Episode #244
Bob Quinn: Healing Earth By Growing Food As Medicine

Montana grain farmer and author Bob Quinn has spent a lifetime proving that the way we grow our food determines the way it nourishes us. His research comparing ancient and modern wheat varieties revealed a striking truth: food grown in living soil can literally help people heal. From his farm-turned-research center, the Quinn Institute for Regenerative Organic Research, Education, and Health, Bob is now advancing a vision to “heal the earth by growing food as medicine.” Here he chats with Dave about the nationwide crisis of diet-related disease and his recent White House meeting with Bobby Kennedy and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, where he urged policymakers to connect organic faring practices and soil health to human health.

Our Bob Quinn interview has been edited and condensed for clarity:

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Dave Chapman interviews Bob Quinn, September 2025:

Dave Chapman 0:00
Welcome to the Real Organic Podcast. I am talking with my friend Bob Quinn today. Bob, this time you’re in Montana, and I’m in Vermont. But we’re going to see each other in just about two and a half weeks at Churchtown, so that’ll be great. Thanks. I wanted to talk about some of the things that we’ve talked about privately so that we can share some of this with other people.

Dave Chapman 0:30
One of the things that you’ve been working on big-time is important, interesting, and confusing. That is, Food is Medicine. Now, this idea is as old as medicine itself, back to Hippocrates: “Let food be thy medicine, and medicine be thy food.” I think there are two things in that, and this can be confusing.

Dave Chapman 1:01
One is that the food that you eat will make you a lot healthier, and the other is the idea that maybe there are certain things you can eat if you are sick that will help you get healthier. Those are two fairly different ways of looking at it. First, tell me about how you got into Food is Medicine. Let’s talk about some basic things that are exciting to you.

Bob Quinn 1:25
All right. Well, that’d be great. First of all, thanks for inviting me. I’ve been anxious to have you come visit us in Montana, but this is as close as it gets this time. It’s fun to be with you, Dave, anytime in any circumstance. Thanks again.

Bob Quinn 1:25
But I didn’t start out with this idea as Food is Medicine at all. As we talked earlier, I didn’t even start out with organic as an idea in my youth, or my studies, or anything. I just evolved into that through the people I met and the experiences I had trying it.

Bob Quinn 1:59
The actual Food is Medicine part didn’t really dawn on me until we started comparing ancient wheat, which we market under the name Kamut, and modern wheat, and found people told me they felt better when they ate this ancient wheat. Most of those people who said they felt better had health challenges.

Bob Quinn 2:24
A lot of other people just said, “Oh, I’ll taste. Fine,” but they don’t notice anything because they’re not bothered by wheat. But 20% of the people in this country are bothered by wheat. That’s huge. That’s 1/5 of the whole population – has some kind of trouble.

Bob Quinn 2:37
Most of those had no trouble, and several had not only no trouble, but also experienced improved health. We started doing research in Italy and comparing organic ancient wheat and organic modern wheat. We didn’t want to have another unknown in the mix, being organic and non-organic. I think there’s also a big difference there. But we wanted to compare just the grain, the seed source.

Dave Chapman 3:05
Looking at the variety.

Bob Quinn 3:07
Right, without comparing any other factors. Everything we tried to keep exactly the same, the same type of manufacturing. We told people not to eat any wheat product other than what we gave them. They didn’t know what they were eating. They had bread, pasta, and flour. They could make whatever they wanted out of wheat. They knew it was wheat, of course, but they didn’t know if they were eating modern or ancient, or even that subject.

Bob Quinn 3:37
These are human clinical trials based on people with chronic disease: heart disease, diabetes, irritable bowel syndrome, and all kinds of different diseases. This is over probably a 10-15 year time frame. We published 37 peer-reviewed journal articles as a result of this work. The results were so consistent, Dave, that the researchers were amazed.

Bob Quinn 4:00
The biggest difference we found was that those on the diet of ancient wheat had significantly higher anti-inflammatory properties and indicators in their blood. The inflammation was going down, and we know that inflammation is linked to chronic disease. That really got me thinking seriously about how what we eat really affects our health.

Bob Quinn 4:23
Then, harkening back, of course, to what you mentioned about Hippocrates, this is not a new idea. It was taught 2,300 years ago, but now it’s starting to come around, where people are starting to talk about it.

Bob Quinn 4:34
You raised a really interesting question about Food as Medicine, wondering if you’re healthy already, or what if you’re sick. When you say it that way, Food is Medicine, then it can either be good medicine or bad medicine. You can eat food that makes you sick, and a lot of people are doing that. Diabetes is a perfect example of a disease coming mostly from your diet, also from your activity, but mostly from your diet.

Bob Quinn 5:00
Some people are predisposed, so they have more opportunity to develop it, but most of that can be controlled by diet. As I told you earlier, we developed now a regenerative, organic research, education, and health institute out of about 600 acres in the middle of my farm. Our focus is healing the earth by growing food as medicine.

Bob Quinn 5:22
We want to focus on the health benefits, providing nutritious food that helps everybody. You don’t have to be sick to eat good food, nor should you be, but it keeps you well. It keeps you strong, supports growing kids, helps with their vitality, and everything else. For people who are aging, it helps them maintain their strength and vitality.

Bob Quinn 5:48
If we look at food as our medicine, I think gentle, organic food is the best medicine, and highly nutritious in that. We want to make sure that that usually goes together, hand in glove, which is what runs that furnace, and we should be focusing on that.

Dave Chapman 6:04
Okay. I have a lot of questions already. First of all, you ran this trial. I wish you’d also run a chemical production as a comparison, but okay. You compared organically grown new variety with organically grown old historic variety that was bred before. The modern wheat is, of course, bred for all kinds of funny stuff – none of its flavor, none of its health. It’s all for yield. It’s all for yield in a chemical system; it’s not for yield in an organic system.

Dave Chapman 6:46
Here’s my first question. You gave people over 10 years, giving them either the new wheat or the old wheat, all organic. Were you giving them, like, white flour pasta? Was it processed in roller mills, so that it was a white spaghetti, or were they eating whole wheat spaghetti?

