It is the only private organization in the United States that preserves rare livestock by gathering and storing both semen and embryos of the animals in its collection, a technique called cryopreservation.

[1][2] SVF, which stands for "Swiss Village Farm", is located in Newport, Rhode Island, and has facilities both for housing live herds and for cryopreservation on its 45 acres.

[1] SVF was founded by Dorrance Hill Hamilton, the billionaire heir to the Campbell Soup Company fortune and one of the wealthiest Americans according to Forbes.

[3][4] The Newport property on which it is housed was built by railroad magnate Arthur Curtiss James in the early 1900s and was purchased by Hamilton in 1998.

[2] This work began in 1999, and in 2004, the Foundation had its first successful birth of a preserved rare-breed embryo — a Tennessee fainting goat — by a host mother of a different breed.