Episode 143: Growing Prescription-Quality Wheat with Bob Quinn

Hi, friends. Welcome back to the Regenerative Agriculture podcast, where we have all kinds of fun conversations about agronomy and plant nutrition and human health and the ways they intersect in so many beautiful ways. Today, I've been having a wonderful visit here in person with Bob Quinn, who's a good friend of mine from Montana. I've had Bob on here in the past. And over the last several months, the conversation actually, really, in the last six weeks, the conversation that has really been surfacing for me in ways that it hasn't for almost a decade is the conversation around nutrient density and growing medicinal quality food, growing immunotherapy quality food. You know, Dan Kittredge and I got onto this train, if you will, probably almost 20 years ago at this point, and I became really inspired by the idea. When we were on our own farm growing up, I became really inspired by the idea that we could grow plants that were so healthy that we could regenerate soil health, we could grow crops that were resistant to diseases and insects, and we could start having a legitimate conversation about food as medicine. But I discovered, to my dismay after some time that this was a conversation that many farmers, they were interested in having the conversation, they were inspired by it. But for most growers, it wasn't enough to actually get them to do something different. And that's beginning to change. I've had more conversations in the last two months with growers who are actually measuring their nutrient density and are marketing based on that and are being paid for that across a broad cross section in beef and dairy and pork and nuts, and the list goes on and on. I've been quite inspired. So, Bob, you're one of the people that, of all those that I know you have probably been for the longest period of time, you've been one of the pioneers here in North America of actually measuring the nutritional integrity of the crop that you are growing and talking about that and marketing about it. So what has that journey been like?

Well, John, first of all, thanks for having me. It's great to be here in person and to spend a little time together. Told Mark earlier this morning that we could spend weeks and not get to the end of our list of topics we'd like to talk about. But the thing you're referring to with nutrition plants really was stimulated for me by our experience with our ancient wheat that we've marketed under the trademark of Kamut. And it's an ancient grain that we started growing as a novelty, actually. We were told it came out of King Tut's tomb well, that wasn't true, but that was the story and it was a great story. And so we just started marketing as a novelty. And then lo and behold, one of our friends who couldn't eat modern wheat had some of this and she could eat it. She'd done some kinesiology studies or testing to see if she could eat it, that it wouldn't make her sick because she was really violently ill with modern wheat and she not only could eat it, but it made her feel better and she sent some to her sister and her sister had all kinds of problems with all kinds of different foods. And after eating this grain in the form of pasta for about six weeks or so, not only could she eat it and she couldn't eat the other wheat, but, but she was less sensitive to some of these foods that she had been given trouble. So it's actually healing her body.

That's the amazing part. That's the piece that I get so inspired by because I've heard dozens of stories like that. Just in the last. For some reason there's just this culmination, the last couple of months of people telling me this is stories from growers and farmers telling me, hey, people are eating our dairy and their gut issues are clearing up, they are healthier, their immune system is responding better. And I'm hearing that from grass fed beef producers who are producing amazing quality beef, that all of a sudden people who are consuming this beef are much healthier even than they were when they were eating a lot of, when they were on a carnivore diet. On, on mainstream beef. There was an additional noticeable improvement with producing higher quality. That's medicinal, that's immunotherapy, quality food. That's where we need to be.

Right? I agree totally. And then we went from those just simple observations to then sponsoring some extensive research in Italy. I couldn't find anybody. This is now, this is the late 80s, we couldn't find anybody in America. I couldn't find anybody that wanted to work with me at that time that actually believed there was any problem with modern wheat. Most of them said, well, it's probably in their head that people are just, you know, having problems because they, they think they're having problems. In Italy we found a different attitude and we ended up after about 15 years of pretty extensive research and trials, now we got into compari, modern wheat and ancient wheat and human clinical trials with people with chronic disease and we found that it was anti inflammatory and we know that inflammation is connected with all chronic disease. And so we Immediately went to that topic. And now we publish about 36 peer reviewed journal articles. You can find them on our website on kamuk.com and see for yourself. And the science is there and I think it's just the tip of the iceberg, just like you're saying now. It's just not an isolated case. We're starting to see it in all kinds of foods and all kinds of production systems that really revitalize the soil, which helps revitalize the gut. It's the same. The microbiome they talk about in the gut is really no different essentially than the microbiome in the soil, if you want to talk about it that way.