Bob Quinn 7:04
That’s a really good question. I was hard on the side of whole wheat. But some diseases, like irritable bowel syndrome, the researchers were so concerned that the bowel would be irritated by whole grain, particularly the whole grain of modern wheat. I’ll explain why in a second. They were afraid that they’d have too many dropouts.

Bob Quinn 7:04
The compromise was what they call an indie semi-integralli, which is a kind of halfway point between white flour and whole wheat. We don’t really have that in America. We’re either white flour or whole wheat. But they have this semi-integralli, which is halfway in between. That’s what we compromised on with some of the experiments.

Bob Quinn 7:23
Others, they were whole grain if there wasn’t a situation where it was a gut sensitivity issue. So, like for heart disease and diabetes, that was more whole grain stuff for pasta and bread that was given to them.

Dave Chapman 8:09
An actual whole wheat pasta is pretty different from a white flour pasta, regardless of where it comes from.

Bob Quinn 8:17
But in Italy, I’ll tell you what. They are the champions of this stuff. They can make you a whole wheat pasta that is smooth and delicious. It’s more delicious in my mind, but it has the texture and the smoothness of white pasta.

Bob Quinn 8:36
We’re fighting a little bit of tradition there, because white pasta in Italy is like white bread in America. That’s what predominates, and that’s what people go for. But there are starting to be some manufacturers, small ones, using more and more organic and that sort of thing, because they’re focusing on nutrition and health, making whole-grain pasta.

Bob Quinn 9:00
What has happened with the breeding process, in many cases, the bran has become harder, so it can be flaked off closer to the endosperm, giving you more white flour recovered in the milling process, because now the bran is harder and flakes off easier.

Dave Chapman 9:20
I’m sorry, Bob. You have to slow that down for people who don’t know. We got wheat berries, and we run them through a mill. Tell me what happens.

Bob Quinn 9:30
You run them through a roller mill – the way we’re doing it nowadays – and it’s flaking off the bran. That bran, when it cracks and breaks away from the kernel, what’s left is the white part of the kernel inside. That’s the endosperm. That’s where the starch is, mostly with some protein.

Bob Quinn 9:30
It’s not only the farmers who want high yields; the millers want high yields too. The bakers want high yields. We can talk about that too. To get higher yields, for the millers, you have a harder bran that flakes off by itself without carrying particles of endosperm – particles of white flour – with them that are lost to the process.

Bob Quinn 10:14
If the miller can get a grain that can flake the bran off separated easier, or more complete, then his yield of white flour as a percent of the whole wheat kernel that he starts with is going to go up. That makes him more money. There’s a big interest in that.

Bob Quinn 10:42
The breeders, and we’re able to make, in many cases, the bran harder, but then when you add that hard bran back to the white flour to make whole wheat flour, even if you grind it up, if you don’t really pulverize it, it’s full of little shards because it’s brittle and hard.

Bob Quinn 10:55
It’s much harder than the old wheat, whose bran is softer. It doesn’t irritate your gut system the way the sharper bran particles can irritate it in modern wheat. Not for everybody, but for those that are sensitive, it’s another factor that’s creating a problem with them. Does that make sense…?

Dave Chapman 11:19
We’re getting there. This is still complicated, because people go to the store and they buy whole wheat flour. They buy whole wheat bread and whole wheat flour. Guess what? It’s not whole wheat. It’s not.

Bob Quinn 11:32
Yeah, because of the way it’s labeled. The labeling laws in America do not require you to put back everything, starting with the kernel, that goes into the flour mill. You only have to put back a certain portion. I couldn’t tell you what that percent is, but it’s not 100%. They can say it’s whole wheat when it’s really not whole wheat, but they put in a portion back.

Bob Quinn 11:57
Many times they don’t even put in any of the germ back in because they’re afraid that might go rancid. But they’ll put in a little bran, and they’ll pulverize that up and make it look… You can see the color is there. It’s colored a little bit, but it’s not whole wheat.

Dave Chapman 12:11
Tell me about the germ. People don’t understand, and I didn’t understand that. When you go and buy whole wheat flour in a store, on the shelf, it’s not whole wheat because they took out the germ, since the germ will break down.

Bob Quinn 12:32
In most cases.

Dave Chapman 12:39
I didn’t understand that, that it’s actually because once you mill flour, it’s very perishable. It’s not like a wheat berry, which is…

Bob Quinn 12:49
You mean the whole wheat flour?

Dave Chapman 12:50
Excuse me, yes. The whole wheat, yeah.

Bob Quinn 12:52
It oxidizes. Here’s the real secret. Then they were just starting to talk about this now, Dave. I don’t think you and I ever talked about this. This is something that just came full circle for me a few months ago. I ran into a lady in Georgia who is really big on fresh-milled flour. I never really thought about it because when I make Kamut sourdough pancakes at least once or twice a week, I mill the flour fresh.

Bob Quinn 13:23
When I make my cracked cereal for corn hot cereal, I crack it fresh. I crack it and then I boil it. Ten minutes, and it’s ready to eat. I never let it sit on the shelf. I really never thought about that, but she’s saying that is a huge, huge difference.

Bob Quinn 13:39
I’ve been trying to work now with the Food Science Department at Montana State University, and actually try to do some analysis of fresh-ground whole wheat flour compared to flour that’s sitting on the shelf at room temperature for days, weeks, several months, or a year, and then compare that with maybe something in the refrigerator or the freezer and just see what’s going on.

Bob Quinn 14:02
Because this lady in Georgia is saying that there’s a huge loss of very important nutrients. This is an organic question, a non-organic question. This is a processing question that relates to the freshness and the nutrition of what you’re starting with. You’re starting with a whole kernel…

Bob Quinn 14:19
It’s a package that’s not open; it’s preserved. But when you open that package, you need to eat that as soon as possible, because some of the nutrition in that begins to break down and is oxidized. It combines with oxygen and destroys the integrity and reduces the nutrition.

Bob Quinn 14:40
Now, it’s not all lost, Dave. These are important components, but they’re not the majority, of course. They are important things that we are losing, that we could add to our health if we ate closer to the mill, I guess, to put it that way. I have people eat close to the field.

Dave Chapman 14:58
I’m like you, Bob. I got my own mill. I just milled some flour this morning; I’m making bread right now. That’s how I do it. It’s interesting. People say, “Well, it’s not a big deal.” But the question is, is it really a big deal?

