Acknowledging a debt….

One of the necessities, when you start late as we did, is to pick every brain you can find.  In developing Thistle Hill Farm and our beautiful herd of Devon I don’t think there’s been a well-known name in cattle, pastures and nutrition that we haven’t read, heard and cross-examinationed.

But Dr. Dick Diven of Colorado was probably the first to have a major impact.  He was certainly the first one I can recall saying it doesn’t make sense to feed grain to cows.  Now Dick was coming at it from a cost perspective.  In fact, while other consultants develop fancy names for what they preach, Dick’s was simply “Low-cost cow/calf production”.  Straightforward, like Dick himself.

But Dick was also an animal nutritionist and knew that grain was, in fact, bad for cows.  Others were to show us that grain fed to cows was equally bad, in fact worse, for humans, too.

So Dick’s program set us on the road to today’s all-natural, grass fed Devon farm.  Dick didn’t have the flair for speaking of many consultants; but what I noticed at one of the first Ag meetings I ever attended was that all the other experts stayed in the room after they finished to hear what he had to say.

This morning I learned that Dick Diven had died recently after a long battle with cancer.  He was one of many people along the way I have failed to thank properly.