Mollie Engelhart is short, about five foot two, though she gets a lift from heeled cowboy boots that reveal themselves as she walks around the bar register at SovereigntyRanch to welcome guests: a couple from the nearby town of Rocksprings, who’ve booked a tiny house for their 21st wedding anniversary, and me, flying solo in a three-bedroom house that sleeps eight. Like many visitors to the ranch, which is located in the town of Bandera, an hour or so northwest of San Antonio, the couple are print subscribers to the Epoch Times, a far-right outlet where Engelhart is a daily columnist, addressing topics from vaccine mandates to fertility decline. Her articles, they say, make “good common sense.”
Engelhart firmly shakes both their hands, as well as mine, presenting an enormous diamond wedding ring. She addresses us as “sir” and “ma’am.” She is 48 years old and has a low voice, which sounds a little congested, confident, and maybe a touch rehearsed. After all, she’s done this before—having been a linchpin of California’s premier vegan-restaurant dynasty for decades. She sets down a cup of white liquid on the bar. “I gave up food for Lent,” she says proudly. For the next 40 days, she will drink about 3,000 calories’ worth of raw milk a day, usually sipped through a plastic straw.
Last year, when Engelhart tried her second raw milk cleanse, she lost 46 pounds; this time, she hopes to drop another 20. But there are additional benefits, she says: Just eight days of fasting has already heightened her senses. “I was on a trip to Walmart, and I felt like I could see so clear,” she says. “I was watching this one man lust after a lady. I could see another woman’s shame about her weight. I could see through everyone’s bullshit.”
This article appears in Issue 36 of Alta Journal.
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If Engelhart is at all impaired by her diet, she shows no signs, simultaneously answering customer calls and fielding questions from a gray-haired employee (who I later learn is her uncle) about a wholesale order of buckwheat and radishes. She’s the center of gravity at Sovereignty Ranch, a 200-acre property with a 40-head cattle farm, rental units, a restaurant, a store that sells ranch-produced eggs and grass-fed meat, and, soon, a brewery. As the ranch’s owner, Engelhart oversees everything; she’s also a mother of four little kids, a writer, and an influencer with 20,000 Instagram followers. She has no time for filters, as she launches into conspiracy theories (“water has memory”) and descriptions of her bowel movements. “I’m a freedom-of-speech maximalist,” she tells me. She also tells me it’s time I start having children—“as soon as possible.”
From the restaurant—a barnlike steel structure with exposed rafters and farm tools decorating the walls—Engelhart leads us outside, below an enormous light-up sign on the patio that says “Howdy Y’all!” In the near distance, I spot two large greenhouses, a purple inflatable bounce castle, and a firepit piled with empty Amazon boxes. As we walk, Engelhart identifies various obstacles that we should sidestep carefully with our luggage: sleeping dogs, hoses, pig buckets. She points to a broken piece of wood on a rotting deck: “The previous guest did that.”
It’s hard to imagine Sovereignty Ranch as a trafficked place, though, of course, that’s Engelhart’s ambition. It’s a trek to get here: You need a substantial vehicle to climb the rocky dirt roads that lead to the front gate. Other than the couple, who stay for one night, I’m the only person renting one of the ranch’s 14 guesthouses. At mealtimes, I am often alone in the 60-seat restaurant. Still, Engelhart hustles to get behind the cash register before 9 a.m. each day, brown Stetson atop her head, pinning hopes on each customer who walks through the door. She’s not shy about discussing money struggles—at one point, she asks me if she can write for Alta Journal. “I’m in survival mode,” she says, revealing that the ranch has saddled her with millions of dollars of debt. “I’m way out on the skinny branches trying to make this work. I don’t want this to be such a struggle.”
The struggle is a by-product of the head-spinning apostasy committed by Engelhart and her family. For two decades, they were formidable forces in California’s vegan community. Mollie’s father and stepmother, Matthew and Terces, are the cofounders of Café Gratitude, a chain of vegan restaurants in California that once served more than 10,000 meals per day. In 2011, Mollie opened Sage Vegan Bistro, a plant-based restaurant that expanded into four locations around Los Angeles, once valued at $31 million. (Café Gratitude still has two locations; Sage closed in 2025.)
