With all the craziness in the world right now, I'd like to devote this Thanksgiving week to things I'm grateful for.  I'm going to start with my parents.  I know many folks have horrible family memories, from dysfunction to abuse to abandonment.  My heart breaks to hear these stories.

             We certainly didn't have a perfect family, but I knew I was loved unconditionally.  Just as profound, however, was that my mom and dad believed opposite of the mainstream.

             When other farmers and agriculture experts advised them to plant corn, they planted fence posts to manage the livestock better.  When others advised them to build confinement animal feeding operations, they built portable structures.  My whole childhood was absorbed with innovative infrastructure.

             I remember a square box with hinged corners for lambs.  Dad would walk the box through the field by moving one side and then walking around to the other, making parallelograms.  In about 3 goes he'd have it completely moved.

             Dad built a portable veal calf barn with 4 quadrants.  We had 4 milk cows.  He'd tie one up and let out the two calves in that quadrant, then do the next cow and the next.  It was a way to sell milk through veal.

             When others dug wells we dug ponds. When others grazed their woodlots we fenced ours out so the trees would be healthier.  When others bought chemical fertilizers we bought a chipper and began composting. 

             When others grain-fed their steers for fattening we stayed with grass.  When others said we needed to overseed clover we moved the cows faster and clover came up by itself.  When others said we needed to lime our fields we spread compost.  When others said to spray thistles we chopped them.  When others built access points into ponds and creeks we fenced out all the riparian areas and pumped water up to a stock tank.

             And we pumped with a wobble pump.  These were simple pumps used to fill steam engine boilers during the early era of threshing machines.  A 4-foot leverage handle operated a piston in the pump and you could pump 100 gallons in about 5 minutes.  I spent many a day, as a youth, wobbling that handle to pump water out of a pond or creek so the cows couldn't step or poop in the precious water resource.

             When others went to round bales in the 1970s, Dad purchased an obsolete hay loader so we could make loose hay.  I would say I'm probably the last person in our county who ever ran a hay loader.  Dad was looking for the elegance of simplicity, and that always made him run counter to the complexity of technology.  He invented portable electric fencing before it was available in stores--long before.

When others left their cows in one field all year, he put together water, shade, and fencing systems so we could move them daily.

             When others went to the supermarket for their food during the 1960s, Mom canned hundreds of quarts of garden produce.  We milked a couple of cows, churned butter and made yoghurt and cottage cheese.  When everyone else bought televisions, we didn't; never had one.  When our Christian church friends promoted "take dominion" Dad tried to figure out how to let God's dominion determine our procedures.

             I stand on the shoulders of giants, Mom and Dad, and pause today to pay tribute to their marching to the beat of a different drummer, to daring to be different and think different, to take the road less traveled.  That has made all the difference.

             To what or to whom do you owe your willingness to think contrary to the accepted orthodoxy?