Willard Cochrane and the American Family Farm

Abstract

Cochrane watched the dramatic decline in American farming from a vantage point few can claim. He was born in the autumn of Jeffersonian idealism and saw it in action on his grandparents' farm in Iowa. He became one of the country's premier agricultural economists and carried the standard of liberalism for President Kennedy in the last serious fight to save the farm. Then, for forty long years, he held to his principles while traditional agriculture faded into what he once called family farms in form but not in spirit. This book is about the spirit of farming: Thomas Jefferson's dream of an agrarian democracy. What should we do in the face of globalization, high technology, and corporate control of our food supply? Willard Cochrane and the American Family Farm recounts how one man faced these issues and where he would wish us to go in the twenty-first century. Richard A. Levins is a professor of agricultural economics at the University of Minnesota.

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