Hang Your Hat With Rotary

Part III – continuation of at article regarding Bob Quinn, PhD, by Bryan Smith as published in The Rotarian magazine on 02/19/2020:

Grain by Grain is devoted to debunking that myth. Yes, the use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers allows farmers to produce large amounts of food quickly, but the abundant supply continues to drive down prices, which reduces profit margins. That forces farmers into trying to produce even more. Eventually, small farmers are chased off their spreads, unable to afford the vast acreage needed to keep up with chemical commodity agriculture.

Those factors blew through Big Sandy and other small towns like tornadoes on the plain. For proof, you need only look at the past half-century of decline, Quinn says. When he was a boy, for instance, Big Sandy’s population was 1,000 — today it has dropped to below 600 — and it boasted a car dealership, two hardware stores, a couple of secondhand shops, a jeweler, a dry cleaner, a lumberyard and farm supply store, and a movie theater.

Quinn’s dime tour of today’s Big Sandy downtown takes a couple of minutes: Over there is the lone grocery store — a good one, he says, but the only one. The last hardware store closed months ago for lack of business. There’s the senior citizens center, the bank, and a combination bowling alley and restaurant.

“The driver [in] all of these social and economic losses to small, rural communities,” Quinn writes in one of his frequent blog posts, “is the quest for cheap food and cheap goods without regard of the cost to those that make them, not to mention the loss of friends and neighbors unable to support their families, which results in fewer jobs and smaller communities. It’s really too bad the true price of these cheap goods isn’t listed on the price tag. If it were, maybe we would think twice about who and what we really want to support with our purchases. It begs the question: How much is our community — our friends and our neighbors — worth to us?”

Quinn dedicated himself and his career to farming without chemicals, making him one of the pioneers in organic agriculture.

Quinn’s own aha moment came a lifetime ago, in the 1970s while he was on a college field trip. He was a graduate student at UC Davis, one of the nation’s premier agricultural schools, and one class outing was to a peach farm. When he stepped off the bus into a “sea of peach trees,” he expected to be overwhelmed by a sweet fragrance. Instead, he smelled nothing. The reason, he learned, was a petroleum-based spray one of his professors had developed that made the peaches look ripe even though they weren’t — which explained why there was no rich, distinctive aroma. In that moment, Quinn says, he was certain of three things: that the spray couldn’t be good for the environment; that unripe peaches were not nearly as nutritious as ripe ones; and that when he returned to Big Sandy, he was going to find a better way.

From that moment sprang Quinn’s dedication to farming without chemicals, making him a pioneer in organic agriculture. (Winner of the Organic Trade Association’s 2010 Organic Leadership Award, Quinn helped draft Montana’s and the nation’s guidelines for organic farming.) “A lot of people said it couldn’t be done,” he recalls. How would you fight weeds and insects without synthetic pesticides? Ever the scientist, Quinn pioneered a system of soil building, green manures, and crop rotation to discourage the growth of weeds and insect infestations. “For many years, people thought I was spraying at night,” he says. “They couldn’t believe anyone could find success without chemical inputs.”

Once he started successfully growing the ancient khorasan wheat, he came up with healthy snack products made from the grain, opening a small plant in Big Sandy that added a few jobs to the economy. (Today his Kamut products are marketed as pasta, cereal, and other foodstuffs all around the world.) When he learned that buyers wanted wheat that had already been milled, he opened a milling plant in nearby Fort Benton to grind his healthier grains, adding jobs there.

Because Quinn doesn’t pay the exorbitant costs of “chemical inputs” — pesticides and herbicides — and because the demand for his healthier grains commands far higher prices from buyers, he not only hasn’t succumbed to the forces dragging down other family farms, but has thrived.

But old ways die hard. Despite Quinn’s successes and the jobs his new endeavors have created, some still cast a jaundiced eye. For one, Quinn committed what to some people is an unpardonable sin: He believed that climate change is both real and man-made. What’s more, he was convinced that the production and employment of the nitrogenbased fertilizers typically used by U.S. farmers generated the greenhouse gases that contributed to climate change.

“He has certainly encountered skepticism,” says Liz Carlisle, a lecturer in the School of Earth, Energy, and Environmental Sciences at Stanford University and the co-author of Grain by Grain. “But I think he recognized that commodity agriculture was not going to sustain his farm. Chemical inputs are getting more and more expensive, and we don’t like the government subsidies that essentially cover the cost of those inputs.”

More to the point, she says, “is that he’s thinking at the scale of his whole community. It’s not just ‘How do I save my farm at a time when agriculture is really difficult?’, but ‘How can I help create conditions under which our whole community can really thrive through a smarter, healthier food system?’”

The field lies vast and hot in the late afternoon; the sun pouring amber over the wheat, which is packed so tightly the landscape looks like a single golden bar. Quinn stands knee-high in the grain, cowboy hat tilted back, his shadow stretching three times his length. He reaches down and pulls a single stalk. Behind him, a combine scythes row after row of the season’s final harvest. He brushes the stalk gently as if it were an ancient artifact, which in some ways it is. “To me, there is something almost sacred about growing wheat,” Quinn writes in Grain by Grain. “Nearly every spring of my life, I have held in my hands a seed passed down over 500 generations, a seed that has nourished my fellow humans for some 10 millennia.”

Just as he likes to begin his days looking over the land from the tall white tower that rises next to his home, he can think of no better way to end them than to be out here, under the big Montana sky, with the golden dust thrown by the combine filling the air with shimmering confetti.

The following morning, he will rise early to make pancakes for a group of visitors. In anticipation, when he leaves the field tonight, he will grind some of his Kamut wheat in a flour mill: Two cups of grain make 2 1/3 cups of flour. He will add two tablespoons of the nutty-smelling safflower oil extracted from his homegrown safflower plants; he will add the same amount of honey, extracted from the honeycombs in his own bee farm, as well as two eggs hatched by his daughter’s chickens. He’ll spoon the batter onto a griddle and within a couple of minutes set steaming stacks of golden Kamut pancakes before his guests, along with small bowls of fresh raspberries and chokeberry syrup he made himself. The whole production will be a symphony of food sovereignty, with Bob Quinn as conductor.

For now, however, he shakes his cupped hands like a miner panning for gold until he has reduced the head of the wheat stalk to a small collection of grain. One by one, he pops the kernels into his mouth and looks out onto the fields, his seamed face smoothed by a contented smile.

Crowned by the sun, Quinn basks in the afterglow of a successful harvest: “To me, there is something almost sacred about growing wheat.”

Food insecurity in Montana

In Montana, approximately 1 in 8 people struggle with hunger and more than 38,000 children live in food insecure homes. This can be a symptom of the state’s economic insecurity, where low wages, job loss, low and insufficient incomes leave families unable to keep food on the table while trying to afford rising costs of housing, child care, and medical costs. While Montana has a relatively low unemployment rate, nearly a quarter of working residents earn below the poverty level, making it difficult to decide which expenses to pay each month.

Thirty of Montana’s 56 counties have areas considered food deserts, where at least 33 percent of the residents must travel more than 10 miles to the nearest supermarket.

Nationally, 17.6 million people live in areas with limited access to healthy foods. Is your neighborhood a food desert? Check out the USDA’s online interactive map to find out where it’s difficult to buy fresh produce and food.

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.