Bob Quinn 15:14
I think it is.

Dave Chapman 15:15
In the old days, bread was the staff of life. All of Europe lived off bread, and now a third of America gets sick from eating bread.

Bob Quinn 15:28
Yeah, it’s the greatest paradox you could imagine. The thing that should make you healthy is actually making you sick.

Dave Chapman 15:35
That’s right. There’s one thing I will disagree with you about. You say, “Well, it’s not about organic.” I know what you mean. I understand. It’s not about whether the grain was grown organically. But for me, real organic is about the whole system, and it is about the wholeness of the food. I have to disagree with Gene Kahn about the “organic” Twinkie. I don’t think so.

Bob Quinn 15:58
Yes, okay. Was Gene Kahn one of the “organic” Twinkies? Is that…?

Dave Chapman 16:02
Gene and Joan Gussow had a famous conversation back in the day on the NOSB. You were probably around for that. Gene famously said, “Organic is not your mother. If you want to put organic ingredients into a Twinkie and call it an ‘organic’ Twinkie, that’s okay with me.” Joan said, “No, that’s not organic anymore. You can’t make an ‘organic’ Twinkie.” What do you think?

Bob Quinn 16:30
I’m agreeing with you. I would never go that way. We’ve talked about this before. My greatest fear for organic is industrialization of organic, and that is the height of industrialization. You can take the best of what great organic farmers have done, and then you can completely adulterate that with ultra-processing that still is classified as organic, and it’s not fit to eat as far as health goes, because there’s nothing left that’s nutritious there.

Bob Quinn 16:30
We’ve talked about this before. There’s a difference between the spirit of organic in my mind, and the letter of the law of organic. The letter of the law is the way we’re dealing with it right now. It kind of allows that sort of thing. But the spirit of organic, the thing that was put together in the first place by the pioneers of organic in America – well, throughout the world, in America and Europe, particularly the ones we worked with – that was not the intention.

Bob Quinn 16:48
The intention was what you’re talking about, to follow it all the way through. The spirit of organic goes cure to your plate on the table. That’s in my mind… You can have a legally labeled “organic” Twinkie, but that won’t give you health, and that’s not the spirit of organic that I was introduced to when I was first introduced to it.

Dave Chapman 17:52
Yeah, me too. It was always much bigger than that – much bigger than a list of inputs. We could go there a long time, Bob, but I want to go back, because I think it’s so important what you did. You’ve run years of trials. These were mostly done in Italy?

Bob Quinn 18:11
Yes. When we first started, I couldn’t find anybody in America that wanted to work with me because the thought in America was, “What can possibly be wrong with our wheat? We are the greatest, most powerful, wonderful, smartest country in the whole world. There can’t be anything wrong with our wheat.”

Bob Quinn 18:30
One researcher particularly kind of summed it up for me when he said to me, “If I would do the kind of research you’re asking for, I’d be wasting my time and your money.” I said, “Okay, well, that paints a picture.” They didn’t believe in it. They thought that a lot of people had trouble eating wheat, that it was all in their head and wasn’t a real problem.

Bob Quinn 18:51
I didn’t really want to work with those kinds of guys, reluctantly. But when I went to Italy, if an Italian has a problem eating pasta, they weren’t ready to run down the street and buy wheat-free, gluten-free. They wanted to know what was the matter with the pasta, or with them, or the combination, and how to fix it.

Bob Quinn 19:13
I found folks at the University of Bologna, which is a thousand years old – they’ve got a little history there – and the University of Florence, which is one of their most famous and well-organized and put-together hospital research laboratories are. They were very interested in my question.

Bob Quinn 19:37
We formed, and became a partnership there, and we did the 10 or 15 years of research with those guys. They were very, very interested. They were quite amazed at what they saw, because they thought they might see something, but they were amazed at the degree of the evidence and the consistency that we saw.

Dave Chapman 19:56
Let’s go to the results now. Consistently what were they seeing?

Bob Quinn 20:02
Every single group, everybody in the group, responded the same. We have these big groups of thousands of people that are in these drug groups, and they look at really teeny, tiny, little differences, and they say, “Okay, this,” then they make all these conclusions.

Bob Quinn 20:17
We had very small groups, but they were divided into two. One would eat ancient grain, one would eat modern wheat. They didn’t know what it was, so it was a blind study. In most cases, the scientists didn’t know either. So, it was double-blind, actually.

Bob Quinn 20:36
They would eat those for six weeks, and then we’d do the blood draws and measure everything. Then they’d have a six-week crossover where they ate whatever they wanted. Then they started over eating the other diet. You have the same person eating both diets and can see how they responded.

Bob Quinn 20:49
In every single case, there wasn’t anybody that had an opposite reaction. In every single case of the ancient wheat, the inflammatory properties were reduced. There was less inflammation. There was more antioxidant capacity. For diabetes, there was less sugar. The insulin levels were down, the insulin resistance was down, and blood sugar was down with the ancient wheat in all cases.

Bob Quinn 21:18
Magnesium and zinc in the blood were up, things that were all important. They were very consistent on that. Even though the degree varied, of course, between people, the direction they were going was not. That’s pretty unusual to have that clear-cut of a difference. We were really pretty excited about that.

Bob Quinn 21:38
Although it was very difficult to publish the first one because no one had talked about this before. This had never been described before. We had a little bit of a challenge getting the first paper published because people didn’t believe it and because they’d never heard of it. That’s kind of the challenge. That’s the danger of being too far out ahead of the pack.

Bob Quinn 21:58
The danger of the pioneer, they think you’re crazy. People thought I was crazy for years, so it’s nothing new for me. But after a while, after several publications, then we get remarks back. Well, here’s another in this series, and it was accepted then. Then other labs around the world were also duplicating some things that we’re doing and finding similar results. It wasn’t just us.

Bob Quinn 22:24
People say, “Well, if you’re paying for your own research, it’s not credible.” But these were all double-blind studies. We had no way to influence the outcomes. There were some diseases that were more affected than others. We had some that didn’t really show very much, but there were none that showed the opposite effects one way or the other for the ancient compared to the modern, as far as a complete difference that way.

