Bob Quinn

Bob Quinn  00:00

But I tell people that there’s a very, very high cost of cheap food, but you don’t pay it at the checkout collar. So in our community, you start with a farmer. The suicide wave in Montana is the highest in the country, and a lot of those dealing with agriculture, so you’re destroying farmers. They’re losing their farms so that the farms are paid when the farms go and mentioned earlier, but the communities start to decline. Our middle of town has lost half of this business. At least have five grain elevators in town now there’s zero, because the grain companies have figured out how to make big terminals and force farmers to haul their grain 10 times further than they did to town the closest town, the Big Sandy here I would haul it now 50 miles and 80 miles, sometimes 100 miles away, the big rain rail turtle. So all that industrialization has destroyed, or is this leading to the decline of small towns in rural America? Clear crossing company, 

Jason Miller  00:47

Hi, I’m Jason.

Nicole  00:47

I’m Fran This is Bill Peter, and I’m Nicole. And this is marketing for what matters, where we explore how marketing paired with a regenerative mindset can uplift humanity, heal the planet, and still achieve profitable business growth. Hey,

Jason Miller  00:59

welcome to a new episode of The Marketing for what matters podcast. I am jam at peaceful media. I’m so happy that you’re here, and I’m excited to introduce you a new friend of mine, Bob Quinn. He’s our guest today, and he’s also the founder of the Quinn Institute, which is a research facility studying the art and science of regenerative organic agriculture, partnered up with Rodale Institute to study what works well in the plains and the food system and food growers systems in the northern plains of Montana. And so if you’re here for hardcore marketing advice and techniques and strategies, this is probably not the episode of marketing for what matters. However, if you’re here to build a massively successful brand and you have a regenerative mindset, really thinking about the triple bottom line, people, planet and profit, then you’re going to love this episode. I fell in love with Bob’s story and and what he’s learned in his business pursuits, which have all been extremely successful, from ancient wheat to bio fuel to renewable energy, Bob’s done it. And what I noticed is a through line of his ability to build relationships and really listen to his customers needs, and find ways to continually add a substantial value to his customers lives, so that everyone wins. And speaking of wins, one of the intentional byproducts of all of his business success has been seen in his local community, there in Big Sandy Montana, where intentionally new opportunities and jobs are created, and a renewed sense of vibrancy has been allowed to come back to this small town in Montana. Bob is an amazing, phenomenal human being, and I can’t wait for you to hear his philosophies for building a successful business. Without further ado, let’s get into this episode. Hey, welcome. I’m jam at peaceful media, and I’m joined by Bob Quinn here in the marketing for what matters podcast. Thank you so much for joining us today for what’s going to be a very fruitful conversation. No pun intended. I’m joined, as I said, by Bob Quinn. He’s a serial entrepreneur and the founder of the Quinn Institute, as well as a prolific writer and a great written a really fabulous book here called grain by grain. As you can see, I thoroughly enjoyed it and bookmarked it to all like every every other page on a bookmark. So I thought we’d start this interview session here Bob by opening up with just a quick reading from chapter 17 of grain by grain, if you wouldn’t mind doing the pleasure of going and going ahead and reading those two first two paragraphs for us. All

Bob Quinn  03:56

right. Thank you very much. I’ll be happy to do it. Imagine I told you there was a product that could dramatically reduce the incidence of four of the top seven cognitive death in the United States, lift 1000s of Americans out of poverty, fight climate change, all while slowing the growth of marine dead zones and reversing pollinator decline. If this were an app, venture capitalists would be falling all over themselves to fund it. This for a new gadget, it would be making headlines and winning awards. But the common solution that an increasing number of people are now proposing is a response to these other problems. Is not a new app, it’s not a new gadget. Rather, it’s about reviving, revaluing something we have come to take for granted, our food,

Jason Miller  04:50

and that’s a wonderful frame for today’s conversation. Food is medicine is a core tenet and a communication. Through line in all the videos that you post on LinkedIn and Facebook and social media for the Quinn Institute. Bob, would you mind just sharing a little bit, just an overview of what the Quinn Institute is setting up to do in partnership with ro daily Institute? Sure.

Bob Quinn  05:16

Well, first of all, we have a 20, about a 3000 acre of organic small grains production farm in North Central Montana. I’ve got five kids, and after, well, the oldest is in their 40s. Now, after 40 years, no one showed up in my doorstep to take over the farm. So I’m the third generation, and I hated it for it to just, you know, be sold down the street eventually. So I decided to take 700 acres out of the middle of it and create a rejective Organic Research, Education and Health Institute. So that’s what we’re doing. We’re in the first year of it. Actually, we’re really excited about it. We are focusing on helping organic farmers convert from chemical to organic systems, helping organic farmers that already have converted keep being successful. We want to educate them and educate the public about how they can grow more their own food. If they don’t have a farm, they can have a garden, maybe, or a garden spot, or at least on their patio. So we want to have educational focuses on that. Have a teaching kitchen that teaches people what to do with the turnip once they get that far out of their garden, how to preserve their food so they can eat it all year round. We want to have some health practitioners on staff to focus that, to focus with on a chronic disease and prescribe food off the farm rather than fills out of the pharmacy. So that’s just kind of an overview of what we’re hoping to do the next three or four years to get started, and hopefully it can be a help to the neighborhoods we want to be have Community Links we want to serve the northern Great Plains, but particularly the short grass prairie of the northern Great Plains, which is Montana, east of the Rocky Mountains of the COVID, western half of the COVID, southern Alberta, southern Saskatchewan, little pieces of Colorado, Wyoming and Nebraska. So that’s our region. Besides rodeo, we hope to also partner with the University research stations, with other migrant institutes, like the Land Institute, and anyone who wants to do something similar and work hand in hand in focusing on food is medicine. Our vision is healing the earth by growing food is medicine.

Jason Miller  07:41

Yes, and you this and reading your book and reading your story of how you grew up, you weren’t always this invested and this fascinated in this sort of sort of prolific in the organic, regenerative, organic space, agriculture space. And so I would love to do a little history lesson for people, because I thought that was one of the more fascinating pieces of US history, and perhaps worldwide history, and how we got to where we’re at in modern, modern conventional agriculture. I’m putting some big air quotes around conventional, of course. So you’re a fourth generation farmer, let’s do the how you got to where you’re at today, and I think it’ll illuminate a lot of the problems that we’re facing as in our society, as both people who eat food, but also people who grow food. So you’re a fourth generation farmer. You’re growing up in an era in the 50s and 60s and witnessing really a big tectonic shift in how agriculture is done in the United States. Farmers were throughout the war, the Second World War, we were, they were national heroes, growing food. And probably, you know, helping our country eat well throughout the war. And so they’re kind of like, you know, as like I said, national heroes. And then it feels like in the 50s and 60s, there was a very concerted effort to convince those farm operators and growers to dive in, into what I think you do a good job of painting as a chemical soaked, nutrient depleted, highly commoditized race to the bottom, where very few wit including the people consuming those foods. So that’s a lot there. But will you help us understand, just like the conventional wisdom in the United States agriculture scene during that era?

