Part II – continuation of an article regarding Bob Quinn, PhD, by Bryan Smith as published in The Rotarian magazine on 02/19/2020
A plainsman with a PhD, Bob Quinn uses his 4,000-acre Montana spread as a laboratory to revive an ancient grain, rethink agricultural practices, and reinvigorate rural communities
Fourteen people, including a visitor from Germany who uses Quinn’s grain, gather around a table where, after passing around worn copies of Rotary songs, they sing “Home on the Range” and “You’re a Grand Old Flag” before reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.
Quinn joined Rotary, he says, for reasons bigger than wanting to continue the family legacy. He finds that the organization’s Four- Way Test — with its emphasis on truth and fairness, goodwill and friendship, and a mutual concern for the well-being of all — dovetails with his own way of thinking. “My philosophy in work is ‘everybody wins’,” he says. “The most successful businesses are the ones that are profitable but that also help improve the lives of other people.”
In his 2019 book, Grain by Grain, which chronicles his “quest to revive ancient wheat, rural jobs, and healthy food,” Quinn writes: “As an entrepreneur and scientist working in the midst of rural American poverty, I have seen firsthand how putting food and other fundamental goods like energy at the center of a value-added economy can foster health, economic opportunity, and ecological regeneration, particularly in some of our country’s poorest communities. ... I measure the success of my business by the degree to which it’s added economic, ecological, and nutritional value all along the supply chain.”
Today Quinn, at 72, travels the world spreading his gospel, which has as its premise that the way food is grown and produced — the Big Agriculture approach of making as much as possible as cheaply as possible, with a heavy emphasis on chemical pesticides and fertilizers — is destructive to the land, to communities, to farmers, and to our health. He also preaches the corollary: that organic farming not only is the right thing to do by consumers, but also is highly profitable for the farmer and a prescriptive for towns like Big Sandy that have found themselves struggling for survival.
The results have been as obvious as towering stalks of wheat, says Jon Tester, a U.S. senator from Montana whose life and career have also been closely intertwined with Big Sandy. “It’s simply undeniable what he’s done for the Big Sandy community,” Tester says. “He’s contributed jobs and a lot of economy to the town. We don’t have enough people like Bob. He’s fearless, a true entrepreneur who is not afraid to take risks, and at the same time he’s somebody who believes in rural America.”
Examples of Quinn’s entrepreneurial spirit, and the greatergood benefits that derive from it, bloom like apple blossoms across his property. On the occasional tours he gives, which draw workaday farmers and ivory-tower agriscientists, Quinn refers to his land as his laboratory. It’s clear why: There are his experimental gardens, of course, where he tries to see which fruits and vegetables can thrive in Montana’s notoriously fickle climate — if only, he says, “to show people we can do something other than wheat and barley.”
Ten feet underground, inside Quinn’s root cellar, bins of potatoes, all grown on the farm — Yukon Gems, Red Norlands, Red La Sodas, and Purple Vikings — are kept naturally cool. “Potatoes are particularly hardy for our northern climate, and they have an excellent shelf life,” Quinn says. A few hundred feet away is what he calls his oil barn. Inside, where Quinn milked cows as a boy, the seeds from farm-grown safflower are pressed into a cooking oil, which he sells to restaurants and grocery stores; it’s also used in the kitchens at the University of Montana, after which the waste is returned to Quinn. “The oil we get back from UM is enough to provide about one-eighth of the fuel needs for our farm,” he writes in Grain by Grain. (A pioneer in sustainable energy, Quinn played a leading role in creating the Judith Gap Wind Farm, which opened in central Montana in 2005.)
And then there is the ancient grain. Known as Khorasan and rechristened — and trademarked — by Quinn as Kamut (pronounced kuh-MOOT), it likely originated centuries ago in the Fertile Crescent, that agriculturally rich region in the Middle East that gave birth to several ancient civilizations. Quinn was introduced to the grain at a county fair when he was in high school and an old man thrust a fistful of kernels in his hand and claimed they were “King Tut’s wheat.” “I was amazed by how big they were: three times the size of the wheat we grew on our farm,” Quinn recalls in Grain by Grain. “I had no inkling that this grain would, some 25 years later, change the whole course of my life.”
Today, Kamut International is a global operation that, while promoting organic farming and healthful eating, also serves as a model for struggling farmers and small towns searching for a return to prosperity. “If you look at what Bob has pushed for and what he’s done, it’s not conventional,” allows Tester. “I mean, it’s not stuff that the university system would say, ‘Go do this.’ For example, in a time when [corporate farms] were shipping grain out in 52-car unit trains, he was setting up a cleaning plant to ship wheat out in 25-kilogram bags. He had a different vision for how you could market grain and make a few bucks off it and employ people.”