Dave Chapman 22:53
When you talk about people thinking you were crazy, it reminded me of Ignaz Semmelweis, the guy who first got this idea of washing his hands before he helped deliver a baby. He was a doctor who worked in a hospital, and he discovered that their outcomes were vastly better if the doctors washed their hands.

Dave Chapman 23:18
When he tried to convince the world of that, they said he was crazy. They drove him out of medicine. He had a terrible life. So, you’re right. It could be very dangerous to be the first. There were significant changes in six weeks. That’s pretty quick recovery.

Bob Quinn 23:41
Yes. The first tests were between six and eight weeks. Some tests were eight, some were six, but that was the time range. Then there was the same amount of time for the washout, then the crossover, and it was repeated.

Dave Chapman 23:52
Okay. Let me ask a question here. If you tested the wheat, as opposed to testing the human and the effect… I’m just really curious, because what I have seen looking at nutritional testing, and Joan was so good about Nutritionism and the complete failure of it.

Dave Chapman 24:15
Of course, Michael Pollan wrote the brilliant book, using Joan’s ideas and developing them about this cult of Nutritionism, where people felt like, “Oh, it’s the vitamin D. So, if we synthesize vitamin D and put it in the wheat now, it’ll solve the problem, and everyone’s going to be healthy.” But it just doesn’t work.

Dave Chapman 24:37
My question to you is, did you look at that, like, “I wonder what the difference is in the wheat,” or were you really focused on what’s the difference in the person who’s eating the two wheats?

Bob Quinn 24:50
That’s really a good question. That’s what we did first, actually – look at chemically what’s in the wheat. The good and the bad and ugly part of that story is that it was a mixed bag, and there wasn’t anything clear cut. There wasn’t one thing we could point to and say, “Well, this is higher. This is the reason why everybody is doing better.”

Bob Quinn 25:11
In fact, we kind of got discounted and poo-pooed because some of the research on – oh, I forgot what chemicals they were – but indicators of wheat sensitivity, the Kamut had it just like the modern wheat, and they said, “Well, it’s no different.” But the people who were eating it felt a difference.

Bob Quinn 25:33
What do you say? My answer to that is, well, we’re not looking at the right thing. Maybe it’s a synergistic relationship between several components that are making the difference. We don’t really know. That is another level of nutrition we haven’t gotten to yet, in my opinion.

Bob Quinn 25:50
I was trained as a biochemist, so I’m familiar with all these kinds of tests and know how much homage they’re paid in some cases. Yet, Dave, there’s more to it than just the presence or absence of a chosen nutritional compound. We don’t really understand the entire mode of action, but in some of our research, we could see changes in nuclear activity in the nucleus.

Bob Quinn 26:24
The messenger DNA, which codes for different proteins and whatnot, was being changed and altered. We could measure it. Things were happening at the nuclear level in the cells that were changing the metabolism going on in your body. That’s huge.

Bob Quinn 26:41
We don’t know what was causing that – what particular element or molecule or anything. Those are some of the things where research in the future, I think, could really help our understanding of what to look for and how to understand nutrition.

Dave Chapman 26:57
Yeah. This is so important, Bob. That’s what I’ve seen when I’ve looked at serious attempts to look at the nutritional differences between good soil-grown food and hydroponic and chemical. It looks like there’s very little difference, and yet it’s so obvious to your tongue that there’s a big difference.

Bob Quinn 27:18
Yes. We have been given two great gifts for sensitivity and analysis. We don’t need all these fancy millions of dollars of instruments. We have this and we have this, and if it has a nice aroma and a really good flavor, then you can be almost guaranteed of very, very high correlation between good taste and good nutrition, and nice aromas and good nutrition.

Bob Quinn 27:49
So, if something tastes good and has a nice, pleasing aroma, it probably is good for you. You hit it on it really well. Everybody can do that at the food counter, at the grocery store, and at the restaurant. I know your business is tomatoes. That’s a really good example. The flavor in tomatoes is like black and white.

Bob Quinn 28:13
We have tomatoes in our store that came from, I don’t know how many thousands of miles away in the wintertime, or from a hot house somewhere that was all hydroponic, and they look beautiful. I think the best use for those is to take a picture and put it on your wall, because that’s the best use for them because to eat them, they’re just not satisfying, and they’re terrible.

Bob Quinn 28:36
If you have tomatoes that are really tasty and satisfying, then you can pretty much be assured that not only are they good for you, but they were grown in a way to produce those compounds that are really flavorful and good for you.

Dave Chapman 28:49
I thought we should start something like Care, the way they used to drop packages of food to people who were really hungry. I thought maybe I could drop some packages of tomatoes in Montana at certain times of the year when you all are starving for them.

Dave Chapman 29:11
This is all so important. I think we’re getting down to it. I know what I wanted to say. Unfortunately, the tongue and the nose are also being fooled now, because they’ve got some good chemists working on this.

Bob Quinn 29:29
Yes. You can artificially mimic stuff. You’re right about that. I should have qualified what I said by fresh food and whole food. Otherwise, if it’s processed food, it can be mimicked and you can’t tell the difference. Or if it’s overshadowed with sugar, or salt, or whatever nice spices, you can’t tell either.

Dave Chapman 29:59
The whole flavoring industry, they’re good at it.

Bob Quinn 30:02
Yeah, of course.

Dave Chapman 30:05
I think that there’s the thing that I do believe educated palates can tell the difference. I think that somebody can go, “Well, yeah, it creates craving, but I don’t think it’s good.” I think that you can learn that, “There’s junk food, and I know if I ate it, I would want to eat more,” but I also taste it and I go, “This doesn’t taste good. If I sit there with it, it doesn’t make me feel good.” You can learn to pay attention.

Bob Quinn 30:36
But if you don’t have anything to compare it with, Dave, it’s really easy for those people who are stuck on that merry-go-round to not know any difference, because they’ve never had it fresh, or the ton of flavor it should have.

Dave Chapman 30:57
When I got married, we didn’t invite anybody to our wedding, but we had a little party a month or so later, and we invited our family and my wife’s family. They’re all from New York City. They came up, and they just never had vegetables like that. They were raving about the corn. The corn was very good, but they just never had it. They didn’t have anything to compare it to. They were like, “How come? We didn’t know about this?”