Bob Quinn  09:50

Okay? Well, alright, if I get off track, you just, you just let me know my great grandfather had a dairy. In northern Idaho, north of buttersbury. He in about 1919 traded that theory for a Wheaton cattle ranch southeast of Big Sandy Montana, which is in north central Montana, booming towns that at that time in 1919 that the homesteaders were just starting to go approach. They had a terrific year in 1916 and then they had drought, and so people were leaving by the droves. And my grandfather, great grandfather, came in on that kind of that scenario. He got some pound property and some, some a good size, couple of 1000 acres of wheat and saddle. And then he went. He moved here. And my grandfather, who was in World War One that time in France, when he got back to Idaho, found they were gone, and he followed them here to Big Sandy married my grandmother because they fallen in love before the war, and they were set to be married. And so that’s how Quinn farmer ran started with my grandfather in 1920 and his marriage to my grandmother, right up the creek, right next door to to his in laws. And so he went through the 20s and 30s and 40s, whereas the Depression came in 29 the Dust Bowl came in the 30s, and they had a tough time. He had to go to Spokane to live with his parents and with his family, taking the winner of 36 just to survive. They were just out of money, out of almost out of hope, but they decided to come back that next spring and just try it one more year. And in that year, was a little bit better, and 38 was a little bit better. 39 then the war came. Of course, there was big demand, and the weather had turned more favorable, and and they were off. My father came back to the Navy. He was in the Navy in World War Two, and married my mother, who was from well, she’s born in Pennsylvania, raised in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and brought her out to the ranch in in 48 just a little after I was born there, married in 46 and he lived in in Georgia for a couple years, trying to say to get turned into a city guy working for a Westinghouse, and that that wasn’t satisfying to know. So he he came back to his roots, and I’m glad he did. This is where I was raised, is all I remember. I got here less than a year old, and my sister joined me a couple years later. And so there’s just a two of us growing up on, as I said, a 2400 acre we can Cabot ranch, and things were fairly, fairly good in the 50s. We had some drought and chalices in the 60s that I can remember, but I remember my father building his first sprayer. I was too young to really appreciate what was going on, but the country side was just grabbed on the chemical herbicides like they were a magic wand, because we the pressure. I remember my dad telling me stories how he would have to ride on the front of the combine and with a brew stick, push the weeds into the combined. Really dangerous. But the weed problems in the wheat fields were horrendous, and they didn’t really have rotations that would have helped with that or anything else. They had come to the prairies and broken the prairies, and we’re in an area where they can only raise one crop every other year, or something summer, following everything half a year, and then growing a crop on that summer fellow where they didn’t raise anything to collect water the second year, but that summer follow having that nudity, ground really opened up for the Dust Bowl And a lot of soil erosion. So that was a thing that was changed. In the 50s, we went to strip cropping, which was having very narrow strips every other every other strip was fallow or grain, and so that it cut down on the wind erosion. So we saw that change take place. Then we saw the coming of fertilizers, and that was not so easily adopted. And of course, these chemical wonders were coming out of what used to be the war effort and the bomb makers and everything else. They decided they could do something in peacetime and still make a lot of money. And so they were pushing all these chemicals, and they the ground had not been farmed that many years, from from native soil, from native prairie, at least, and so they didn’t see a lot of immediate response for the chemicals. But after four or five more years of farming, and they were kind of on the edge, my dad, that was a great experimenter, so he was experimenting all the time, and he started to be convinced that the the chemical fertilizers were paying their way and were adding additional additional bushels, additional yield to this crop. So it was sort of a natural there was no one really questioned this that I remember hearing in my. My neighborhood, at least once they demonstrated that they get more yield, then that was the name of the game, and it was on and on like that for his Champlain, and even also school. That’s all I heard, and that’s all I was taught. So when I got to California in my graduate school. My love was plants. I

Jason Miller  15:23

apologies there, Bob, because I’m going to take you. We’re going to get to your PhD program in California. Okay, okay, first I want to hover real quickly on corporate influence and government policy that really changed there in the 70s. Okay, Economic Development Council headed by major corporations here in the US on getting together with the USDA to develop a Go big or go home policy. Can you kind of share what happened there in the 70s?

Bob Quinn  15:54

Well, again, no one ever knew about the back the backstory of any of that. All we knew was that we were encouraged to plant natural and plant as much as we could, because America was depending on export. We are a wheat producing state, and most of our wheat was exported. We’re pretty close on the railroad to the west coast that was large to Asia or less of their high quality wheat, and also our wheat went to the milling centers of the country to mix with the lower protein waste coming out of Kansas and other wheat growing areas. It had more production, but less protein. And so we were in a really highly sought after area for wheat production. And so things are really encouraged to just plant as much and become a specialized as much as possible. So when I was growing up, there was a great diversity on the farmsteads. Every farmstead had some pigs and some chickens and cows. We had a milk tower too. We raised a lot of our own food. It was we and we would sell, my mother would sell cream, and at the local store with eggs, even though they’re just a few dozen, it didn’t matter. They loved them. And I remember butchering chicken sauce and taking him up the hammer, which is the nearest big town, about 50 miles away. And the store keeper said, What do you have any more of these? Because they were really, they were good quality, and we were proud of that. And that wasn’t our main business. That was just a little grocery money for my mom or little extra stuff she wanted to do. We didn’t have never had any extra, a big extra amount of money. So that was just a little bit of a fun thing that she could put in her cookie jar. But everybody had that. And in the 60s, in the 70s, that started disappear. It was back to the farm in the late 70s, but folks had gotten rid of most of that stuff. I had some small kids, and I kind of wanted them to have the same experience I had. So we got back chickens and got a milk cow, and I don’t forget pigs. Pigs would get out and root up my garden, and that was my favorite spot on the farm. Was my garden. I love plants and to grow things, so I didn’t really relish the pigs as much, but we would have the other some of the other animals. But as things got bigger and bigger, people had farmers have less time to take care of animals and do chores and whatnot, because they’re in the field all the time. It became more and more industrial. Now we really didn’t think of it that way, as it evolved, but your ride, that’s what you saw, totally boiling water. Said the conversion had had happen, then you could look around, oh my gosh. You know, we don’t have anything that we used to have. And in the meanwhile, with the modern advent of all these wonder chemicals, these all cost a lot of money. And the price of grain was never going tough. It was going up and down, up and down. In many years, people could hardly afford to pay for their input costs that now they were hooked on, because they had been taught that this is the only way to farm. And we were losing neighbors, left and right. And so after 50 years or so, half my neighbors had gone that I had when I was growing up, at least the farms were gone. They had been absorbed by neighbors, most of them town of Big Sandy had dwindled from a Fauci when I was in school down to 600 it is now barely 600 Main Streets have borders, huh? So it’s just like a vicious cycle. Once you lose your farm base and the people supporting the communities, then it just spirals on down, and it’s kind of rushed to the bottom, and

