Grain by Grain

A Quest to Revive Ancient Wheat, Rural Jobs, and Healthy Food

Bob Quinn, Liz Carlisle

• Publisher: Island Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781610919968
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

"A compelling agricultural story skillfully told; environmentalists will eat it up." - Kirkus Reviews When Bob Quinn was a kid, a stranger at a county fair gave him a few kernels of an unusual grain. Little did he know, that grain would change his life. Years later, after finishing a PhD in plant biochemistry and returning to his family's farm in Montana, Bob started experimenting with organic wheat. In the beginning, his concern wasn't health or the environment; he just wanted to make a decent living and some chance encounters led him to organics.But as demand for organics grew, so too did Bob's experiments. He discovered that through time-tested practices like cover cropping and crop rotation, he could produce successful yields—without pesticides. Regenerative organic farming allowed him to grow fruits and vegetables in cold, dry Montana, providing a source of local produce to families in his hometown. He even started producing his own renewable energy. And he learned that the grain he first tasted at the fair was actually a type of ancient wheat, one that was proven to lower inflammation rather than worsening it, as modern wheat does.Ultimately, Bob's forays with organics turned into a multimillion dollar heirloom grain company, Kamut International. In Grain by Grain, Quinn and cowriter Liz Carlisle, author of Lentil Underground, show how his story can become the story of American agriculture. We don't have to accept stagnating rural communities, degraded soil, or poor health. By following Bob's example, we can grow a healthy future, grain by grain.

CHAPTER 1:

Roots and Growth

When I was a sophomore at Big Sandy High School, we started a new club: speech and debate. I liked it better than any other extracurricular activity because it was easy to make friends with people from all over the state. In sports, you shook hands with the other team after the game, but you didn’t really mix with them much—the objective was to beat them. Speech was different. We talked to each other. Sometimes I learned surprising things.

To me, the 950-person town of Big Sandy, Montana, was a minor metropolis. Movie theater, swimming pool, skating rink—when I got to go to town, which was about a fifteen-mile drive from my family’s farm, I thought we had an amazing number of things to do. But my friends who lived right in the thick of it would say, “Oh, this is just a hole; there’s nothing to do here.” On and on about how bored they were. Geez, I thought, you should live out in the country by yourself and see how magical it is to have a movie theater right down Main Street.

When I started to do speech and debate, I met kids from a larger town thirty-five miles northeast of Big Sandy that my folks took me to sometimes on special occasions: Havre. In Havre, they had three movie theaters. They even had an outdoor theater, or a drive-in, as we called it, and an A&W stand where they served root beer in frozen mugs. When the A&W soda jerks poured the root beer into the mug, it would freeze a little bit around the rim, so you’d have these ice crystals at the top of the glass. That cost a nickel, for the medium size. On a very special occasion, I sometimes got a root beer float, which was twenty-five cents. I would look forward to that for months. But when I got acquainted with a guy from Havre who did speech and debate, he said, “Oh, this is just a hole; there’s nothing to do here.” Curious, I thought, that’s just what my friends from Big Sandy said.

Then I started to meet kids from Great Falls. Now, this was the big time. In Montana, the first number on your license plate indicates what county you’re from, and it’s in approximate order of the population size as of the 1930 census. Great Falls was number two, just behind Butte. They had the state fair, all kinds of stores and things to do. They had swimming pools indoors. And yet, the Great Falls kids said the same thing: “This is just a hole.” They had their eyes on the really big cities out of state.

At that point, I think it dawned on me: You can always look for someplace bigger and better. Or you can make the most of where you are.

The Big Sandy of my childhood was a hub of activity. We had a post office, two hotels, a drugstore, a jeweler, two secondhand stores, a lumberyard, a bank, three grocery stores, two restaurants, a clothing store, a couple of gas stations, a Chevy dealership, a public library, a dry cleaner, a law office, an accounting firm, an agricultural equipment dealer, and two hardware stores. In addition to the swimming pool in the summer and the skating rink in the winter, we had a bowling alley and a combination pool hall and soda fountain where you could buy a hamburger and a Coke for forty-five cents. We had five grain elevators, five bars, and five churches, so we thought we were pretty balanced.

We held country dances in the schoolhouse that would start at eight or nine and go all night. Polkas, waltzes, schottisches, square dances—I would practice out behind the barn until I had the steps down. We would eat a midnight supper and then keep dancing until two or three in the morning, sometimes later. In the summertime, it would be getting light when we went home.

The farm I grew up on was a half hour’s drive southeast of town, surrounded by windswept prairie. From my front porch, I could see for miles around. Sixty miles to the south were the Judith Mountains, and on a clear day I could even see the taller range beyond them, the Little Belts. Eighty miles northwest, along the Canadian border, were the Sweet Grass Hills. And just a few miles away, the Bear Paw Mountains rose up to the northeast in a jagged sweep of indigo. My grandfather had started farming the place in 1920, and my dad had taken over in 1948, a year after I was born. It was a midsize family operation for those days: 2,400 acres, half wheat, half cattle.