Dave Chapman 31:24
Now it’s different. Now you can go to the farmer’s market in New York and you can get good food, but back then, the only choice was the stores, the bodegas, or the supermarkets.

Dave Chapman 31:37
All right. I got another place to go. But is there more to be said about your work here with this? What’s come out of it? Now that you’ve had a number of papers published, and I just want to remind people you’re a good old boy from Montana, but you also have a PhD. You wear two hats. I know you like to wear that hat?

Bob Quinn 32:00
Yeah, I do have a different hat, Dave. There’s several different ones.

Dave Chapman 32:05
Where are you going to go with this project next?

Bob Quinn 32:10
One of the things that has really intrigued me with the whole Food is Medicine movement is that… what I see a lot, Dave, is they leave out the farm component. You can’t leave out the farm component, because that’s where it starts.

Bob Quinn 32:30
So, I’ve taken about 600 acres out of the middle of my farm and created a regenerative, organic research, education, and health institute. Our whole focus is healing the earth by growing food as medicine, and that’s what we want to focus on.

Bob Quinn 32:43
We’re focusing not on high yields – although yields are important. We don’t take something you can’t make money with, of course, but we don’t sacrifice nutrition for high yields. If we have something that has the best taste, the best nutrition, and not quite as good a yield, that’s what we go with. We’re trying to figure out how to help farmers be more successful as organic farmers, how to convert, how to get off the chemical treadmill.

Bob Quinn 33:13
Seventy-five percent of my neighbors that I had when I was in high school, Dave – that was a few years back now – but they’re gone, and they’re gone because they went broke. They went broke because of the modern chemical industrial agricultural system that requires a lot of money upfront for inputs, and then very little money in return for what you grow and what you haul into the elevator.

Bob Quinn 33:38
I’m talking about grain farmers now in my neighborhood – that’s what most of it was – and most of those guys are gone. The big chemical companies don’t care about that, because the ones that are left are still sending them big checks, and so somebody is still paying out.

Bob Quinn 33:59
But I think it’s a real loss, because when they go, then the communities go. Our little, big community of Big Sandy has declined from 1,000 when I was in high school in the 60s to 600 now. Half of Main Street is boarded up. I can’t say that you can call that progress.

Bob Quinn 34:20
Then we have such pollution now. We’ve got glyphosate in our rain. Most children are not allowed to drink from the well water of Iowa. We have cancer rates in rural America that are higher than anywhere else. We have dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico the size of New Jersey. How big does it have to get before we think maybe we’re going the wrong direction?

Bob Quinn 34:43
Those are the kinds of prices. What I’ve just been talking about is the high cost of cheap food. The focus is on cheap food, but it’s a mirage. There’s no such thing as cheap food. There’s only cheap checkouts at the food counter at the grocery store in the major supermarkets. All the rest of the costs are paid by someone else in different periods of time.

Bob Quinn 35:10
Then the biggest cost is paid by the people who now are doctoring some kind of health malady because of this cheap food. Right now, the CDC just announced a few days ago that we’ve gone from 60% to 76% of our entire population having at least one chronic disease. That’s over three quarters, Dave, of the whole country. How bad does that have to get before we start really taking this seriously?

Bob Quinn 35:36
This is a crisis, I think, that not many people want to talk about, or even acknowledge. But we have the answer. The Organic Farmers of America have the beginning of the answer. It starts with how we grow our food. It continues on in the processing and how we process it – we talked already about that – but it starts with good seed.

Bob Quinn 35:57
That was my conclusion with the ancient wheat and modern wheat. You can have the best soil and the best organic system in the world, but if you put in crappy seed or GMO stuff, it’s going to produce questionable results for nutrition. You’ve lost half of what you could have gained right there. So, it has to all go together.

Bob Quinn 36:17
You were mentioning this in the beginning too, that there’s a big continuum. It’s not just a little set of rules for this particular part of the program; it’s the whole process. You have to get from the good soil to harvesting at peak nutrition, not green. We can’t harvest things green and expect the nutrition to be there and then ship it all around the world.

Bob Quinn 36:37
You can’t process it to death and add all the goodies so it’ll taste good, but there’s nothing there. Those are the things where you have to finish the food by preserving what the farmers have worked so hard to put in in the first place.

Dave Chapman 36:53
Absolutely, Bob. Dan Barber, Hugh, and Lisa Kent have been working together. They did a really interesting taste test on Hugh’s blueberries and compared them to chemical berries and to allegedly organic berries from Mexico and Peru, probably hydroponic. They did a taste test, and they were tested for pesticides.

Dave Chapman 37:24
He was going to tell that story at Churchtown. I think you were in another breakout so you didn’t get to hear it. You’ll hear about it.

Bob Quinn 37:35
Aren’t you taping the message…?

Dave Chapman 37:36
We’re going to tape it. Yeah, we’ll get it out.

Bob Quinn 37:39
Okay, good.

Dave Chapman 37:40
One thing that Dan said, I interviewed him a month or two, maybe a couple months ago, and he’s always interesting. He does Row 7 Seed. He said, “I really thought the genetics was it, that we just need to get our genetics right.” Just what you’re talking about with Kamut and the Heritage Grains.

Dave Chapman 38:02
He said, “But then I did a taste comparison of Hugh’s blueberries with the same variety grown in a chemical place close by. There was no comparison.” He said, “So I have to go back to my roots, which is to say how they were grown is critically important.” He believes that taste reflects the health-giving qualities of that food.

Dave Chapman 38:32
There is now a movement. Food is Medicine is getting millions of dollars, God bless them, to try and get America off junk food. I’ve talked to a few of them, and they’re all good people, and they want good things. Their main focus, as far as I can see, is to get America off its junk food habit because it’s killing us. I agree, and support that. But they seem almost childishly naive or indifferent to how the food is grown.

Dave Chapman 39:08
A carrot is not a carrot. That’s just the truth. I’ll bet that a kernel of wheat is not a kernel of wheat. There’s a lot of variation in there about how it was grown, how the soil is, and the varieties too, all of that. Everything that happens before the swallow, as Joan Gussow would say.

Bob Quinn 39:30
Sure. How it’s milled and when it was milled. We’d already talked about that.