Jacob Cowgill, who worked on Quinn’s farm for two seasons before starting his own organic farm and bakery, marvels at Quinn’s willingness to try the unconventional. “The thing that I took away from working with Bob is the idea of experimenting,” Cowgill says. “He always has multiple projects that are still considered pretty radical and ahead of their time. In fact, it seems like anything that he jumps into is a radical idea — until it isn’t, and more people are doing it.”
“He’s the most incredible idea generator I’ve ever met,” adds Bruce Maxwell, a professor of agroecology at Montana State University. “He has one after another — ways to make his own farm more sustainable and more profitable — but he’s also got a real dedication to his community.”
Since 1920, three generations of the family have tended the Quinn Farm and Ranch — and Quinn’s roots as a farmer extend back to his ancestors in 17thcentury Virginia.
The Rocky Boy’s Reservation lies green and windswept at the foot of the Bears Paw Mountains, a flat table of land spread across Chouteau and Hill counties, some 50 miles south of the Canadian border. The last and smallest reservation created in Montana, it is home to about 3,000 members of the Chippewa Cree tribe. Quinn, having grown up on the family farm, about 15 miles southwest, had long known about the struggles of the reservation’s people, such as poor health and high unemployment. Of particular heartbreak to him is that the reservation is a “food desert” — a community barren of quality grocery stores where the residents can buy the kinds of healthy foods that might mitigate some of their worst problems, such as rampant diabetes.
Quinn wanted to help, and believed he could, but the tribal council, to say nothing of the people of the reservation, were wary of a white man trying to tell them what was best for their Native American community. “It took years to win their trust,” says Quinn. “Now I’m invited to their sweat lodges, and I have a number of friends here.” It has taken another decade for real progress toward the goal of “food sovereignty”— where, rather than relying on outside grocers, the reservation can supply its own healthy food.
Tribe member Jason Belcourt grasped the implications immediately. “I met Bob back in January 2019. I heard him speak, and he just blew me away,” says Belcourt, a member of a food sovereignty team that includes representatives from the school health program, the tribe’s ranch and farm, the local college, and the reservation hospital’s diabetes program.
“Rocky Boy was an island,” he says. “There’s nothing available but processed foods and frozen food, snacks and sugary drinks. We’re trying to re-establish our relationship with Mother Earth so that, ideally, we can grow our own food and provide for ourselves. Hopefully we can have it turn into something that we can take pride in.”
As Belcourt speaks, Quinn walks through a one-acre plot inspecting rows of winter peas and new potatoes planted a few months before. “I’m really jacked,” Quinn says, removing his cowboy hat and cradling it as he drops in the golf-ball sized spuds. “We’re going in the right direction.”
“What’s crazy is that Bob doesn’t have to come up and help us do this, but he has volunteered,” Belcourt adds. “We have no equipment, so he brought up his to help us weed, and he has given us advice all the way. He gave us the corn seed. That’s Indian corn over there, which I actually planted.”
The yield from those particular seeds is less than spectacular, but Quinn reassures Belcourt: “This is the first year. You shouldn’t be discouraged that it’s not perfect.”
This 21st-century plainsman grows an ancient Mesopotamian grain called Khorasan that he believes holds no less than the power to change everything.
If Quinn initially faced mistrust from the residents of Rocky Boy, he encountered outright skepticism from the people of Big Sandy, including the farmers in and around the town who have spent most of their lives using conventional synthetic chemical agricultural practices. He still hears whispers that he’s trying to impose fancy big-city ideas on their small town — though even the most hard-bitten skeptic has been forced to acknowledge Quinn’s successes. “These young farmers are looking at his new equipment and talking over what’s going on, and they’re saying, ‘I don’t know if I can tolerate these weeds, but damn, he’s making money’,” Maxwell says.
Quinn is sympathetic to farmers wary of new systems. “I was raised farming with chemicals,” he says. “I never questioned our use of fertilizer and herbicide. These were the new tools that my dad quickly adopted after a little experimentation. He thought they could help us be better farmers and make more money.”
Next week’s section will tell about Quinn’s agricultural endeavors. If you would like to find out more about rotary please feel free to join in our weekly Zoom meet. The meeting will be online at noon Thursday. Please send an email request for an invite to rotarysstx@gmail.com or call Mike Thomas at 512-924-4687 and we will get you online with us.