Jason Miller  19:40

before you moved your family back there and sort of witness the, the sort of demolition, that degradation of what you ate, you know, what we think of as, uh, traditional farming into conventional, I’m sorry, chemical, so industrialized agriculture, you, i. Um, so basically the USDA is saying farms, you’re either going to go as big as possible, produce as much as possible, be as efficient as possible, you’re either going to go big or you’re just going to have to stop what you’re doing. And so farms, I mean, that was a government policy, subsidized government policy from the United States, that said you’re going to do it this way. You’re just not going to have a livelihood anymore when you’re going off to your PhD program. I know you got to stop in Bozeman couple. I didn’t post grad there. But then you go to PhD in UC Davis, which is the, you know, one of the country’s foremost, you know, agriculture schools, ag schools, just learning the cutting edge with agriculture technology. And it was you get there and again, you know, the the between the lion story in your book is that you’re becoming more and more disillusioned with where, where farming is going, and it’s punctuated, or punctuated with a really poignant story in a peach orchard. Could you take us to that peach orchard there in Northern California? Sure,

Bob Quinn  21:12

this is actually the first time I ever questioned the direction we’re going with chemical agriculture. I was I was in studying plant biochemistry. That was my major. But I was still it was a bread basket to me, it was a wonder place that they could grow anything. And so I would sit in classes and the egg school and the crops production classes, and in the summer times, they would have tours around California that would take people to the students, to different crops, cropping systems, and just show them. And I was I signed up for two or three of those. And the first one I’d signed up where we went down the central valley and south in a peach orchard. And when I was growing up, we got our peaches and wooden boxes. They were double wrapped, and you would open them up and put the pieces on the counter, and within a few days, they were perfectly ripe and delicious. When I got to California, there were peaches also near Davis. I was going to school, and we would go out. My wife and I did a lot of canning and still making a lot of our own food course later on a student dole, it was quite slim, and we living on $200 a month. That was, that was what we lived on. That was amazing, thinking these days, in some sites housing. And so we would go out the beach, orchard and the farm would say, well, he said, Are you playing the can this afternoon or tomorrow or the next day? And depending on what we said, he said, Go to this pile of crates, or this bottle of crates, and and the pieces were so right. If you’re planning this afternoon, they were they were just dead, right? And they were so sweet and succulent, and the aroma was fantastic. And we take those home at cam, and they’re just wonderful. I mean, it was almost like picking them off a tree, really. Instead of shipping them. They were totally green, but partially ripe to Montana, as I saw one of this new and when I went to this beach orchard, I expected they said, okay, they’re just getting ready for harvest. And got off the bus and I couldn’t smell anything. I couldn’t smell any aromas of ripening peaches. And they took us out to the peace orchard and to the trees, and the fruit was gorgeous. Looks like they were dead, right? Then they picked one and throw it to us, and it was as hard as your rock, and you cut it open. It wasn’t fit to eat. It was It wasn’t right at all. It just looked right and and the story was that the art professor leading the trip in this farmer grower, had gotten together and figured in their testing, a spray of some kind of mixture of petrochemicals that sprayed on the tree caused the fruit to change color so it looked dead ripe, but it was dead green. And they loved this, because they could harvested fruit and ship them in big crates. They didn’t have to put them in individual boxes or anything. They ship them big crates clear across the country without any bruising. And of course, wouldn’t get right. P should bruises. You know this instantly. It’s very you have to tell it very, very gently, and you can’t be shipping it and creates big boxes across the country without individual protection. And they thought this is a wonderful thing, so when they got to the store shelf, they put it on the store shelf, and they were beautiful, but they they didn’t taste any good, and a lot of times it would start to rot from the center out. And it was so I thought it was, this isn’t progress. This is kind of a flawed you’re you’re pretending to you. Project something that isn’t true. You’re projecting something that looks and taste delicious, but it only looks delicious. It doesn’t taste like anything you really want to eat and and they were hailing this, as you know, modern advances in agriculture, and that was the first time, the first time that I ever questioned the direction we were going wasn’t the last but it was the first time, and that it didn’t cause me to connect that yet to what we’re doing in Montana, because we weren’t doing that. We were still producing high protein weight that tasted good and acted right, and everything else, and thinking about how we were doing it, because it wasn’t the same kind of product. But this one, um, really made an impression on me, because they had changed something that was important. Yeah,

Jason Miller  25:49

I should say, uh, University of California at Davis is, is one of our clients here at peace media and I so I want to just say this gently, like the professor was profiting on, you know, this new product that was being revealed, and that’s just kind of like where the United States, yeah,

Bob Quinn  26:09

yes, it was. And no one, no one thought giving everybody.

Jason Miller  26:13

It’s just it was influencing everybody to find the thing that will help us get that biggest yield and most profit for this? Yeah, this industry is possible.

Bob Quinn  26:22

Kiddo is all about in this case, it was cutting costs. They were thinking, how can we make it as cheap as possible? It was the cheapest possible. Then there’s still a little bit more margin for us to make, you know, the people in the middle, and that’s what was being pushed. No one, I don’t think anybody, if any, thought to nutrition or, you know, shorting the end user. It wasn’t, wasn’t a deliberate thing on cheating anybody. It was just, how can we make more money and and and make things cheaper? I was all about efficiency. It was all about consolidation and all those things. No one gave a thought to the fall, the fallout from all that stuff, yeah.