Dave Chapman 39:33
That’s right. You’ve had somewhat similar experiences. I think I’ll let you speak for yourself, but I know you went to a gathering at Tufts, a pretty prestigious group, and you said there were two farmers in the room, out of 150 people or something. Talk about that. What did you discover?

Bob Quinn 39:59
It was like you said. I’m thrilled to death about the level of interest and focus on Food is Medicine, but I was a little discouraged about the lack of inclusion of how we start out with creating that. Food is Medicine, I agree with that, but organic food is the best medicine. Regenerative organic food, if it’s from good, healthy soil, that’s the best medicine.

Bob Quinn 40:39
We put together kind of a chart, Dave, that starts with that. How does food become good medicine? It doesn’t become good medicine at the processing plant. That’s not where it starts. It starts with seed. Then the next step is, what kind of soil is that seed put into? The things you’ve already mentioned.

Bob Quinn 41:00
Then, when is it harvested? How is it harvested? Is it harvested at peak nutrition? Is it harvested green? Then we go to the processing, but those first three steps, and it’s not only soil, but then is anything sprayed on it? Are we putting hormones on it? Are we spraying chemicals, pesticides, herbicides, and all this other stuff that we don’t want to really have on our food. All that is a part of the whole picture.

Bob Quinn 41:28
You can look at one little piece and say, “Okay, we’re not going to eat Twinkies, we don’t care if they’re organic or not,” for example – we talked about that. That’s ignoring a whole other part of the question, which you brought up so well. A Twinkie isn’t really a nutritional food anyway. Why do we even have that discussion? That should be part of the junk food that we discourage, and is a big part of that.

Bob Quinn 41:54
I was surprised that the main folks who were there were like the insurance people: the life insurance, the health insurance, Kaiser hospital. I’m thrilled that they’re there and working at least on the junk food aspect. But I would love to be able to introduce what we understand is the beginning of that story of how food becomes not just what makes it bad, but what makes it good, Dave.

Bob Quinn 42:23
I think you got two things. You got food that’s created or grown in ways that really make it good, and then you have ways of growing it that don’t end with that same result. Then you go the next step, which is processors, and they have their own set of things that can happen to either preserve that nutrition or lose that nutrition, or add bad things to it or take good things out. Those are the different things I see happening at their end.

Bob Quinn 42:52
But you have to start with something that’s good, and that comes from agriculture, and that comes from farmers. I would really appreciate having a little more of a stage for that, and also research coming out of USDA and the government to support that. I don’t hear very much talk about that, and that’s really critical.

Bob Quinn 43:13
There are really a lot of questions that should be answered, that would help people feel more comfortable as farmers converting to organic, because right now, a lot of them are afraid to start, even though we have successful ones in every state of the Union now that they can look to. They’re still, the majority, have been so touted by hour after hour of commercials, and in the public school system, that the chemical way is the only way to go, because that’s the future of feeding the world.

Bob Quinn 43:54
They’re afraid. They haven’t heard the other side and they haven’t seen it up front. That’s what needs to happen. For us, in Montana, we have some perennial weed problems that we could really use some research money to help solve. I’m sure that they can be managed. But without research, it’s hard to guess the best way to do that.

Dave Chapman 44:14
That’s right. There’s a lot of research going on. It’s all on the wrong things.

Bob Quinn 44:19
There’s a lot of money spent. You’re right.

Dave Chapman 44:21
There’s a lot of money being spent on research. You were probably one of the people who told me, but organic is seven percent of the groceries sold in America. What percent of the USDA’s research budget is spent on organic?

Bob Quinn 44:40
Yeah, just over one percent. That’s a pitch I’ve been trying to make every time I go to Washington and talk to those guys. I said, at least let’s research. By definition, research should be looking at the future. That’s why we do it, to understand the present so we can prepare better for the future. The biggest growth in American agriculture right now is organic, and the biggest growth in food is organic.

Bob Quinn 45:07
It’s still small. It’s less than 10%, but at the current rate of growth, and you and I have been around for most of this, the last 35 years, we’ve gone from near zero to seven percent. We were a laughingstock 35 years ago. It was ridiculous for anybody to think of such a thing as replacing chemical agriculture. But now we see so much evidence of trouble.

Bob Quinn 45:32
I think we should hold the torch really as high as we can, and say, “Here is a standard you can come to, a solution that you can put your money on, if you research or any other thing, and have results.”

Bob Quinn 45:45
Because now, at the current rate of growth, Dave, in another 35 years, you and I are going to be hard-pressed to be here another 35 years. But somebody will be here 35 years from now. So why can’t our children and grandchildren have the benefit of another 35 years? At the current rate of growth, organic will go from seven to 100%.

Bob Quinn 46:03
That should be our vision. That can be our goal. Why not reverse this terrible health crisis we have? Think of all the good that could be done with all the money spent on health right now if it were redirected. We could pay a little more for our food so the farmers would have a decent return for what they’re out in the hot sun sweating over.

Bob Quinn 46:23
What’s the matter with that idea? Isn’t that fair and equitable? We can have that. Yet we’ll still be saving a lot of money compared to what we’re spending now on health care.

Dave Chapman 46:34
Yeah. I’m all with you, Bob. That’s well said. It’s so clear and obvious. Yet, it’s not easy, is it?

Bob Quinn 46:43
No. We’re the minority. We’re in the minority of the money too. The big money is not where we are. It’s where the chemical guys are, and the big pharma, the typical guys.

Dave Chapman 46:58
I’m not absolutely certain we’re the minority, but we’re certainly the minority of the money. We’re the minority of the influence. All the things we’re talking about are just health for people, everybody. People who hate what we do.

Bob Quinn 47:17
I think we’re getting more acknowledged and understood. I think we need to be understood better. We need to tell our story better, or get it out better. That’s why I really appreciate what you do in getting the story out, because people have to be informed in order to make good decisions.

Bob Quinn 47:39
If their only source of information is coming from Bayer, the former Monsanto folks, they’re not going to be looking for better solutions. That’s all.

Dave Chapman 47:51
All right. Let’s talk about one of your efforts to get the word out and educate. You’re doing a lot with the Quinn Institute. I just love that for you, 600 acres is “I carved off a little piece of the farm.” For me, 600 acres is about 300 times my farm.

Bob Quinn 48:09
You got something I don’t have, Dave. You got rain. When you don’t have rain, you need a little more territory to grow crops. We can only grow one crop every two years, wheat for example. We want to put things in perspective.