Today, the Engelharts have abandoned veganism and fled California. They’ve become cattle ranchers, practicing and evangelizing regenerative farming—an approach to conserving top soil without synthetic inputs, which the U.S. Department of Agriculture deems a viable path to increased agricultural productivity. Now in their 70s, Matthew and Terces live in Idaho, where they operate a dairy farm and creamery. Ryland, Mollie’s younger brother, is a Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) leader and a confidant of the U.S. secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who visited the ranch in May. Ryland lives and works at Sovereignty Ranch with his wife and two sons. Though nearly 2,000 miles apart, the two homesteads are halves of a whole, promoting Engelhart values—simultaneously dogmatic and wildly open to change.
The Engelharts’ choices have outraged, baffled, and distanced the communities they once served—those charmed by Café Gratitude’s goji berry–flecked messages of radical love and acceptance. The family’s story mirrors broader trends: a move away from veganism toward a meat-forward diet, reinforced by the Trump administration, and an exodus from California, which lost more residents between 2024 and 2025 than any other state. On the bleeding edge of the MAHA coalition, the Engelharts have sacrificed everything, relocating their children and selling businesses at a loss. The reputational stakes for Mollie are high—once raking it in from Westside moms who ordered steaming oat milk lattes, she now spends hours sticking labels on homemade tallow balms to make extra cash. They’re perhaps even higher for Ryland, a public-facing human anecdote for the MAHA movement. The Engelharts have transferred their California dream of happy, healthy, and wealthy—one that was so well suited to that environment—to Texas, where they have yet to establish the same matrix.
“I had made it,” Mollie tells me of her former life in L.A. “I had the big house, pool, palm trees. I decided to risk it all.”
SLAUGHTER-GATE
Customers at Café Gratitude order by repeating affirmations from the menu: “I Am Luscious” (vanilla smoothie) or “I Am Worthy” (mung bean–egg omelet). Waiters, in turn, affirm the statement: “You Are Luscious,” they say, before plunking down a glass of frothy white liquid sprinkled with raw cacao. If this was a gimmick, it had legs: By 2011, seven years after opening their first location in San Francisco’s Mission district, the Engelharts had seven Café Gratitudes across California, as well as a Mexican restaurant, Gracias Madre, in the Mission. The Café Gratitude location in L.A.’s Larchmont neighborhood alone grossed $12,000 a day, according to the New York Times. Musician Jason Mraz was an investor; Beyoncé, Ariana Grande, and Jake Gyllenhaal were regulars.
Working at Café Gratitude was another matter. In 2011, two employees filed suit for wage theft, prompting the Engelharts to close all eight Northern California cafés. The event resurfaced an East Bay Express story from 2009 that raised concerns about the business’s affiliation with Landmark Forum, a reinvention of est, the 1970s self-development movement that purported to deliver personal breakthroughs via group workshops. Matthew had met Terces (secret spelled backward) at Landmark Forum; many of the program’s values still shape their lives today.
Employees described pressure to attend seminars and recruit others; in the East Bay Express, former staffers spoke of a workplace culture where colleagues gave one another hugs and managers asked intimate questions. The Engelharts explained these practices as part of “sacred commerce”: Business, they said, is guided by the heart. In a statement to Alta Journal, Matthew denies allegations that employees were forced to participate in Landmark Forum. “There are hundreds of employees who went through it,” he says. “The manager training highly benefitted their lives.”
For the Engelharts, business and family had always been intertwined. In the early ’80s, Matthew; Jeanne, Mollie’s mother; and Jeanne’s twin sister, Virginia, who was married to Matthew’s brother, purchased a farm near Ithaca, New York. They pooled resources from carpentry work, milking cows, and selling homemade clothes at the farmers’ market. Mollie and Ryland, who is two years younger (he was conceived in a tepee on the banks of Lake Champlain), roamed the homestead’s 27 acres. Like the adults, the children were vegan—except for butter, which replaced margarine after Jeanne discovered that the spread turned into a hard plastic sheet if left in the oven too long.
