News Release: Give Me a Home Where the Dairy Cows Roam

October 2004Cows Roam (192 pages; $13.95; ISBN 1-59113-592-3)
For Immediate Release...is a collection of 20 true stories that took place on
Give Me a Home Where the Dairy Cows Roamher family's farm 40 years ago. Story titles include
COLFAX, WISCONSIN - Did you know that since"Taking the Bull by the Horns," "Spring Cleaning," "A
1969, the United States has lost 85 percent of itsDifferent Sort of Cow," "Dad's Favorite Recipe,"
dairy farms. And did you know that since 1969,"Popsicle Blues," "On Top of the World," and "Better
Wisconsin has lost nearly 70 percent of its dairyButter."
farms?According to Midwest Book Review, Ralph's first
"I lived away from my hometown in west centralbook, Christmas In Dairyland: True Stories From A
Wisconsin for 15 years. When I returned in the midWisconsin Farm "is a heartwarming anthology of true
1990s, I expected to be living in a farming communityanecdotes of rural life on a Wisconsin dairy farm.
again. Instead, I discovered that many of the smallEven though Wisconsin is still known as America's
family dairy farms like the one where I grew up hadDairyland, life on a family homestead is fast being
disappeared" said LeAnn R. Ralph, author of thereplaced by corporate agribusiness, and the memories
books Christmas in Dairyland (True Stories from atreasured in Christmas In Dairyland are quickly
Wisconsin Farm) (August 2003) and Give Me a Homebecoming unique milestones of an era needing to be
Where the Dairy Cows Roam (October 2004).preserved in thought and print for the sake of future
Figures from the Census of Agriculture and from thegenerations. Christmas In Dairyland is simply
American Farm Bureau Federation indicate that inwonderful reading and is a 'must' for all Wisconsin
1969 more than a half a million dairy farms operatedpublic library collections."
in the United States, but by the year 2000, onlyRalph earned a Bachelor of Arts in English with a
83,000 dairy farms remained. And according towriting emphasis from the University of
statistics from the U.S. Census of Agriculture, duringWisconsin-Whitewater and also earned a Master of
the last three decades of the twentieth century,Arts in Teaching from UW-Whitewater. She worked
Wisconsin went from 66,000 dairy farms down toas a newspaper reporter for nine years and also has
20,000 dairy farms.taught English at a boys' boarding school. She is the
"That's why I decided to write stories about growingeditor of the Wisconsin Regional Writer (the quarterly
up on a dairy farm. Our farm was home-steaded bypublication of the Wisconsin Regional Writers' Assoc.).
my Norwegian great-grandfather in the late 1800s,Give Me a Home Where the Dairy Cows Roam and
but small family farms are a thing of the past. TheyChristmas in Dairyland (True Stories from a Wisconsin
have pretty much disappeared from the landscape,"Farm)are available through Barnes & Noble and For
Ralph said.more information or to order the books, visit or call
"My dad milked 20 cows and knew all of them byLeAnn at (715) 962-3368.
name. Nowadays the trend is toward corporateContact Information:
farms that milk hundreds of cows," she said.LeAnn R. Ralph; E6689 970th Ave.
Ralph's new book, Give Me a Home Where the Dairy