Bob Quinn 48:24
The average size in Montana is 2,500 acres. That’s our average size. We’re having a hard time making a living with that. We’re about 3,000, we’re not much bigger than average, but we’ve taken about a quarter then. I know it sounds big if you’re…

Dave Chapman 48:41
No, I just think it’s hilarious. All right. You told me a while back that you had a meeting with Bobby Kennedy and Brooke Rollins, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, and the Secretary of Agriculture. This wasn’t a three-minute meeting; this was a two-hour meeting. What was the point of that meeting? Were you there to get something for yourself? Were you there to promote the Quinn Institute?

Bob Quinn 49:13
Actually, I was invited, so I didn’t initiate this. I was minding my own business up early in the morning as I usually am, looking at my text messages and emails. Here was a text message, and it said, “Good morning, Bob. This is Brooke Rollins. I’m reading your book, and I want to talk to you.”

Bob Quinn 49:49
I just immediately typed back a snap response. I said, “Oh, I’m glad you like it. I’d be happy to talk anytime.” Then I thought to myself, Brooke Rollins? That sounds so familiar. Who is that? I got on my computer. Oh, my gosh. I said, “Secretary of Agriculture.” It was early in the morning. I was just out of bed.

Bob Quinn 49:13
I had forgotten that the governor of Montana is actually good friends with her. She had asked me for a copy of one of my books, “Grain by Grain: A Quest to Revive Ancient Wheat, Rural Jobs, and Healthy Food.” I had signed it for her, put in a business card – that’s how she got my number – and gave it to him or left it in the office. I didn’t even see him, back in January or February, and I had forgotten all about that.

Bob Quinn 50:27
Here she had finally gotten it, was actually reading it – which is even more amazing – and she was interested in it and wanted to talk to me. When I found that out, I wrote a more appropriate response, considering who she was.

Bob Quinn 50:42
I said, “I’d be glad to meet with you. I’m going to be back at Rodale in Pennsylvania in a few weeks. It’s right in your neighborhood” – that’s kind of how we look at it compared to where we are. I said, “I’d be glad to come and talk to you.”

Bob Quinn 50:56
She said, “Okay, well, my people will be in touch.” A couple of weeks went by and nobody was in touch. I texted her again, and because she usually answered when I sent her stuff, I said, “I haven’t heard from any of your people.” She said, “Oh, I’ll check.” I’m sure it just slipped through the cracks.

Bob Quinn 51:15
Now we’re only a week away from that Thursday when we were supposed to meet. I’m sure she was completely booked – I don’t know, I’m supposing this. Because she wrote back a few minutes later and said, “How would you like to meet at the Naval Mess in the White House, and I’ll invite Bobby Kennedy to join us?”

Bob Quinn 51:36
I thought, “Wow, I think I can rearrange my schedule for that.” I did say it that way, but I had to admit I was planning to leave that day. I immediately canceled that. I had a plane ticket, got a new one, and said, “I’d be happy to do that. That sounds amazing.” Then she wrote back a few minutes later and said, “Well, Bobby’s in. He’ll be there.”

Bob Quinn 53:18
I was at the White House a little after seven in the morning on Friday, June 13. It happened to be the day after Israel attacked Iran. The president was supposed to have a Cabinet meeting that morning in the White House. That’s probably another reason she suggested the meeting, because it would have been easy for her to just go from one to the other. But the Cabinet meeting was canceled.

Bob Quinn 52:23
Now here were two secretaries with a canceled meeting and a very open schedule. We had a very leisurely breakfast. She asked lots and lots of questions about my book. Her background is that she was raised on a farm, but she hasn’t worked in agriculture professionally, though she has that farm background.

Bob Quinn 52:48
She was asking lots of farm-related questions. She was quite interested in what we had done, and how our farm has changed over the last four decades. She was very, very engaging. Bobby Kennedy knows all this stuff already. He’s really believing it, preaching it, and encouraging organic and all that. He didn’t really ask many questions – she did most of that – but he would pipe in with a few things we talked about.

Bob Quinn 53:19
Most of the discussion was at a really high level… I wanted to talk with them about the future of food, about how we can really change that in America, and the research needed to do it. I offered to help in any way I could, from my own experiences.

Bob Quinn 53:40
I’m not a politician, I’m not really an expert in everything, but I’ve had enough experience in agriculture that if they want to know how we could move the needle in a positive way – away from chemicals and toward organic and natural, or what’s often called alternative – I could contribute. I offered whatever help I could. That’s kind of where it stayed.

Bob Quinn 54:11
After breakfast, they had time to take me on a tour of the Rose Garden, which was all dug up, and I got some nice pictures at the back of the White House, which I had only ever seen on TV before. It was very pleasant. It was quite an amazing experience for me – something I never imagined. I never would have imagined asking for such a privilege or even hoping to be acknowledged.

Bob Quinn 54:38
I was in Washington last February, and I contacted Secretary Kennedy’s office. I said, “I’m not asking to meet with him, but if there are any undersecretaries or anybody I could meet with to share a little about what we’re doing with food as medicine, or growing food as medicine, I would be happy to do so.”

Bob Quinn 54:48
I got a canned response back: “Oh, thank you for your interest. The Secretary is very busy. Blah, blah, blah.” Even though I hadn’t asked to meet with the Secretary, I had asked to meet with somebody in his office to share our experiences.

Bob Quinn 55:15
Dave, this was so different. It was out of the bureaucratic loop. That’s how I felt. It was a completely unconventional type of meeting, really a wonderful experience of just exchanging information and exchanging ideas. I was very encouraged by her interest.

Bob Quinn 55:42
I said, “I can’t tell you how excited I am to be at the same table with the Secretary of Health and Human Services and the Secretary of Agriculture, because I think those two, working in combination and harmony, can solve the problems that either one by themselves cannot solve in isolation.”

Bob Quinn 56:02
She said to me, “Oh, we’re starting to meet more and more.” I took that as a very positive thing. Anyway, I came back quite encouraged by what I heard and by my experience there.

Dave Chapman 56:16
That’s great, Bob. You’re the right guy for that job. They wouldn’t enjoy meeting with me.