After moving to California for college, Mollie opened KindKreme, a vegan soft-serve shop in Studio City that grew into Sage Vegan Bistro, a full-service restaurant (Woody Harrelson was an investor), located in a brick-and-mortar in Echo Park. Business boomed; Sage later expanded to additional locations in Culver City, Pasadena, and Agoura Hills.
In 2016, My Vegan Journal circulated a blog post written by Terces that described Matthew abandoning 40 years of vegetarianism by eating a hamburger made from a cow, Flower, that had lived on Be Love Farm, his homestead in Vacaville that grew produce for Café Gratitude and Sage. The incident, which the Engelharts refer to as Slaughter-gate, outraged the vegan community. Matthew and Terces received death threats. The decision, Matthew explained, was aligned with the laws of nature: “Cows maintain the grass, predators maintain the herd by culling the weak and sick.”
To the Engelharts, Slaughter-gate resembled growth—an informed next step in their lifelong commitment to environmentalism. But California, where the family had been so successful, was inhospitable to their new philosophies. Matthew received a call from the Solano County Building & Safety Services prohibiting him from continuing to live in a yurt on his farm. “You’re just taking the frontier ethic and just putting it in the wastebasket,” he recalls thinking. Ventura County officials warned Mollie, who purchased Sow a Heart Farm in Fillmore in 2018, of restrictions on using restaurant food waste as compost on her land. And everyone was frustrated by the county’s ever-shifting COVID restrictions on food businesses. “The rural redneck is the last great hope for America,” advised a friend, who encouraged Mollie to consider a move to Texas.
She, too, was having a fall from veganism. In her 2025 memoir, Debunked by Nature: How a Vegan-Chef-Turned-Regenerative-Farmer Discovered That Mother Nature Is a Conservative, Mollie explains her radicalization through a series of incidents on the farm. “Ground squirrels in traps, toads under tires, ducks and sheep gone wrong,” she writes. “Every plate has death on it—even in the vegan plate.” (Today, other than consuming bone broth, Mollie is a vegetarian. Her children, except Luna, her nine-year-old daughter, eat meat.)
She began scouting properties. Bandera, though unremarkable on her first visit, felt like destiny. “God had saved this place for me,” Mollie recalls in her memoir. The problem was finances; her businesses were bleeding from the pandemic, and she was unable to offload her Fillmore farm. A phone call from Ye (the artist formerly known as Kanye West) answered her prayers. During a stint as a semi-successful slam poet in the mid-aughts, Mollie had connected with the rapper, who offered her $300,000 to help him develop a farm in Italy. The project never materialized, but the check still arrived, as did, eventually, an offer on the farm from the scion of a prominent pharmaceuticals brand that developed vaccines during the pandemic. Mollie was free to proceed with Sovereignty Ranch—and none too soon: In 2024, Sage profits plummeted after Mollie decided to add meat and dairy products to the menu, igniting a response similar to that faced by Matthew and Terces.
The following year, Mollie closed all the Sage locations. The Engelhart ties to California were cut. “Texas began to feel like more than a venture,” Mollie says. “It felt like a calling.”
FIELD OF DREAMS
Mollie’s husband, Elias Sosa, pulls up to the Barn restaurant in a pickup truck with an open-air wagon hitched to it. It’s time for the farm tour. I climb up the steel ladder into the wagon, following a young family, who are camping on the grounds in a mobile home, and the older couple. The man wears a black T-shirt that says “I stand for the flag, I kneel for the cross.” Mollie joins last, clutching a wireless microphone and a mason jar of raw milk. “It’s not a one-woman show; it’s a seven-woman show,” she announces as she sets up her audio equipment.
Elias is slightly taller than his wife, with a round face and long hair twisted into a bun. He met Mollie in 2011 at Sage, where he was a dishwasher, having come to the United States illegally from Oaxaca. Early on, they communicated using Google Translate. (Mollie cautiously contextualizes this period in the “Defund the Cartels” chapter of her memoir: “Nothing in my life would exist without illegal immigration. And yet, I now advocate for border security.”) She mostly speaks for Elias (whether out of necessity or preference, it’s hard to tell) as he stands nearby and grins. Still, they’re in sync, Elias anticipating Mollie’s verbal cues for places to pause along the tour. (“I don’t know any other man who would put up with the endless projects,” Mollie says to me later. “He’s very happy to let me deal with the money stuff as long as I make him food, get him coffee, and have sex.”)
