One of the necessities, when you start late as we did, is to pick every brain you can find.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
But Dr. Dick Diven of Colorado was probably the first to have a major impact.\u00a0 He was certainly the first one I can recall saying it doesn’t make sense to feed grain to cows.\u00a0 Now Dick was coming at it from a cost perspective.\u00a0 In fact, while other consultants develop fancy names for what they preach, Dick’s was simply\u00a0“Low-cost cow\/calf production”.\u00a0 Straightforward, like Dick himself.<\/p>\n
But Dick was also an animal\u00a0nutritionist and knew that grain was, in fact, bad for cows.\u00a0 Others were to show us that grain fed to cows was equally bad, in fact worse, for humans, too.<\/p>\n
So Dick’s program set us on the road to today’s all-natural, grass fed Devon\u00a0farm.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
This morning I learned that Dick Diven had died recently\u00a0after a long battle with cancer.\u00a0 He was one of many people along the\u00a0way I\u00a0have failed to thank properly.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One of the necessities, when you start late as we did, is to pick every brain you can find.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 He was certainly the first one I can recall saying it doesn’t make sense to feed grain to cows.\u00a0 Now Dick was coming at it from a cost perspective.\u00a0 In fact, while other consultants develop fancy names for what they preach, Dick’s was simply\u00a0“Low-cost cow\/calf production”.\u00a0 Straightforward, like Dick himself. But Dick was also an animal\u00a0nutritionist and knew that grain was, in fact, bad for cows.\u00a0 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\u00a0farm.\u00a0 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\u00a0after a long battle with cancer.\u00a0 He was one of many people along the\u00a0way I\u00a0have failed to thank properly. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thistlehill.net\/wpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thistlehill.net\/wpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thistlehill.net\/wpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thistlehill.net\/wpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thistlehill.net\/wpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.thistlehill.net\/wpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":106,"href":"http:\/\/www.thistlehill.net\/wpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104\/revisions\/106"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thistlehill.net\/wpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thistlehill.net\/wpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thistlehill.net\/wpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}