The Round Barn, a Biography of an American Farm, Volume Four

With a storyteller's style and a historian's fidelity, Jacqueline Dougan Jackson records the life and death of the internationally renowned Dougan Dairy farm near Beloit, Wisconsin. Volume four completes the story by documenting the family's interactions with agriculture in the state, nation, and wider world. Highlights include Grampa Dougan giving public radio talks heard throughout the Midwest and traveling with a university professor to encourage farm record-keeping. Grampa and Grama Dougan are the first couple with portraits in the University of Wisconsin Agricultural Hall of Fame. Ron Dougan develops and markets hybrid seed corn and joins the board of the Wisconsin Scientific Breeders Institute, which evolves to American Breeders Service (ABS), the largest artificial insemination company in the world. For twenty-five years after World War II, the family welcomes Scandinavians in a farm exchange program, and the farm continues close ties with Beloit College and the University of Wisconsin. In 1961 the Dougans host Wisconsin Farm Progress Days, and Jackie eats with the governor. Eventually Interstate 90 slices through the property, presaging the death of the farm. Readers will be entertained as well as educated by the lively, involved, inventive Dougan family, who always remember Grampa's motto painted on the farm's silo: "Life as well as a living."