As we lumber forward, the great experiment comes into view. Sovereignty Ranch is a rock-free zone of Texas Hill Country with rich soil seven feet deep, snaked by a narrow creek. The Engelharts scoured the property to find areas suitable for a diversity of crops—pears, fava beans, and passion fruit. We hop out to wander the greenhouse. Mollie walks backward, like a college student giving a campus tour, though rather than identify academic buildings, she excitedly points at the herbs she uses to make homeopathic medicine for her children. “Welcome to my big, foolish project,” she says.
Sovereignty Ranch has installed the amenities of farm stays in the Catskills or Ojai, but it’s haphazard. Posted arrows directing visitors to a photo booth or a toddler tent instead lead to empty fields. Children’s toys lie abandoned in unusual places: I find a plastic Pocahontas doll under my bed; while walking the main road, I come upon a small stuffed monkey stuck on a thorny bush. A piece of cardboard that reads “pee on a tree” is nailed to a trunk. On the ranch’s Yelp page, a recent visitor wrote that she turned around just after entering: “We left concerned we were arriving at some [sort] of Deliverance.”
Engelhart often refers to the ranch’s financial struggles—the enormous overhead, the six full-time employees (all of whom are relatives of her husband). “Anything that’s unfinished, you can just assume money,” she announces into the microphone, pointing to the coming brewery. “I’m joyously awaiting for the Lord to bless us with more for us to finish.” Business, she says, is uneven. Sometimes they get six customers in a day, sometimes 25. Her target audience is unclear, as Mollie tells me she’s not catering to locals. “They don’t know about healthy food,” she says.
As the wagon returns to the parking lot, we’re greeted by Rio, Mollie’s 11-year-old son, her eldest, who’s carrying his bearded dragon, Red Velvet, in a clear plastic backpack, and Ryland, who’s sipping something hot from a jar. He’s on a master cleanse, mostly citrus and water, to clear kidney stones, he tells me. Ryland has a shaved head and a slumped, ropy body. He closes his eyes as he speaks, punching out individual words with a raised fist.
He’s about to drive to Austin to appear with RFK Jr. on his “Take Back Your Health” tour. Last year, Ryland traveled with Mollie to Washington, D.C., to speak on behalf of the Heritage Foundation about regenerative farming. Mollie defines herself as “politically nonbinary,” though many of her personal and professional choices align with MAHA and she has expressed support for Tucker Carlson.
At Sovereignty Ranch, Ryland is a managing partner. Working with family is not without its challenges: Ryland contends with the insecurity of being the little brother. In a recent podcast interview, he described participating in the New Warrior Training Adventure, a workshop that promises to “fundamentally alter” one’s experience of manhood. (He was partly motivated, he said, by the “experience of feeling totally denuded by my sister.”) Still, his confidence in Mollie is unwavering. “This piece of land that called her doesn’t make sense on paper,” he tells me. “But if you build it, they will come. It’s the field of dreams we’re creating here.”
VIRTUE SIGNALING
That afternoon, I sit with Mollie in the restaurant as she labels makeup highlighter sticks (ingredients include olive oil, arrowroot, and mica) and laminates plastic together to create freezer bags for meat storage. Estrella, who is three, eats a pizza, wagging a piece in front of her mother’s face. “No, no,” Mollie says. “Mommy’s not eating until Easter.” When she finishes lunch, Estrella crawls into her mother’s lap, pulls up Mollie’s shirt, and begins breastfeeding.
In a recent Epoch Times column, Mollie argues against trad wives—online influencers like Hannah Neeleman and Nara Smith, who perform 1950s domesticity at full volume. These women, chasing after six-plus children while stocking the cupboard with sourdough made from scratch, have become powerful and appealing examples of a sort of homespun motherhood that MAHA idealizes. But nothing about them is traditional, Mollie explains, since they center their lives on homemaking. “Traditional values is a family business, whether you’re the shoemaker, the candlestick maker, the farmer,” she says. “Everybody’s working together.” (Notably, Neeleman’s business, between her products and sponsorships, rakes in millions.)