Bob Quinn 56:28
I didn’t ask any embarrassing question.

Dave Chapman 56:30
I couldn’t help myself. I’d have a lot of embarrassing things to say.

Bob Quinn 56:34
No, that’s fair. That’s alright.

Dave Chapman 56:35
Yeah, that’s right. But it’s great that you did that. It’s great that they got to hear you for a couple of hours talking about the best of organic and where it could go and where it should go. I applaud you for having that meeting. You told me that you then went on and showed up on a panel. They were both there, right?

Bob Quinn 57:02
Yes. Now we’re in the middle of harvest, so this is July. I got a call from Kennedy’s office, and they said, “We’re having a Senate roundtable a week from today in the Capitol that’s hosted by Senator – his name is Bingham, I think, from Kansas. You should look that up. Is it Bingham?

Dave Chapman 57:35
I don’t remember the name. I remember that he’s from Kansas.

Bob Quinn 57:39
I should know. He’s the chairman of the [inaudible 0:57:42] Senate Committee. He had invited a lot of his Kansas friends to come, and they wanted to be sure that they had an organic voice. Then they asked me for a recommendation of an organic farmer from Kansas.

Bob Quinn 57:58
Of course, even in Kansas, it’s still a really busy time. Even though most of their harvest is done – their wheat and everything – it’s a busy time. It took me all day and a dozen phone calls, but I found somebody that could come and join me from Kansas.

Bob Quinn 58:19
We ended up with 10 people on the panel. We were asked for our script ahead of time. We were given three minutes each to introduce ourselves, and then they wanted 30 minutes for introductions of 10 people, and then 30 minutes of questions and answers that would be coming from the two secretaries – the Secretary of Agriculture and Secretary Kennedy, who was supposed to be there. That’s what we were told to prepare for.

Bob Quinn 58:49
The Secretary showed up. They made opening statements, and the press was excused so that the participants could feel free to say whatever they wanted without worrying about being quoted. Anyway, that’s what happened. Then the senator running the meeting took quite a while to introduce his friends from Kansas and made remarks after they spoke.

Bob Quinn 59:25
First, the senator spoke, and then the two secretaries spoke. That took 15 minutes, and then the introductions – the three minutes we were supposed to have – some of them were more than that. We were down to the last 10 minutes of the hour, and there were four of us left to speak, two of whom were the organic farmers.

Bob Quinn 59:43
So, they quickly cut past noses and said, “Please cut your three-minute remarks in half.” Then they turned to the Secretary of Agriculture and said, “I know now, Madam Secretary, that you need to leave right at 10 o’clock.” Because it went from nine to ten. She said, “Oh, no, I’ll stay until I can hear everybody speak.” She stayed. Then we got to give our piece.

Bob Quinn 1:00:12
There were some who said, “Well, organic won’t work.” We had one researcher from Georgia who said, “Well, in my research, I can show you and tell you that organic won’t work.” So I simply said, “I have been organic for 40 years now, and it’s not only working for me; it saved our farm from bankruptcy, as many of our neighbors went through with the high cost of producing cheap food.”

Bob Quinn 1:00:41
I said, “My story has been replicated in every state of this country, and all you have to do is find those people and have them share their experiences with those who would like to know how to do it. And this is the future. There’s no future in chemical agriculture. It’s making people sick.” That’s about all I said.

Bob Quinn 1:01:06
I was a little bit frustrated, Dave, about the whole thing, except to say that even being at the table was huge. In the past, and you know this very well, we’re very rarely invited to the table. To be invited to the table is huge. Even if we were short-circuited a little bit on presentation, we were still there, and we got to say our piece at whatever level it was. I thought that was a huge step forward.

Bob Quinn 1:01:40
Anyway, you have to be thankful for the positive things, not frustrated over the things that didn’t quite go the way you thought.

Dave Chapman 1:01:49
You and I met with Vilsack.

Bob Quinn 1:01:53
Yes.

Dave Chapman 1:01:55
Secretary Vilsack. We had about an hour, I think.

Bob Quinn 1:01:58
Yes. Another one was supposed to be 20 minutes. I remember his assistant coming in, or some of his staff people, saying, “Your next meeting is about ready to start.” He kind of brushed it off and said, “Okay, just tell him we’ll be right there.” I’m sure they probably do that if they need an excuse to cut it off. But he actually took time to listen to us in great detail – like a whole hour, like you said. I was very encouraged by that.

Bob Quinn 1:02:28
The activity that came from all that, I don’t know how much it really flushed out into actual action. But at least we’re starting to be heard, Dave. I think that’s the difference now. We’re starting to be heard at many different levels. It’s still going to take a while for the action to come, but we’re starting to be heard. I think that’s what we can say now.

Dave Chapman 1:02:50
Yeah, I love how you told me that your name plaque on that panel was “Bob Quinn, Real Organic Project.”

Bob Quinn 1:02:58
Did you have something to do with that? What’s that got you, Dave?

Speaker 1 1:03:07
Around the golf. Yeah, right. That was great.

Bob Quinn 1:03:11
I listed the different associations that I have. Of course, the Real Organic Project is one of them, but they didn’t ask me what to put on there. I listed the Quinn Institute as the first one. I thought they would put that on, but who knows why they chose otherwise?

Bob Quinn 1:03:27
I thought that was a good compliment to you and the whole organization, that that’s what they put on there, because that’s maybe what they thought would be most significant. I don’t know. They didn’t ask me, but I thought that was kind of fun.

Dave Chapman 1:03:39
Yeah. God bless you, Bob, for working at this. I have lots of friends who spend a lot of their time trying to influence the government. I don’t think it’s a fool’s errand, but it’s not where I can quite stand to put all my energy. We’ve put our energy into basically trying to create a big enough movement that the government will have to listen.

Bob Quinn 1:04:09
They don’t really lead, Dave, as much as they follow. But there has got to be a core critical mass that they can follow. That’s how I see it, and that’s kind of what you’re saying too.

Dave Chapman 1:04:20
That’s right. All right, Bob, we’re probably at time here. As I say, we could go for another couple of hours, but Bob Quinn, thank you very much. It’s always really interesting to talk with you, and I mean that. Thank you.

Bob Quinn 1:04:44
Thanks, Dave. Thanks for having me.