Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Grain by Grain: A Quest to Revive Ancient Wheat, Rural Jobs, and Healthy Food
    Grain by Grain: A Quest to Revive Ancient Wheat, Rural Jobs, and Healthy Food
    Grain by Grain: A Quest to Revive Ancient Wheat, Rural Jobs, and Healthy Food
    Audiobook8 hours

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

    Written by Bob Quinn and Liz Carlisle

    Narrated by Coleen Marlo and Chris Sorensen

    5/5

    ()

    Switch to ebook

    About this audiobook

    When Bob Quinn was a kid, a stranger at a county fair gave him a few kernels of an unusual grain. Little did he know, that grain would change his life. Years later, after finishing a PhD in plant biochemistry and returning to his family's farm in Montana, Bob started experimenting with organic wheat. In the beginning, his concern wasn't health or the environment; he just wanted to make a decent living and some chance encounters led him to organics.

    But as demand for organics grew, so too did Bob's experiments. He discovered that through time-tested practices like cover cropping and crop rotation, he could produce successful yields-without pesticides. Regenerative organic farming allowed him to grow fruits and vegetables in cold, dry Montana, providing a source of local produce to families in his hometown. He even started producing his own renewable energy. And he learned that the grain he first tasted at the fair was actually a type of ancient wheat, one that was proven to lower inflammation rather than worsening it, as modern wheat does.

    Ultimately, Bob's forays with organics turned into a multimillion dollar heirloom grain company, Kamut International.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateSep 24, 2019
    ISBN9781541431157

    Related to Grain by Grain

    Related audiobooks

    Biography & Memoir For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Deep Litter MANAGEMENT

      Feb 7, 2020

      Repugnance for what comes out the far end of an animal is not merely cultural conditioning—our senses are warning us of potential danger: Feces can be a vector for disease. Joel’s quote above implicitly advises us to trust that repugnance: If it smel

      8 min read

    • Article

      Starting A Food Forest

      Aug 20, 2014

      Starting A Food Forest
      6 min read

    • Article

      Building VIBRANT SOILS

      Oct 20, 2019

      Building VIBRANT SOILS
      6 min read

    • Article

      Home-Raised PIG FEED

      Feb 21, 2020

      Home-Raised PIG FEED
      7 min read

    • Article

      Perennial VEGETABLES

      Mar 30, 2018

      Perennial VEGETABLES
      6 min read

    • Article

      Regenerative Soil Solutions

      Apr 26, 2020

      Regenerative Soil Solutions
      1 min read

    • Article

      Backyard Orchards: A Better Way

      Jun 9, 2021

      Backyard Orchards: A Better Way
      4 min read

    • Article

      Edible Invasives

      May 8, 2020

      Edible Invasives
      8 min read

    • Article

      Cotton: The Ideal Crop For Reducing Carbon Emissions And Poverty

      Feb 4, 2022

      What impact is climate change having on South Africa’s cotton farmers? Hennie Bruwer (HB): Ironically, we’re currently seeing, and will continue to see, an increase in the number of cotton farmers in South Africa as a result of climate change. This i

      6 min read

    • Article

      Soil assessment 101

      Aug 27, 2018

      Soil assessment 101
      3 min read

    • Article

      5 Farm-to-Table Casualties

      Oct 17, 2016

      A week after Cultivate, I visit Polyface Farms in Swoope, Virginia, a three-hour drive from Washington, D.C. Polyface, which has been a Chipotle pork supplier since 2007, is one of the places that gives credence to Chipotle slogans like “Family Farme

      5 min read

    • Article

      The Road Ahead

      Nov 1, 2020

      WHEN THIS ISSUE REACHES YOU, we probably still won’t know who won the presidential election — or too many of the other races, either. It’s hard to predict what the aftermath of Election Day will be. Our cover photo shows a driver trying to make her w

      2 min read

    • Article

      The Anti-California

      Aug 9, 2023

      The Anti-California
      6 min read

    • Article

      Clyde Bellecourt, Co-founder Of The American Indian Movement, Dies Of Cancer At 85

      Jan 12, 2022

      Bellecourt died on Tuesday night in Minneapolis, where more than 50 years ago he helped launch the American Indian Movement.

