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The foundation, a nonprofit group, was founded by Dorrance Hill Hamilton, known as Dodo. Mrs. Hamilton, 82, is a summer resident of Newport who inherited a major stake in the Campbell Soup Company, making her one of the country’s wealthiest women, according to Forbes magazine. An avid preservationist, she realized that the pastures and fieldstone buildings could not only serve as a greenbelt, but would also be ideal for the conservation of livestock.

After consulting with Tufts scientists, she decided to create a frozen library of genetic material from farm animals in danger of being lost to extinction. The facility operates on an annual budget of approximately $2 million supplied by Mrs. Hamilton.

“No one else was doing this work,” Mrs. Hamilton said through a spokesman. She was visiting Britain in 2001 when millions of farm animals were destroyed to prevent the spread of foot-and-mouth disease, and she thought that something had to be done in case a similar outbreak happened here. “I didn’t have enough land to maintain herds of animals, so I realized that cryopreservation was where we should go,” she said.

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