Jason Miller  27:03

And so the soul of food, the nutrition the food is medicine is completely knocked out, as if it were hit with a series of antibiotics in a way. Yeah? So, so, from UC Davis, you, you get called back to the to the farm. And I couldn’t tell from your book whether or not the farm was, was, you know, failing or anything like that, but it seemed like, you know, the family wanted you to be there to help get it back going again. And you though I

Bob Quinn  27:35

was in a good situation. It was a good situation. You

Jason Miller  27:39

have this you have this PhD? You’re, well, oh yeah, you know, you coming back to the farm with all this, this new the new brain, you know, the new way of thinking, and and you, oh, you take a look at your, your family’s farm operation books, they’re like the accounting. And you start looking and scrutinizing how subsidies work and who actually benefits from subsidies when a significant chunk, if not all of it, is going towards the chemical inputs, the fertilizers and all that. So could you well, you share what you exposed there and how he realized, well,

Bob Quinn  28:21

that’s something I didn’t stumble on until I started playing with organic experiments. Well, I got back the farm, even though the farm, farm is in good shape, but it was a good shape because, well, my my dad, was a great operator and very careful and good farmer, but it was also the right size for one family. It’s 500 acres supported one family. Now we are two families on the farm, and that was a problem financially, because there wasn’t enough income for two families, really. And so we tried to figure out, how can we add value to what we had? And I tried many different things that we don’t have time to even talk about in this program, but the one that succeeded was selling our wheat to high, high protein bakers, or whole, whole grain bakers in Southern California, who loved our wheat because of its high protein, and they could make really good bread with it and really pipe all these stuff. And after we were in business, a cousin of mine in Southern California found them. He He didn’t have a job, and I said, Well, I just see if we can sell wheat together. And that’s how we started our business. It’s called Montana flower grain. And after one year, our main customer called up and said, You think you can find some organic wheat for me, like this same quality. And you know, to tell you the truth, I had heard about organic in California, but I still was focused so much on my experience with chemicals, although then theme it that way. It just thought that’s you did that I thought I had been taught, and I believe that a plant couldn’t tell a difference between a molecule of nitrogen coming out of a manure pile and one coming out of a bag of ammonium sulfate, a chemical. Application. And that’s and that’s why I didn’t taught, and that’s I believe. So I thought this organic stuff was a little bit of, you know, smoke and mirrors, a little bit of a hooey and but yet, I was not willing to let my customers request go on heated I didn’t want to disappoint him. They were a good customer. So I went looking for organic, uh, grain. I found some and and sent them a truckload. Had it cleaned and baked. And then my new, new farmer friend signed a certificate saying it was organic growing California law, and that’s what it was in those days. That’s all you did. And and then my customers loved it so much. He wanted some more and some more and some more. And so I was really trying to scramble, finding everything I could in dozen, 84 now 1984 there weren’t that many organic farmers in Montana or anywhere, actually, but I found all I could. And that winter, I had a whole new group of friends, and I started going to their meetings, and they were telling me, Well, I should back out and say, when I used to go to the regular farm organizational meetings, it mostly it was always me, you know, the prices in the toilet, the government program started helping us like we could and on and on and on and on. And when I went to this organic friends meetings, they it was kind of discussion. They talked about how they could feel the tilt had changed under their feet as they walked over their fields. The soil wasn’t as hard and it was more soft, and they could grow their own fertilizer by growing the legumes, and they could reduce or eliminate herbicides by doing crop rotations. And I was very intrigued about this. I had become I left university because I become a little disillusioned with the power struggle in the kingdom buildings that was occurring in the laboratories. I didn’t really want to be a part of that. I wanted to do science. That’s what I wanted to do, ask questions and try to solve problems. And back to the farm, I came and I had a chance to do that, but in different ways than I expected. So when I was introduced to these organic ideas, I told my dad, we got to try this. This sounds so interesting to me. And so we tried 20 acres in 86 and right next to 20 acres of chemical winter weekly and winter week. In both cases, the organic grain had come off of an Al Fauci strip that we had planted about three or four years previous, and so that had built up the soil. That’s what my friends told me you needed. You needed a legume of some kind to build up the soil, add nitrogen back and and plant material back and trace it, organic matter and all that stuff feeding the microbes, although they begin in that much detail at that time. But that’s what was going on. And at harvest time, both crops were nearly the same, nearly the same protein in the 15 the 15 and a half range, nearly the same yield. Those some were about 36 to 38 bushel that year’s got an average year, and that was very good. My father was astounded here. He had been paid 10s of 1000s of dollars a year for all these inputs to grow a crop that I had produced or equaled with none of that. And so I was very excited about that. Try to get into plant, go 50% of the farm into organic mixture. But we started more like 15% and when the second year, we had another success, and I just quit chemicals 100% after two years of experimental organic. So when we started to go to organic, then I noticed that the government subsidies organic, and they were basically, kind of alluded to it earlier, but the programs are based on your yields, and the higher yields you’ve got, the more money you’ve got. So it was a big incentive to get as much production as you could, because your government payments came to you, and they were just automatic payments in those days, and they were tied to your yield history. So everybody was after more and more yield, with that more and more inputs. But the sounding thing to me was that on our farm, so we have about 1200 acres of pasture. 1200 acres of it was crop ground. So half of that crop was summer fellow. Half was in crop actually. So 600 acres of cropping shear, we were spending for the summer fellow. We weren’t doing any chemical on the summer follow, but on the crop year, we’re spending about 25 around 25 plus or minus two or $3,000 a year on our inputs. And then Donovan just just jumped off the page at me that here was our government checked coming in almost exactly the same amount. So wasn’t really a check to us. It was a check to our chemical companies, and they were going through our checkbook. So was it in and out? And that, I was quite astounded by, that no one ever talked about now in those terms ever. I never heard anybody talk about that. And it was astounding to me to see that how close it was related and. So, according to Kevin, companies are very careful in helping put together a farm program that maximize their ability to sell as much as possible. And that’s what happened over, over the course of several decades, throughout green

Jason Miller  35:11

grain, you expose how the modern agriculture industry has been designed to sort of squeeze every little bit, every bit, little last bit of profit out of the soil with really very little or no concern for downstream externalities and impacts, especially in, you know, the communities surrounding farms. But after watching this design play out for over 50 years, we can see that it’s severely a flawed race. It’s a severely flawed race to the bottom, and with exception of the monsantos and big petrochemical uh, yeah, input providers and other industrialized agriculture corporations, nobody is winning this race, and it’s not the farmers.

Bob Quinn  36:03

It’s called extraction, yeah? Extraction

Jason Miller  36:06

American Indians or the food they grow. It’s certainly not the consumers, and also, it’s not our climate. Everything is hurting, except for their bottom lines, yeah? And so I and you know, the land itself as well. So the big question for you, Bob, and this is something you you you talk about a lot in the book, so we’ll just keep this broad, but how do we get back on track? Well,

