Kenneth V. Nordlund

Ken Nordlund was the first-born child of Joel Nordlund and Enice Sandland, and he grew up on a farm in Clearbrook, Minnesota near the headwaters of the Mississippi with his younger brother Kelly and sister Kathy.

While a student in animal science at the University of Minnesota, Ken also took journalism and art courses, and began dating fellow student Jean Davies his senior year. Upon graduating in 1969, he received his diploma and his military draft notice. With the war in Viet Nam at its peak, becoming a 2-year draftee meant likely serving in infantry. Preferring to avoid combat, he enlisted for a third year which gave him a choice of military occupation. After basic training, he was sent to Walter Reed Army Medical Center to train as a Veterinary Technician.

In June of 1970, he married Jean and three weeks later flew to Viet Nam for 365 days. Stationed in Long Binh, he cared for sentry dogs that guarded the largest ammunition depot in the world which was sprayed with Agent Orange defoliant every ninety days. When his army stint ended, he took advantage of the financial support offered by the GI Bill and applied to the University of Minnesota School of Veterinary Medicine. After five more years, Ken received his DVM degree and accepted a job with the Lake Region Veterinary Center. He and Jean moved to Fergus Falls, Minnesota where their family grew to include four sons within five years.

While in private veterinary practice, Ken created a preventive medicine approach to dairy herds, developing a nutrition service to prevent disease. Speaking frequently at regional and national veterinary meetings, Ken received the award for Excellence in Preventive Veterinary Medicine at the American Association of Bovine Practitioners (AABP) in 1986.

In 1989 after twelve years with the LRVC, Ken was invited to join the faculty at University of Wisconsin-Madison, School of Veterinary Medicine. By then he had the reputation of being one of the most innovative and influential dairy practitioners in the United States. He took great pleasure working with the UW team to improve cow comfort and impact positively the lives of dairy families around the globe. Ken and Jean returned the kindness of being guests in the homes of their international friends by hosting a multitude of them in their own home. In 2013, Ken received recognition as the World Dairy Expo Industry Person of the Year. Ken retired from UW as an Emeritus Professor in 2014, leaving an indelible legacy for the University of Wisconsin and the dairy industry.

On a personal note, very few people could claim to enjoy music more. When Ken was a kid, a traveling salesman sold his family an accordion and he took the lessons. He played the trumpet all through high school, then learned to play the banjo in Vet school and longed to be a rock star. He had a curated record album collection from the ‘60s and ‘70s envied by his four sons. Always as much an artist as a scientist, Ken was an avid landscape designer, his own garden being one featured during the Olbrich Home Garden Tour in 2021. During retirement, he worked to restore a native prairie adjacent to his home. Ken took pleasure writing his annual Christmas letter and most recently wrote a memoir of his life. He was married to his best friend Jean for a lifetime, like a pair of geese.

Ken is survived by Jean, his brother Kelly Nordlund (Linda) and his sister Kathy Brandt (Brian) in Minnesota, his four sons - Peter (Erin Nordlund) in California; Steven (Lorraine Gaynor) in Iowa, Paul (Anna Shmagel) in Illinois, Thomas (Jennifer Chilstrom) in Merida, Mexico, his six grandchildren - Jackson and Grant, Maeve and Zeke, Maya and Evan, and his two sisters-in-law Donna Davies (Denny Jespersen) in California and Diane Schultz in Florida.

A celebration of life will be held at Olbrich Gardens in Madison in early August. Memorials are suggested to Second Harvest Foodbank. The family thanks Dr. Glenn Liu with the UW Health Carbone Cancer Center for his care of Ken over the past six years. Ken’s prostate cancer metastases were presumably related to Agent Orange exposure while in Viet Nam. Ken joined the “cancer club” in 2018, but still considered himself to be a lucky man.

Please share your memories of Ken here on his Tribute Wall.

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