, you know? When you live in the city- and I grew up on a farm. I’ve always been very closely connected to farms, but I think that people are completely disconnected from food. People are completely…
Paul Ward:
They don’t know how it’s made.
Mollie Engelhart:
No, there’s a quote like, “Eating is an agricultural act.” Someone said that yesterday. And so I was like, “Wow, that’s a profound thought. “And I was like, “Not that (profound) if you’re the one harvesting the food.” It doesn’t seem that profound. But you know, we don’t, we don’t relate to food as an agricultural thing; it just comes from the grocery store, packed in this. And so people want to know where their food comes from. They want to know.
Paul Ward:
I think that even at the grocery store, I mean, sometimes- and I’m guilty myself. It’s like, you look for the perfect shiniest fruit. And if it has one little blemish, which was, you know, perfectly fine, it was caused by maybe wind, you know, brushing against a stick or something.
Mollie Engelhart:
You don’t choose that one.
Paul Ward:
You don’t choose that one. And then it’s like 40% or more are just thrown away.
Mollie Engelhart:
I had a distillery call me and say that they wanted to buy organic lemons. And I said, “Sure.” And that they said, okay, we only want this size and they all need to be perfect. And I was like, “Oh, I’m not the person for you to buy the lemons from.”
Paul Ward:
Why would they need that though?
Mollie Engelhart:
They were using the outside, I mean, I don’t know if they were using the skin or whatever. I wrote back and I said, “Oh, I appreciate that that’s your needs. And I know that every business has different needs and my business’ need is to sell all of my lemons no matter how they look and I believe that they all taste delicious and they may have a blemish. They may have been scrapped or whatever, but I’m gonna sell all of them. So I would rather just sell ’em to my restaurants where they’re gonna take them all.” That actually made them realize their own thoughts. And they said, “You know what? Well, we still want them.” Well, even though they’re gonna be different sizes and gonna be different looking, you know, things. But if you think about what, if you see a bit of lemons, you live in Ventura County, you’ve seen a bit of lemons.
Mollie Engelhart:
They’re all different sizes. They’re all different shapes. But in the grocery store, they all are this perfect oval and they’re this big and they have two nipples, but on either end. Right. But literally that’s only like 30% of lemons look like that. Some of them look more like an orange, their round, no nipples. Some are, you know, some are flat on one side because they were leading against a branch. But what happens to all those lemons? Like they get turned into juice and the farmer gets paid less money for them. Like, and so I, I actually want to educate people that like, we want to eat all the food. We want to eat whatever food there is out there. And that maybe the conversation that there’s not enough food. Well it’s because we throw away a lot. Like we throw away a lot in our own houses.
And we throw away a lot at the farm level to just send out the perfect ones. And so I think that that needs to shift, but people are just, you know, it’s not like people are bad or ignorant or wrong. It’s just, we’ve been so disconnected. I saw a tweet the other day that said, “I don’t know why everybody’s so stressed out about people not planting corn and soy because of drought or too much rain this year, when you can go to Kroger and buy anything you want.” And people are making fun of her and people were retweeting it, but that person actually didn’t have the idea that like everything that is at Kroger got grown somewhere by somebody. Like 70% of it probably had corner soy in it of some ingredient. Right. But like there was, there was no connection to like, well, why do people worry about what farmers are doing? You could just go to the grocery store and buy it like that. And everybody, you know, she got really made fun of, but it really just shows us how as humanity, we’ve lost sight of, you know, people will say to me, “Oh organic, does that mean that that’s not from a factory?” Well, not organic things are not from a factory either. They’re all from a farm, you know, of some version.
Paul Ward:
Absolutely. Well, this is a wonderful conversation and then we gotta pick it up again another time, another time. Excellent. But thank you, Mollie Engelhart for being our guest on this edition of Farm Talk. We love having you.
Mollie Engelhart:
Thank you, Paul Ward, for coming here to Sow a Heart Farm and putting up with my dogs here and joining us this afternoon.
Paul Ward:
They’re loving life. That’s for sure.
Mollie Engelhart:
Yeah. Two rescue pit bulls
Paul Ward:
And we of course want to thank our sponsors again, The Escrow Hub and The Money Store and be sure to tune in for our next episode and follow us wherever you find your podcasts. And you can also watch us on YouTube. Thanks so much and join us next time.
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