Bob Quinn  36:32

there’s one more there’s one more portion that you need to also consider, and what’s because everything you said is absolutely true. But the other half of the picture now is the healthcare industry. So the big pharma now is in bed with the big chemical companies. In fact, have now Bayer. Bayer has bought Monsanto, so we have the biggest one in America. Actually even is Native American company now it’s an international company has their has their foot in both camps, soundly, making money with agro chemicals, and then making money with all the pills they sell to the people that are sick as a result of eating this, some many times contaminated food, and also food that has is decreased in nutrition, deteriorated nutrition. So I always talk everybody, the thing that everybody points to this in control and is trying to sell this message in this program is to the abundance of cheap food. And the government really was the leader of this after World War Two, seeing the families in Europe, they promised that we had never seen anything like that in America. And so the whole focus became on abundance and cheap. And the chemical companies played right into that, and everybody else, the things we talked about earlier, with the consolidations and less than cost everywhere you could, so that food was cheap and food was abundant. But I tell people that there’s a very, very high cost of cheap too. It would only pay it at the checkout cover, and the things you mentioned alluded to that’s, that’s who pays. So in our community, you start with a farmer. You know the suicide wave in Montana is the highest in the country, and a lot of those dealing with agriculture, so you’re destroying farmers. They’re losing their farms so that the farms are paid when the farms go and mentioned earlier, but the communities start to decline. Our little town has lost half of this business. At least have five grain elevators in town now there’s zero because the grain companies have figured out how to make big terminals and force farmers to haul their grain 10 times further than they did to town the closest town, the Big Sandy here we haul it now 50 miles and 80 miles, sometimes 100 miles away, the big Rain rail turtle and so all that industrialization has destroyed, or is this leading to the decline of small towns in rural America, clear crossing country? The next item, and you alluded to this, was our environment. So we’re polluting our environment. We’ve got glyphosate in the groundwater, in the in the.in the soil now, in the rain, in the in the surface water. We have all kinds of other chemicals contaminating every every facet of of our country. We have wells in Iowa that children are prohibited from drinking from because of high nitrates in it. We have a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s the biggest New Jersey, and we have all this erratic weather that that that greenhouse gasses have played a role in, and one of the main one is is coming from CO two that’s coming out of the soil, from lowering the organic matter just the way we’re farming. Right? And then finally, the biggest, the biggest one who is paying is the is the health of our people. Right now, 60% of the entire population in the United States has at least one chronic disease. And that’s over half, 60% it’s over half the people are sick. And you and at CDC, so the government agency even says that 60% of that is due to the poor nutrition people receiving, contributing to these dry diseases. And there’s no end of this inside. It’s just getting worse and worse. The tenant they the Big Pharma, they’re not too concerned about that, because the more sick people are, the more pills they can sell. And they don’t sell pills that can heal you. They only sell pills that help you function so you don’t die right away, so you can spend all your money on them. But you never you’re never cured. The only cure is getting off that and getting on good healthy food, healthy food that’s that’s clean and pure and also check full of nutrition that can reverse those chronic diseases, that that’s part of the cure anyway, that’s what’s happening. And I forgot what the question was.

Jason Miller  41:12

And the question Yeah, so you Oh, how do you get back to it? Is that with the specific details of all the problems, but how do we get back on track?

Bob Quinn  41:19

Yeah, okay, that’s right. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I get so wrapped up in where we’re at, I forget to talk about where we’re going, because for me, that’s the most important thing, is where we’re headed. Do we want to continue heading this direction? If we do, it’s just ruin I mean, there’s, there’s no there’s no solution in sight. It’s just going to get worse and worse. And how many people have to be sick before we think we’re going the wrong direction? How big does the dead zone in Mexico have to get before we think we’re going the wrong direction? How many farmers have to go grow before we’re going the wrong direction? So the solution of that, in my mind, is to reconnect, so everybody can understand, appreciate what’s going on. To reconnect the whole idea of food and medicine. There were Higgs talked about this. He said, Let medicine be your food and food. Do your medicine. That was funny 300 years ago. For heaven’s sake. How long does it take us to rediscover ancient wisdom? But it’s that’s what’s starting to be talked about here and now again. Finally, because the industrial model, although it started out with really good intentions and a good goal of having cheap, abundant food, that’s nothing about that goal. It’s just the way that it was achieved has caused so many other problems that it completely subverts the reason that we should have supported first. So now, if we can reconnect food and health and focus on nutrition, wonder if farmers are paid by the nutrients they produce per acre rather than the pounds they produce per acre. Wonder if we paid farmers. Wonder if we paid farmers like pharmacists and and people say, Oh no, we can’t pay more for food. We can’t pay more for food. But guess what? 50 years ago, you paid twice your annual budget for food than you’re paying now. It’s so cheap. But guess what? Has taken its place. Healthcare has taken this place. 50 years ago, you paid half what you’re paying now for healthcare. So if you add those two together, they equal about 27.78% of your total budget, the household budgets in America. That has not changed. The two together have not changed. What has changed is who is above the other who’s, who’s in the media and who are the growth is, and these are expensive. This is fun. Growth, not income. This is the expense, and it also carries with it, just not financial expense, but also hardships. I mean that the suffering that goes along with being sick and watching family members who are ill, this is really this is really tough. You can’t put a cost on that, or a price on that, and that’s what’s happening. And if we could pay a little more to our farmers to raise food as old or medicine, that means the ground, the soil, has to be healthy. You have to start with good seed. You can’t put poisons on it. You’ve got to do rotations and other soil building crops and and systems, and maybe your yield isn’t going to be as high as it was, but your nutrition is going to be astronomically more than it was, and that’s what you should be paid for, and that’s what will help solve the the financial crisis of the of the communities, the start to heal the Earth and its pollutions and its climate chaos that I think we’re in. And finally, and most importantly, it should heal our people and our population.

Jason Miller  44:56

Yeah, the spirit of your book is coming through a lot, including. Here you’re Bob. And one of the other big themes was value, word value, how we define value? And this is, this is how everybody listening to this podcast can benefit, because we’re all consumers of this food system in one, one way or another. So I’d love for you to define value as you see it and and almost is take us on a journey of how your philosophy manifested into how your philosophies around value manifested into business success. Oh,

