By BARRY ESTABROOK

NEWPORT, Rhode Island - Located on an 18-hectare estate, the SVF foundation is the only organization in the United States dedicated to conserving rare heritage livestock breeds by freezing their semen and embryos, a technique called cryopreservation. About 45,000 samples from 20 breeds of rare cattle, sheep and goats are preserved at the foundation in liquid nitrogen chilled to minus 191 degrees Celsius - essentially a frozen ark.

Chip, a Tennessee fainting goat, was the proof that the foundation had mastered the process. In early 2004, as a six-day-old embryo, he was flushed from his mother’s womb and spent the next several months frozen. Thawed and transplanted into a surrogate Nubian doe, a common breed, he was born on May 7, 2004, a perfectly normal fainting goat. Each time the foundation freezes a batch of embryos from a new breed, it thaws a few and transplants them into surrogate animals, repeating the test that Chip once passed.

Keeling over when frightened by a potential predator is not the most desirable trait in a small ruminant, so it is easy to see why fainting goats like Chip became an endangered breed. In the eyes of modern agribusiness, Chip and his companions at SVF are a collection of misfits.

Huge dreadlocked Cotswold sheep are too big and slow-growing for commercial acceptance. Sleek Milking Devon cattle have the flaw of being dual-purpose livestock in a farm economy that demands specialization - a bovine must produce either rivers of milk or massive cuts of well-marbled beef.

But in other ways, the foundation’s four-legged barnyard rejects are ideally suited to meet the demands of evolving culinary and farming trends.

“People are demanding choice at a time when commercial livestock are being bred for consistency,” said Peter Borden, the executive director of the SVF Foundation.

Chip will never end up on a kebab skewer, but a glance at his stocky wrestler’s build shows that he carries plenty of meat.

“Think of this as a safety valve program,” said Dr. George Saperstein, the foundation’s chief scientific adviser, who is chairman of the Department of Environmental and Population Health at the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University in Massachusetts. “If there was a disaster, if something like the potato famine of livestock ever hit, these frozen embryos would be made available, and in one generation we would be back in business.”

For all their efficiency and high output, modern livestock breeds have become a weak, inbred bunch, Dr. Saperstein said. Fifty years ago there were a half-dozen popular dairy breeds in the United States. But today, according to Lindsey Worden of Holstein Association USA, the country’s 8.6 million Holstein cows make up 93 percent of America’s dairy herd. Fewer than 20 champion bulls are responsible for half the genes in today’s Holsteins.

“Heritage breeds have not been continuously ‘improved’ by humans,” Mr. Borden said. “They have been shaped by natural survival-of-the-fittest forces and can get along without human intervention. Typically, rare varieties exhibit good birthing and mothering abilities. They can thrive on native grasses and other natural forage, and many know how to avoid predators.”

The foundation, a nonprofit group, was founded by Dorrance Hill Hamilton. Mrs. Hamilton, 82, is a summer resident of Newport who inherited a major stake in the Campbell Soup Company . An avid preservationist, 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. “I didn’t have enough land to maintain herds of animals, so I realized that cryopreservation was where we should go,” she said.

Having mastered the techniques of cryogenics, SVF has expanded its efforts to educating the public about the value of conserving heritage breeds.

“We have to eat these animals to save them,” Mr. Borden said. “Ultimately, food is the reason heritage breeds are important.”

PHOTOGRAPHS BY MIKE MERGEN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

At the SVF Foundation ,embryos and semen from rare animals are frozen for future breeding.

a Tennessee fainting goat

Arapawa goats.

a blue Andalusian chicken