Mollie’s version of a traditional family, though perhaps more authentic to an original homestead, is received as an affront to conservative values, especially in Texas. “Out here, even if you get your astrology chart done, you might as well be a witch,” she says. I’m reminded of something she told me earlier: “Every day, I’m either failing the [kids] or failing the business. That is the truth of being an entrepreneur mother.”
The strain is evident: the endless projects, the milk fasts. But it’s the good kind of tired, a spiritual exhaustion that comes with the fierce belief in, well, sovereignty. “I want to be a ripple effect,” she tells me. “I don’t want to have 50 Sovereignty Ranches across the country.”
The challenge to that ripple is the fractured conservatism where Mollie’s version of health-conscious libertarianism now sits. A survey released by Politico in April revealed confusion among many MAHA supporters, who were asked to identify the movement’s core objectives: Was it eliminating fluoride in water, restricting abortion access, banning cell phones from school? There was no consensus. The objectives of veganism, by comparison, are abundantly clear and, as one of the most effective ways for individuals to reduce their environmental impact, arguably virtuous. To achieve relative success, MAHA outposts are hard-pressed to know what virtue to signal. Mollie’s homestead—depicted as a haven where families, just like hers, can fully embody their values—presents an option. But is family enough to sustain a movement?
Hands still greasy from her pizza, Estrella paws at her mother’s shoulder. “Mama, a big car is coming,” she shrieks. Mollie perks up: “Maybe it’s a customer.”
HEADS ABOVE WATER
I’m awakened one night by stomach cramps, a reminder of the mug of raw milk—or “baby-ccino,” as the kids called it—I’d drunk after dinner. The next morning, I trudge up the hill to Mollie’s sprawling Spanish-style home, where I knock on the door. Rio answers with a shy smile. He’s in his pajamas, as are his three siblings. Mollie wears a blue-and-white flowered bathrobe; without her trademark heavy eyeliner, she looks younger, a celestial creature trailed by a flock of children and animals. The house is light-filled, with tile floors and an open fireplace. The walls are covered in family photos. Yoshimi, a beakless macaw that Mollie is rehabilitating, squawks from the wooden farm table, where he marches about, uncaged.
Estrella leads me by the hand upstairs, past a mounted print of the Constitution. Rio shows me his natural fish tank, a self-sustaining ecosystem that reduces the need for additional food or cleaning. Atop the tank, he has partially submerged Japanese sweet potato, mint, and a strawberry plant. The bottom is lined with soil, he explains, to filter the water, which is remarkably clear. Finding the right plants has been an ongoing experiment, guided by Mollie.
Rio spots a dead fish—Lotus, with gold specks. He removes her with a net and holds her in his palm to show Mollie as the kids gather around. I brace for impact, expecting tears. “Do you want to put her in a bag in the freezer or flush her down the toilet?” Mollie asks. (They settle on the freezer until the family’s next trip to town—the pet store has a 30-day guarantee.)
Mollie’s and Ryland’s children are homeschooled in a yurt on the ranch. They study math, reading, and writing with a teacher for three hours, three days a week. Lessons often have real-life applications: In the fall, Mollie’s kids pooled together $135 to buy five meat rabbits, which they planned to harvest. Two of the females died within a few days; Mollie used the opportunity to explain investment risk.
We move to the couch outside the children’s rooms, resting our feet on the blond hide rug. Sol, age six, eager for my attention, plays his red plastic guitar. Mollie basks in the warm light and fleeting stillness of morning, before reality pulls her back into constant motion.
“Part of the move to Texas and this business model, which is not very financially viable yet, is that the kids can come find me,” she says. “I’m not an hour and 15 minutes away if someone falls and scrapes their knee. I can come hold them for 10 minutes and then go back to work.” She gazes at Rio, who’s giving the bearded dragon a bath. “Is it too deep?” she asks him. “Is she struggling to keep her head above water?”
Estrella makes her way over to Mollie and starts breastfeeding again.•
Lydia Horne is the senior editor and research director at Alta Journal. Her writing has appeared in Wired, Racquet Magazine, L.A. Taco, Hyperallergic, and other publications.