Bob Quinn  45:34

well, okay, when you talk about business success, my philosophy in business is everybody wins. And so if you put together a business model that starts, in our case for agriculture, so we start with a farmer, and the farmer wins. That means he gets a good price. He gets dealt fairly with. He doesn’t if it makes a contract, it’s honored, all that kind of stuff. He gets a price that can pay his expenses, plus have a decent living like everybody else is trying to achieve. And then you go to the next level, the manufacturers. Are the ship, the processors, and you make sure that they are not making their money off the backs of somebody else, like farmers. They find the Bucha and pricing by cheap but they’re making their money by producing a high value product. They’re not selling it full of cheap gimmicks, sugars or flavors or additives that make it look smaller or appear artificially better than it is, but they are rewarded for preserving the nutrition and the high quality that the farmers are producing and delivering to them. And then you I think that rather than try to feed the whole world, you know that the chemical companies drum beat is constantly we need to feed the world. That’s why we need all this stuff and the hobbies high yield. But if we would focus on feeding our communities first, instead of focusing on feeding the world. You know, I don’t think our our role should be to feed the world. I think our role should be to help the world feed itself. And every community, when we go and cheap food into other countries, we destroy their agriculture and put their farmers out of business, and it’s all in the in the disguise that tried to get them to grow a big cash crop, Dennis exported, and so that they have to buy their own food because they’re not growing it anymore. And it’s just a vicious cycle that just, if you study it, it doesn’t make any sense at all. It’s the financial model is just a house of cards where there’s, in the beginning, apparently, a large amount of money to be made by somebody, and that’s who’s pushing it. But there’s so much destruction in the path. We need to get back to where we started, as far as self contained communities, and not worry so much about squeezing every penny we can out of consolidation and advantage of of all that stuff that goes with centralization and salvation. When we saw what happened during COVID, you know, and I tell this story, people sometimes glaze over. Well, everything’s fine the way it is. I can have watermelon in January. What’s the matter with that? But when you taste that watermelon in January, it’s not that great. You have water bill in July, when it’s ripe. Out of the field, it’s wonderful, but to ship it across the world from another part of the world in January, we really need that. Why don’t we start thinking about how great it is to eat in season, or things either peak, peak flavors, the taste, all that kind of stuff. And actually, aromas and flavors in food are an indication of their nutrient value, because most of those aromas and flavors come from polyphenols and other antioxidants and things that reduce inflammation. There are secondary products in plants that are naturally occurring and encouraging people in their own way to eat, as they say, Eat me because I taste good, I smell good, I am good, and we’ve lost a lot of that, but if we really go back to that, it would be it’d be more fun. So if we could get people to think in that way and talk about that, I think a real missing piece that we don’t have is a real easy way to put a nutrient index or in our case, we’re working on an anti inflammatory index on our food and so that people could see, have an easy way to identify how much nutrition they’re buying. For that in that case of cabbage or that bottle of milk or whatever, whatever they’re buying, they can see the nutrient value, and therefore they could justify spending more say, if they know it is higher value, then it’s easy to justify paying more for because it’s a higher value and it’s going to translate into better health or nutrition for themselves or their children or their Ellen or elderly parents or grandparents or whatever. So everybody wins. And so that’s been my philosophy, that that it’s that what for me to all of the food system, then I think we have a much healthier and better food system. So that’s kind of where I started.

Jason Miller  50:13

Yeah, so you’re a serial entrepreneur, and so I’d love to cherry pick a few of your entrepreneurial pursuits or endeavors to explore, how do you found value additive ways to sort of increase increase that everybody wins philosophy and make that happen. So I know there’s like a transition from conventional wheat to organic, and then also from organic to ancient wheat. It’s just one. There’s several other businesses that you’ve started up where you added a ton of value and found success for everybody you want to speak to. Okay,

Bob Quinn  50:58

well, yeah, and let me mention a couple things that a couple words that I don’t use anymore, that are very common in the vernacular, but I think they’re extending the wrong message. It tracks us from getting back to the real story that we should be telling. I never use the word conventional when talking about this chemical experiment that we’ve been doing the last 70 years or so, and a lot of the wheels are coming off that bus that don’t even have time to talk about them all. But conventional, to me, is the kind of agriculture we’ve done for the last 10,000 years. That’s conventional. And while we’re doing the last 50, 6070, years, that’s not conventional. That’s an experiment. And now we see the detriment of that experiment, and they don’t deserve the in my mind, they don’t deserve the compliment of being called conventional, but they’re not conventional. It’s an experiment. What we’re trying to do is get back to conventional but with a with the modern twist on it. Um, focusing on the so the difference between organic farmer and and a chemical farmer is that we focus on feeding the soil, or chemical farmers to focus on feeding the plants. So it’s a very different orientation. And if we can get back to the root of our health is the soil, not not how many bushels that we can extract out of it, but how we take care of it and how it is nourished. That that is the difference. The other word I have trouble with is commodities. I don’t grow a single commodity on my farm, and I did this once. And the reason I came to this idea, I was at a food show one time, a lady came up to me the food show and shook my hand and looking around the eye and said, Thank you for buying food for my family. And I thought, no one ever thank you for drawing food for their family before, as a wheat farmer, you know, we don’t go to farmers markets. We never see our in end customer. We never see anybody that can say thank you for anything. We take our week by the truckload to an elevator, and the elevator manager comes out, taking samples and trying to figure out an excuse to dock us or pay us less money for that beach. There’s never a thank you. That was just so foreign to me. But I went home and I never looked at my farm the same again. I’m not going commodity, I’m going food, good food that can nourish people, food that can bring vitality and health to the community. Commodity is an initialization of something that a lot of farmers don’t even think about growing food anymore. They’re growing commodities that you can buy and sell in the stock exchange. It’s like, you know, bicycles or anything anyway, those are the two things. And I don’t think be critical of people to use them, but I I like to explain how I look at those and how there really is a subtle difference about of what, what you know, what, what they’re implying, which imply,

Jason Miller  54:02

I thought you were going to call out the my usage of value additive. I know that’s a portion of the book too, where it’s every, you know, every marketer out there uses value added by re adding nutrients back in, or re adding vitamins back in. You call it, yeah, value. So what we’re producing here the Queen farm, is value, not extracted. That’s