      2 min read

    • Article

      Cultivate Local Change

      Sep 14, 2018

      Cultivate Local Change
      8 min read

    • Article

      Wendell Berry

      Nov 6, 2017

      The writer, activist and farmer on his new book, The Art of Loading Brush, and the future of American land

      2 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Grain by Grain

    5/5

    27 ratings4 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      We need to keep hearing the voices of these ‘pioneers’ of change, of seeing through a different lens to foment the solution to a path forward that champions a return to vibrant living.
    • 5/5
      I went into farming because Bob Quinn came in as a guest speaker in one of my classes at MSU in the 1990s. It was the first positive message about agriculture that I had heard. I'm glad to have had the opportunity to hear the rest of his incredible story. Thanks Bob!
    • 4/5
      This 2019 book from Island Press is one of the few books on wheat that is based on sound nutrition principles. When author Bob Quinn took over his family's Montana farm, he started off on a long journey to find and manifest agricultural integrity. No-till farming? Check. Organic farming? Check. Farm foods that enhance human nutrition? Check.The only correction I offer is that teaching in the USA about organic whole grains as a major element in the human diet did not start "in the late 1960s," it started with a network of macrobiotic teachers in the late 1950s, first in New York City, then expanding to Boston and its suburbs. George Ohsawa, plus Michio and Aveline Kushi, with their students and colleagues opened the very first US natural food stores to sell a wide range of whole grains and whole grain products. US writers like William Dufty (Sugar Blues) and actress Gloria Swanson (Swanson on Swanson), along with many other writers popularized macrobiotics; the result nowadays is an Americanization of the natural foods movement, which is as it should be. US stores that popularized nutrition before the late 1950s, like Lindblad Nutrition, only sold supplements, *not* whole foods.Mr. Quinn is dead right on the mistaken US wheat seed hybridization fad to create an extra-hard bran layer to protect the inner wheat berry ... that "development" did indeed create a US distaste for whole wheat products, since the resulting flour still contained unpleasantly sharp edges of bran. This book is a great read.
    • 5/5
      Bob Quinn is not your average organic visionary. He is a lifelong conservative Republican and was raised on his father’s traditional farm in Big Sandy, Montana. Bob earned a PhD in plant biochemistry at UC Davis and started a career in his field of study.But when he returned to his father’s farm, he saw how much of the profit was going to chemical pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers. He was also troubled by the lack of quality in traditional food and also by the push to reduce the number of small farms. He began to experiment with organic farming. He found that like life itself, all things agriculture are related. He began to work for more control of his product – which eventually meant setting up his own mills to grind grain for himself and his neighbors, starting Montana’s first wind farm, and producing high oleic safflower oil. While he first envisioned the oil powering his farm’s diesel engines, he soon realized that it was a better more nutritious type of edible oil, creating contracts to ‘rent’ the oil to food companies such as the University of Montana and then having the used oil return to his farm.One of his most far-reaching experiments was attempting to grow a sample of ‘King Tut’s Wheat’, a supposedly ancient seed given to him at a county fair in 1964. Over many years, he found it could be grown on his dryland farm (no irrigation), and produced a high protein, high nutrition product that research showed reduced inflammation and was tolerated by many of those suffering from modern day ‘gluten intolerance’. He believes that this intolerance is the product of the unbalanced genetical modifications that make wheat more hearty, greater yield but less nutritious. This wheat is now grown by numerous farms as Kamut wheat. Kamut is a variety of Khorasan wheat, known in some parts of the Middle East as ‘the prophet’s wheat’ – the prophet is not Mohammed but Noah. Kamut is a trademark guaranteeing that the product is organic and not crossed with other varieties. His guiding principle has become the ‘triple bottom line’: "not just profit but also value to people and planet. This was a revolutionary concept for businesses that had previously externalized costs like environmental damage and health problems for workers exposed to toxins. But even sustainability-oriented businesses still tended to see these three bottom lines as separate goals, and given their overriding obligations to their shareholders, profit frequently trumped people and planet.” P 198Fascinating book – much ‘food for thought’. In the summary chapters, he gives an easy way to start: on your next trip to the grocery store, add two organic items to your cart and let it grow from there.