Yeah, no different in principle, really. So the idea of anti inflammatory grain, I remember being so inspired by this in our first conversation because it's my understanding that most modern grains that are readily available have an inflammatory effect.

That's true. That's what we've seen in our research. It's not great, but it certainly is significant and measurable. And this is just the opposite of that. That's what makes it so unusual. And it never been described in wheat before. Wheat is not thought of as an anti inflammatory food because in most cases it's not.

Right. Yeah.

So that's really, that's really exciting. And it opened up a whole different world for us. So I recently, I sold all my businesses and, and had a retirement party and.

I can guess how that went.

Yeah, it was great. But I promised my wife I'd have a retirement party. So we had one.

The next day you went back to.

Work and the next day. Well, no, I started a regenerative organic research education and health institute. It's a nonprofit now, so. John, a nonprofit is not really a business, is it? Because I promised my wife I'd have no more businesses, you see? Yeah, okay, well, that works to a certain extent. Anyway. This institute is focusing on actually our motto in our business plan and everything. Our mission statement is healing the earth by growing food as medicine. And so that's our focus. We're trying to focus on, you know, most commodities are focusing on yield. And that's the bottom line. That's what everybody focuses on. And we don't grow a single commodity on our farm. We only grow food on our farm. And because we're growing food that is something that people eat. And so we're focusing on the quality of that food and growing up food that just not only fills the stomach, but heals the body and keeps you healthy. And that's what we're Focusing on.

You know Bob, one of the questions that I is in the back of my mind when I hear your story and read the research, the stuff that you've published. From my perspective, there are at least two major components and I'm sure they're both contributing. There are two major components to why your grains have an anti inflammatory effect and why they have these positive health attributes. Part of it is obviously the genetics. Genetics play a part, but then there's also the nutritional component. And I'm going to focus on one for just a moment that I'm really intrigued by and that is selenium. So we know that first of all here in the U.S. 50% of the people alive today, both men and women, are expected to get cancer in their lifetime. That's official CDC data. And you look at that and you say, why would we accept that as being normal? But we have, we've begun to accept it as being normal. But then you go to Google Scholar and you do a search for selenium as a cancer treatment and you can look up specific types of cancers. But I've been told on good authority from people who've done thorough homework that when you go to Google Scholar and you search for selenium on cancer, There are over 400 peer reviewed published papers reporting remarkably positive benefits of selenium as a cancer preventative and as a cancer treatment. And you look at that and you say, okay, well just from a geological perspective, over half of the United States is severely selenium deficient. It's not present in our food supply. And yet you are growing kamut in a region where you have adequate selenium in the soil. Shouldn't we, as a public health service, as a public health benefit, shouldn't we make it a national priority to make sure that we have adequate selenium status in all of our food? How far would that go to mitigating our public health crisis around cancer? And so anyway, with the kamut that you're going, you're growing this in a selenium rich region. So how much of the anti inflammatory effect and the medicinal value that is coming from the food you're growing is coming from genetics versus how much of it is coming from the nutrition that it's able to absorb from the soil?

That's a very good question. And you know John, the truth is we really don't know the mode of action for this anti inflammatory property that we're seeing. But that would be one of the, one of the possibilities for sure. And it'd be very Interesting to identify the mode of action and then make sure that you are augmenting that or at least with other plants. I mean, so what's interesting, interesting about this ancient wheat is that when we planted side by side with our best modern spring wheat, the selenium amounts in the modern spring wheat is about 30% or 40% less than what we have in the kuhmi.

Oh, wow.

So it's a significant amount less. And it's the same grain at the same field, the same year, the same everything. And yet it's high enough in the Komooth that if you have three helpings a day, you have your, your. The amount of selenium and recommended by the government in their, in their nutritional values. So just a normal diet, you can have something that's actually very important, but it has to be a diet that is made up of plants and foods and animal products and whatnot that contain these things.

Right?

And so that's the difference between, I think, what we have today and what we had 100 years ago or maybe 150 years ago, where a lot of that deficiency has come, not only by the way we farm, but also by the way we have bread or plants. Focusing on that, not that we tried to eliminate nutrition. That wasn't the goal. The goal was focusing on yield. And when you focus 100% on something, you're going to let something else go by that you don't even know that's happened until way later. And I think that's a lot of what's happened. So there's two things that are going on. The soil is being diminished in its, in its nutrition. And also the plant's ability to take up what's left or act in a way that provides high nutrition is being compromised.