Bob Quinn  54:25

right, because now we, you know, we because of the popularity of white flower, even after, well even before, World War One, by the World War Two, most of the very significant number of the young men no longer pass the physical. And they were astounded that the probably the greatest contributor that was white flour, and they started requiring flour to be what they call fortified. So you’re adding back what you thought you were taking out. When you’re making white flour, you’re throwing away 30% of the nutrition. Well, probably more than that nutrition, but 30% of the volume of the wheat by taking off the brand and off the. Often germ where the vitamins are and there’s minerals there. And of course, the fiber for helps your gut be healthy with digestion, feeding the microbiota in your gut, which is really important. So anyway, we’re trying to promote the idea of eating whole grain, but having raising wheat that is satisfying as a whole grain. Much of the wheat breeding program now, in the last 50 years or so have been an effort to make the brands harder, so that their slate off easier. So it’s just looked at as a byproduct to get rid of. They feed it to the pigs. The pigs eat better than we do, and by this by this program. So if we could get back to selling grains and growing grains that have the more original type of brand and and high nutrient germ in them, then we’d be adding that health back. So we stumbled onto an ancient wheat well late 80s, also that we found, quite by accident, could be eaten by people who could need modern wheat. My father gave it to a lady nearby, and she said, Well, let’s try it. And she did kinesiology muscle testing, because she couldn’t eat weight. She couldn’t even get near it. And she found that she thought she could try it so she would be okay, but when she ate it, not only could she eat it, but it made her feel better. And she called up my dad, she says, What is this stuff? Because it makes me feel good. And I said, Wow. Well, you know, we, we, we’re selling it because it was a novelty that we told it came out of King Tut Stoke, and it was just for fun. We thought make a great snack and different things for fun. Yeah, no idea that it had a real nutrient value and and so when that happened, she said to us, well, I have a sister who can eat weed, but she also can’t access it to lots of other foods. And we sent her a whole case of this pasta that we made out of this ancient Gran. We we called to put a trademark on it, Richard, trademark by name, camut. So that’s what we sold it on her so we could guarantee purity and and, and how it was growing. It was always grown organic thing, and it kind of stuff to sell it without me. And her sister called back in a couple, oh, 456, weeks, and she said, not only did I eat the grain, but I asked her, I ate it three or four weeks. I was less sensitive to other foods. So it was, it was not only helping her eat wheat again, but it was healing her body in a way that she was less sensitive to these other foods. So this is just astounding to me. This is the very first time I started thinking of food as medicine. I mean, I did. I wasn’t raised with this idea. I never thought about it before. But when we saw it, when it just hit me in the face, and you couldn’t deny it, then we started doing research on it, and we oh gosh, over 10 years, we’ve now published 3536 peer reviewed journal articles comparing to ancient wheat with modern wheat, and mostly in human clinical trials of Chryst disease, because one of the first things we found was anti inflammatory, and inflammation is tied to all, all chronic disease. And so we found that switching just a week, there was a significant increase in health with all these people with chronic diseases, from heart disease to diabetes to irritable bowel syndrome to fatty acid, not alcoholic fatty acid, liver syndrome, all these kinds of things, some of these diseases. So that really opened my mind and my eyes to a whole nother world, just not organic. So it’s you often hear that the couple of healthy food, healthy soils, the healthy food makes healthy people 333, couples, but we add to that. Now, starting with good seed, you have to have seed that has nutritional potential. Not see this, then, you know, just genetically modified, just for high yields and that sort of thing, or disease resistance or something. So more and more I’m going back and trying to look at older varieties, not heirloom varieties, things that haven’t been really modified just for yield, and see if we can pick among those, the ones that are the most nutritious, and then find those that are best adapted for our regions. And I think that that is a better way to go. And so this is the other thing that we’re trying to do in our food and and production systems, and how we encourage other people to be the same?

Jason Miller  59:26

Yeah, and I love what you’re you’re doing throughout the region, lifting so many other farm operators underneath the commute brand and sort of everybody working with them underneath this trademarked trademarks brand. And I, you know, I don’t think of you as a marketer, Bob. I think in our first conversation, I don’t even think you want to be anywhere near the word marketer, which is great is in the marketing for what matters context. You, you. You’ve created a lot of success in your businesses. You’ve from thin air, you know, things just suddenly appear. You you suddenly you’re, you’re selling vast quantities of soil, safflower oil back to the University of Montana, for instance. Like, it’s just like all these businesses that you started at lunch. And I’m just kind of curious, how the What’s your secret to promoting and sort of marketing and getting a new business off the ground?

Bob Quinn  1:00:28

Well, mostly I I like to go and see what’s going on all over the world, and take the food shows and like the folks all the time, and see what different challenges are and what different needs are. And I tried to see what, what needs to be filled in those needs. So the the oil story, I mean, it didn’t magically appear. It might seem that way from reading the book, because I only had 200 and some pages, right? But it took years. It took years and all those things. And so the oil story started with an idea of growing my own fuel. And I wanted to be fuel independent so that we could grow our own fuel. And so I started drawing camelina, which was oil seed that we could plant very early in the spring. We have trouble with with other types of oil seeds, because they they bloom later, and they are susceptible to high heat, and so this camelina wasn’t and so I wanted to use it for straight vegetable oil, and I didn’t want to make biodiesel, and because that has its own set of challenges and expenses and everything else in byproducts you have to deal with. I wanted to be able to put it right direction to my diesel engine. And I took this to Europe, to Germany, sometimes I admit there that actually were using conversion kits for bio, for straight vegetable oil use, in tractors and diesel engines. And they said, Oh, you can’t use this kind of oil because it’s polyunsaturated. You have to have a monounsaturated oil. And so then I looked around and I found high oleic safflower, oleic acid, fatty acid is a monounsaturated fatty acid. So we started going down, and I had a hired man who took some of the oil to the local restaurant here in Big Sandy and they said, Wow, this makes the best french fries. And you’ve ever had said, we’ll pay you $2 a pound for this. And so, you know, I’m not real good at math, but I can do $2 a pound times, you know, two Italians and a gallon, and that’s about eight, 8000 gallon, and that’s about $16 and so I can either put in my engine, my tractor engine, or I can sell for $16 a gallon. And even a high price in the diesel in those days, at over five bucks, or whatever it was, or six, that was an easy decision to make. So we started making food grade oil, and then I was selling it to the University of Montana, and the supply actually all of their oil, and also from Montana State University in the kitchens. And the folks in Missoula University said, Well, I asked them if they could save the oil. I said, could they any chance that you get back? And they said, Oh yeah, we can get it back to you. And so I thought, well, I’ll use the oil twice. We’ll sell it twice. We’ll use it first for food and then for fuel. And I just bought the oil hole, and I cleaned it, took the water out of it, put it through centrifuged particles, so it can filter, just take out the little particles. And then we could put in our diesel engine, and it burns just like diesel. It had to be pretty heated. So I had to start the engine on diesel. And then once the heat exchanger heated up, just enough of the vegetable oil to go into the engine, I didn’t heat whole tank, just a little small stream. They worked all day on the vegetable it was fantastic. So this, to me, was really exciting, because, you know, the big debates in this country right now about food versus fuel, and all the acres going to burst to burn your fuel, and the cost of that economic and also the ecological cost of growing your own fuel, like that with corn, for example. Compare that to vegetable oil substitutes for diesel, where you’re using it first for food and then for fuel. There’s no debate anymore whether you’re going food or fuel, because you’re doing it both, doing it for both. And I see that as a real exciting potential for the future. We use enough fly oil in Montana to run our entire agriculture. We can’t run the cities, but we could run or all the trucks and highways, but we could run agriculture. And I think that would be a neat um combination to a loop to close between being competitive on foreign oil or international oil companies to run a farm and being able to run them on on the byproduct of something. That we’re using for food and first place. So that was a long trail to get there, but it was, it was a lot of fun, and I still want to work on it some more and see if we can’t affect it and make it more available to other people, to adopt

Jason Miller  1:05:14

Well, speaking of making things more available to everybody, I think this is a big part of your mission at Quinn Institute, making everything that you’ve learned over the decades of transitioning from the modern chemical soaked agriculture to organic and and finding all sorts of ways to continue adding value and creating circular economy, is it reusing things like the oils from from the cooking. I would love to go and just explain, or help people understand what your mission at Queen Institute is, and how you’re getting the word out mission, because I think I know that. But what’s How are you getting the word out? What’s been successful, and what kind of traction are you getting so far with your marketing efforts?

