|
The Round Barn, A Biography of an American Farm, Volume Four
The Farm to the World
Jacqueline Dougan Jackson
An influential dairy farm and family, from the early 1900s to 1972
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."
Jacqueline Dougan Jackson is the author of fourteen books, including Stories from the Round Barn and More Stories from the Round Barn. She was a founding faculty member of Sangamon State University, now the University of Illinois–Springfield.
Praise
"Jackson's saga is our most detailed history of Midwest farming and dairying from 1900 to the 1970s. The Dougan farm was a top dairy, utilizing the latest developments in crops—including the early years of alfalfa and the advent of hybrid seed corn—and the beginning of artificial insemination and proved sires. Jackson writes with warmth and empathy, and we are the fortunate beneficiaries of her work."
—Robert Walton, former president of American Breeders Service
"An uncanny ability to describe and reflect on what it really was like to grow up on a renowned and innovative family dairy farm. Colorful, interesting, detailed, and insightful."
—Hoard's Dairyman
Publicity and Press Kit Resources
Click here for current & upcoming UW Press events
Download high resolution cover, color
Download high resolution cover, b/w
All images are at least 2.25 inches at 300 dpi wide; current title covers are a minimum of 1500 px wide/6 inches wide at 300 dpi. Please contact us if you need a custom size.
Media & bookseller inquiries regarding review copies, events, and interviews can be directed to the publicity department at publicity@uwpress.wisc.edu or (608) 263-0734. (If you want to examine a book for possible course use, please see our Course Books page. If you want to examine a book for possible rights licensing, please see Rights & Permissions.)
|
August 2018
490 pp. 6 x 9
316 b/w illus.
|