So that's fascinating. So I, I framed my original question as what are the drivers? Is it the genetics as in, so that we're not. We have a different protein profile on the plant or is it, is it the, the mineral content and what you're saying? Actually it is the genetics that are leading to the, and the genetics lead or develop the capacity to absorb the minerals.

It's a potential, right? So we have the potential there. Do you have a higher potential or lower potential?

Right.

So you can have better plants actually produce a pretty good result in poor soil, for example, and you can have poor plants produce a better result in really great soil. But what if you have both of those, John, combined? Or if you have the plants with the genetic also in the living soil to have the best of both worlds. And that's what we really need. Because you mentioned earlier about the cancer thing in the future, that half the half the living population has cancer to look forward to. But if you look at the chronic disease levels right now, and these are again CDC reports and everybody's starting to talk about it, it's 60% of the entire population has at least one chronic disease, 40% have two or more. And that is not sustainable. That means over half our population is already sick. They're already sick. And so we have the sickest population in the world. We always are tired of how we have the best food the world or the most food. The most. We've got the most.

But I think the best is arguable.

That's right. Because at best they defined in price. So it's the best price. That's right, it's the cheapest.

Have we forgotten the old adage that you get what you pay for?

I was just thinking the same thing.

Aye aye yai yai yi yai yai. So this conversation around inflammatory foods and chronic disease and inflammation, it's probably, I don't know, 15 years or so ago I first came to the realization of this, there is this foundational baseline that this is a bit of an oversimplification, it's not entirely accurate, but that you could broadly think about food selection and dietary choices on the basis of whether they produce inflammation or not. And what I what really intrigued me was the research by Blue Blanc Core in France where they were testing animal products on and human health responses to animal products that had a narrow omega 3 to omega 6 ratio. And they were not producing this in a, in a grass fed or grazing environment. But they were testing meat as in beef, dairy, pork, eggs and perhaps poultry meat as well, I'm not entirely certain. But they determined that when you have a narrow omega 3 to 6 ratio which they were producing by feeding flax, you had an anti inflammatory effect from consuming those animal products where the ratio was narrow and a pro inflammatory effect when the ratio was wide, similar to what you're describing in the contrast between kamut and modern grains. And what was intriguing to me is that in that model they're not actually farming significantly differently. They're not obsessing over nutritional quality. They're simply looking at essential fatty acid ratios and feeding accordingly.

Yes.

How much further could we go down that road if we also paid attention to forage quality, nutritional value and nutrient density? And on and on the list goes.

I know one of the things when we first saw this in our research, it occurred to me that how much of a value there could be in developing a inflammatory index so that you could test the foods for either their ability to create inflammation or decrease it. Because another factor, John, we haven't been talking about, and a lot of people don't talk about this either when they're talking about agriculture. And of course, you and I are involved in agriculture, and that's what we eat and breathe and see around us. But you can have the best soil systems, living soil in place, the best seeds in those, grow the best quality crops and everything. And then once you harvest those crops and the farmers done everything right, essentially, and they have the peak of nutrition, but you can take those crops and then just process the daylight out of them, at least the nutrition out of them, and you can end up with food. They call it food on the store shelves that are devoid of a lot of that nutrition that they left the field with. And this is another area.

Can you give me an example of that?

Well, I would say the processed cereals, for example. I mean, I had some friends from. Not to drop names, but to. As an example, I had some friends from Europe who bought Fruit Loops for their kids because they thought they were buying fruit of some kind to eat their kids, get more healthy.

Okay.

And I said, well, I really hate to be the bearer of bad news, but Fruit Loops are really not based on fruit, but they're all full of food coloring and all kinds of other things. Well, for wheat, and that's my main focus is wheat. That's what I was raised with. But we are throwing away the most valuable part of the wheat when we make white flour. So with white flour, we're already throwing away the bran, which is all full of fiber, which is good for digestion. We're throwing away the germ, which is all full of all kinds of nutritional vitamins and minerals, too.

And then we're adding folic acid.

Yes. And then we try to add back what we took out. So we call that fortification or enrichment, but it's never the same.

Well, when you just said that, it kind of struck me. Yeah, we call it enrichment.