Contour Farming

I think it was fourth grade. I think it was a science book. We were learning about conservation and there was the photo and I fell in love. Imagine, farm land so unlike the perfectly flat thin-line-horizoned boring expanse of my North Dakota homeland that rain water might come rushing down the slopes in a storm and cause erosion! Farm land so hilly that it needed bands of crops perpendicular to the down of the slope to conserve the precious soil. I loved the idea that somewhere, farmland that interesting and potentially beautiful existed and that somewhere, people cared enough to conserve it. I think that might make me a science nerd.