My grandfather and my dad knew all of their cows individually, even though there were nearly fifty. They could say, “That cow over there, she’s the one that has the small calves.” “She’s ornery” or “She’s docile”; “She’s the leader” or “She’s the follower.”

We knew all our neighbors too. One of our closest neighbors had the binder that we would borrow every year to cut our oats for our cattle’s winter feed. One of my very first jobs on the farm was to ride that binder, which my dad pulled behind our tractor. It was an amazing machine: it not only cut the oats but also tied them into foot-thick bundles, which it dumped out one by one on a little platform. My task, as soon as I was big enough to push and pull the appropriate lever, was to dump these bundles onto the field once the platform filled up, so more bundles could be collected. Once I got a little older, I graduated to the burlier job of walking through the field after the binder went through and stacking the oat bundles against one another so they would dry properly. In the early fall, when I was back in school, my dad would come back for the dried bundles, pitch them into a wagon, and haul them back to the hammer mill next to the barn. The hammer mill chopped the oats into little two-or three-inch pieces and blew them into the feed shed, where our cows enjoyed them throughout the winter.

ON THE CORRAL FENCE WITH MY FIRST COWBOY HAT AND ROPE, KEEPING AN EYE ON THE COWS AT QUINN FARM & RANCH.

(Photo by John Miller)

Hauling our oat bundles into the barn every fall took my dad the better part of a week, so he was eager to purchase a machine that could chop the oats right in the field, eliminating an awful lot of binding and gathering of bundles. But upgrading our oat harvest meant purchasing a whole fleet of additional machinery: a swather, which would cut the oat plants down and lay them in windrows; a chopper, which would pick up the windrows and chop them; a customized truck, into which the chopper would blow the shredded oats; and a blower, which would neatly usher this load of feed straight from our truck to our barn. It was a big investment, so we partnered with the same neighbors and bought one swather, chopper, and blower to share. We each outfitted a truck for the job, but we lent them to one another during harvest time so that one truck could gather oats while the other loaded them into the blower. Neighbors often helped each other with tasks like these, just as we did when it came time to brand cattle or raise a new building. I tagged along with my dad on countless cement-pouring projects for new barns and homes around the neighborhood.

READY TO HEAD TO THE FIELD ON MY FIRST TRACTOR, AGE TEN.

(Photo courtesy of Bob Quinn)

In August, though, all other activity stopped for the wheat harvest. Part of the Golden Triangle region of north central Montana, the Big Sandy area was known for its production of high-protein wheat, which flowed out of the fields in late summer like a river of gold. There were five grain elevators in town to haul our crops to. Three were owned by a large out-of-state corporation. One was run by the local chapter of the Farmers Union, a national farm advocacy group known for organizing producer cooperatives. The fifth, Big Sandy Grain Company, had recently been established by another group of local farmers, many of whom were part of a competing farm advocacy organization, the Farm Bureau.

Looking back all these years later, I realize these two local elevators had pretty similar business models. Local farmers shared in the costs and the proceeds. Decisions were made locally too, according to farmers’ best interests. The Farmers Union also had some associated services and a farm supply store, so that was unique, and Big Sandy Grain Company was the first to add a bulk fertilizer plant and a roller mill to roll grain in the winter for feeding cattle. But otherwise, the two rival elevators bore a strong resemblance to each other. At the core of each operation was the same basic principle: keep the money in the local community and negotiate for better prices as a group, rather than taking products to market as individual farmers and getting jerked around by the big grain corporations.

But had I suggested at the time that my dad haul his grain to the Farmers Union elevator, that would have been like telling a Red Sox fan to go cheer for the Yankees. Farmers Union and Farm Bureau were different crowds, and since we were in the Farm Bureau camp, we hauled to Big Sandy Grain Company. The two elevators were on opposite sides of Main Street, and everybody knew who was on which side.

My father, who was a shareholder in Big Sandy Grain Company, was very careful not to call it a “co-op” because that word was associated with the Farmers Union. It was sort of like a dirty word in our crowd, a word that indicated you weren’t focused enough on the viability of your business. But of course the Farmers Union elevator had to be viable to stay in business—and in many ways our elevator was replicating their focus on mutual benefit. Some things have improved in farm country since I was a kid, and I think one of them is that Farm Bureau members and Farmers Union members actually talk to each other now and work together. Unfortunately, it wasn’t until get-big-or-get-out farm policy had dramatically depopulated rural America—drastically reducing the ranks of both farm organizations—that their members began to recognize that they had more in common than they had to fight about.