Bob Quinn  1:06:01

Well, that’s, that’s a good question. We just in the very first season. So once spring started, we focused on, on the farm, on growing things, and setting out experiments and and we’ve done very, very little marketing and and trying to get the word out. We created a website. However, you can look at Quinn acidp.org, or G the social media ready to get the word out in that but what we’re hoping to at the end of each season, oh, we had a grand opening, which is very successful, but only it was very successful. That’s nearly 100 people show up. But 100 out of, you know, 300 million, the whole country, that’s kind of a small start, but at least we want to make it accessible, and that’s for anyone who wants to know more easily or do so. We want to put together any reports so they can start to show and demonstrate the kind of things that we are studying and want to accomplish. So we’ll be doing the first one here this winter. We’ll be starting to go into compasses and getting presentations on what we’re doing. So we think that can be a way to introduce more people to it. We haven’t really have great success in the fundraising at this point. We’re not with a tin cup of the street corps, however, so we have had enough success to keep us going this first year, which we’re very, very thankful for. I want you to know and what our supporters should know, how much we appreciate their help, but we’re looking at a campus now of 25 million bucks that we want to put up with, administration, research, teaching facilities, lecture halls, small lecture halls, and places for people to stay for short courses or interns and all that kind of stuff, machine sheds and having machinery to run a small farm and experimental research station. So all those add up to a pretty big bill. So we’re just taking that a little as it comes in, and a little bit of time and hoping for the best, and just do what we can do. We got one full time employee now our research coordinator, and we have y’all helping us with our social media and all the financial planning and all that kind of stuff, part time, and so that’s when we started this first year. So we’re just getting started, and we’re hoping, as we can tell more of our story, that more people will be interested, not only participate, but to learn from it, and also to help us support it. That’s we’re hoping, that’s insured,

Jason Miller  1:08:34

yeah, well, you’re it’s working. That’s exactly how I found you. Is one of your wonderful little videos out in the field on posted to LinkedIn, as we work in regenerative ag space, a little bit here with the soil food web school, and we’re kind of running out of time here. Bob is I did want to highlight this because there’s a lot of people who watch this podcast who are interested in growing their businesses. And what I noticed throughout your entrepreneurial journeys is the importance of relationships in your success. And you know, relationships in all manners, finding partners, finding listening to what your customers want. Where’s the where are they going? Where are consumers going? You just have this very innate ability to connect and listen to those around you, and if anything comes out of the air, it’s the right person at the right time to help you take a business to the next level, based on what I read in your book, so can you just kind of speak to a little bit about how you how you develop quality relationships, especially in business? Well,

Bob Quinn  1:09:52

it’s not only business, it’s separate all aspects of life. I making new friends that. Is probably my, one of my most favorite hobbies, being like it as a hobby, but that’s why I enjoy the most. I love going and seeing people in their native lands, in their more homes, if that’s possible, or just getting quiet with how they live, how they think, and what their their cares and joys or challenges are, and all that other stuff. So we can really relate to each other. You know, we have so much more in common with each other than we have what divides us. I never focus on what devices. I think that the bison this is going on right now is the biggest disservice we could have in the whole country, and all this way of categorizing everybody, wanting everybody to be in boxes, that’s that’s insane, but we’ll never get better client. That way. Get Better clients, and we’re all together in the same room and in the same around the same table, enjoying the same meal, all that kind of stuff, retelling the same old jokes, all those things that help build bridges. I think that is so important. As far as business goes, I never spend less time with grandiose multi decade plans of like building skyscrapers. I just start with the one room where I’m at and try to do the best I can in that room, and then almost every time a window will open unexpectedly, or a door, I go to the next room and I see, well, we can expand into this area, that area. I just take it kind of one step at a time, and I and I meet friends the same way. No, I don’t try to go out and try to be everything to everybody. I just try to meet them where they are, and they can meet me where I am. Yeah, I am what I am. I don’t I tend to be something different. And so that’s that makes it. It’s easy for me. I enjoy it. It’s fun. Yeah, it

Jason Miller  1:11:58

seems like you really emphasize treating everyone fairly and everything fairly, including the soil, in the in the land and in the community. So there’s no question in my head, you know, why you’ve been so successful, Bob, and I’m really excited about where the Quinn Institute is going. I know it’s just going to be a super powerful entity up there in a much needed territory in Montana. And I would love to, I know wildfires have been ravaging the US. Oh, ravaging the world, really. Yeah, as we get into our segment for planting trees on your behalf, I hear that you may be interested in planting some trees where, where some scarred ground sits right now. So I’m going to

Bob Quinn  1:12:51

share. I would love to help that way, because every summer we are focused, we’re covered with smoke that smokes coming from somewhere, and it’s doing a lot of destruction, so look at the part of the the the healing of that. That would be fantastic.

Jason Miller  1:13:08

Alright, well, we’re partnered up here with one tree planted, and we’re going to plant some trees on your behalf. We’ll just go to by impact here on one tree planted.org and visit the fund. There’s that smoke you were referring to here, over here in the Pacific Northwest as well. Bob, we’ll make that donation. Send you a confirmation email thanking you for your time and energy on marketing, for what matters today. Are there any closing thoughts or inspirational words you’d like to share with our audience before we close out.

Bob Quinn  1:13:47

Well, other than to think about every time you go to the store, you vote with your dollars, and if you can vote in a way that heals the earth and provides opportunity for farmers to have a fair return. I encourage you to vote with organic food. It’s a label that’s defined you can trust and you know what it means. And it’s not perfect, but it’s, it’s a nice to say a voting or direction that you know will can make a difference. So that’s going to be my parting task or play or and hope and also, what did you listen to? Know we’re always open to visitors or anybody would like more questions answered. We’re here to do that and help encourage this kind of direction, this turning food back into medicine any way we can. So thanks again for your your hospitality and for connecting me and with such a wonderful audience. And wish you all the best.

Jason Miller  1:14:53

Thank you so much, Bob, and we’ll include Bob’s links to his LinkedIn and Facebook. Stoke and is Queen institute.org and commute international as well. So you can learn more about the journeys he’s been on and the successes he’s created through building relationships. Bob, thank you again for joining marketing for what matters and until we see you next time, remember to love more, play more and do more good. I’m jam at peaceful media. We’ll see you soon.

Peaceful Media hosts  1:15:21

Thank you for tuning in to our podcast. Marketing for what matters. You can find us on Apple, Spotify, Google or Pandora. Love the show, leave us a review, and follow us on social media, at peaceful media to stay up to date about new episodes and as always, thank you to this earth for giving us all we’ve ever needed. See you next time you