Owning our own grain elevators was a step in the right direction for both Farmers Union families and Farm Bureau families like mine, but it still didn’t make us masters of our own destiny. Despite the sense of independence we had in our day-to-day lives, we were all selling most of the grain from our local elevators into the global commodity food system—which meant that many aspects of our operations were effectively out of our hands. One of those out-of-our-hands matters that particularly frustrated Big Sandy farmers like my dad was the fact that in order to get our product to market, we had to put our grain on the Great Northern Railway, one of the biggest monopolies in the history of the American West.¹ The behemoth railroad was a constant source of consternation, widely suspected of jacking up prices and resented for making so much profit while its captive shippers—growers—struggled to make ends meet. To add insult to injury, the railroad didn’t always send enough cars at harvesttime. Inevitably, the elevators alongside the tracks would get so full that they couldn’t accept any more loads. Plugged, we called it. For our neighbors without sufficient grain storage on their own farms, this meant that in years of plentiful harvests they had to dump part of their grain on the ground and pick it up later—a costly and risky proposition.

My father made sure that he had enough steel bins to store everything we grew, so we didn’t have to haul it in at harvest if the railcars weren’t there. He was very big on backup plans and not putting all his eggs in one basket. In the 1960s, government and economic “experts” were starting to put a lot of pressure on farmers to specialize in one thing or another and maximize their profits. Farm policy reflected these recommendations, incentivizing monoculture. My dad didn’t buy it. He liked to keep half the farm in cattle and half in grain, and if he had a bad year with one enterprise, he could usually make it up with the other.

Another thing Dad really believed in was community activities. In between farm chores, he and my mother drove all over the state attending various meetings—he in his Stetson hat, she in her beaver coat and pearls. While Mom took her turn in the lead with the PTA and Sunday school, Dad was a charter member of Big Sandy’s chapter of Rotary Club, an international organization of civically oriented businesspeople that spearheaded the building of our local swimming pool and the new hospital. He was a proud member of the American Legion, like his father before him, and he joined up with the Masonic Order and the Shriners too. He never ran for public office—other than the local school board, which he sat on for fifteen years—but he was quite enthusiastic about politics, and my sister Debby and I were expected to participate. I’ll never forget the Halloween night in 1964 when we walked around town with “cookies for Goldwater,” encouraging people to vote in the upcoming election. Debby and I went up to this one house and knocked on the door. We waited. Finally, an old guy answered, sizing us up. “How’s a Democrat with false teeth supposed to eat a Republican cookie?” he barked.

Although Dad didn’t become a politician, he did eventually become president of the Montana Farm Bureau and served on the organization’s national board of directors. He had earned a reputation as a forward-thinking, innovative producer, having won the title of Montana’s Outstanding Young Farmer in 1955. Always on the lookout for new ways to do things better, he was one of the first in our area to start experimenting with chemical fertilizers.

At the time, most of our neighbors thought fertilizers were a waste of money. But soon, it seemed like everybody was using them: US fertilizer application doubled over the course of the 1940s, then nearly doubled again between 1950 and 1970.² The ground was beginning to wear out from decades of mining the fertility of the soil, and this was the first serious attempt to put something back. Looking back, I’m convinced it wasn’t the right way, but it was the correct principle: add something back to replace what has been removed.

Chemical fertilizers may have been a bit of a tough sell, but herbicides were adopted immediately. They were like a wonder drug. In those days, people practiced very limited crop rotation, and their planting sequences were not nearly complex enough to keep the soil healthy and break up cycles of pests and disease. So the weeds kept getting worse and worse until 2,4-D came along and totally knocked them out in one pass.

I don’t remember anybody raising concerns that herbicides might be bad for us. People would spray in open-air tractors with the wind blowing the chemicals back in their face. But I never really liked them much. I could see drift damage curling up the leaves of the ash trees in our shelterbelts. And the worst part was what they did to my garden.

Contrary to the fantasy version of rural life, we didn’t live entirely off the fat of the land, the way my grandparents had. My mother bought “air bread” from town—the same fluffy white stuff nearly everybody had in the 1950s—rather than making her own, and she wasn’t big on growing vegetables. But my great-aunt who lived in Big Sandy had more of a green thumb. She baked her own bread—which of course we thought had too hard a crust and a weirdly grainy flavor (probably because it actually tasted like grain). And she gardened.

When I was still in grade school my great-aunt got me a subscription to Rodale’s Organic Gardening magazine, and she and my grandfather helped me grow a small garden. I loved it. I planted all sorts of things: carrots, tomatoes, peas, beets, beans, chard, radishes, sweet corn. Being very Irish, my grandfather insisted I plant potatoes on Good Friday, and my fall harvest included buttercup squash and pumpkins for Halloween.

Showing up at the front door of our house with freshly picked ears of corn for my...