Willard Wesley Cochrane (May 15, 1914 – March 5, 2012) was an

agricultural economist Agricultural economics is an applied field of economics concerned with the application of economic theory in optimizing the production and distribution of food and fiber products. Agricultural economics began as a branch of economics that specif ...

and a leading architect of farm policy in the United States. He was born in 1914 in California and went on to earn degrees at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

, Montana State University and

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...

, where he received his Ph.D. In the late 1930s and 1940s, he served in government and United Nations agricultural agencies. He served in the Navy during World War II. He became Professor of agricultural economics at the

University of Minnesota The University of Minnesota, formally the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, (UMN Twin Cities, the U of M, or Minnesota) is a public land-grant research university in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States. ...

in 1951. During the 1960s he was U.S. Department of Agriculture's head agricultural economist under U.S. Secretary of Agriculture

Orville Freeman Orville Lothrop Freeman (May 9, 1918February 20, 2003) was an American Democratic politician who served as the 29th Governor of Minnesota from January 5, 1955, to January 2, 1961, and as the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture from 1961 to 1969 under ...

. During this time he developed proposals for supply management policy and a national food stamp program. He was an advocate of sustainable family farming and coined the concept of the technology treadmill. He was opposed to government commodity program payments and an early advocate of set aside programs to benefit conservation.

Bibliography

Cochrane wrote a dozen books on farm policy. His last book, about sustainable family farming, was published in 2003. * "The economics of consumption: Economics of decision making in the household" (1956), with Carolyn Shaw Bell * "Farm Prices: Myth and Reality" (1958) * "The City Man's Guide to the Farm Problem" (1965) * "The World Food Problem A Guardedly Optimistic View" (1969) * "Economics of American Agriculture" (1974), with Walter W. Wilcox & Robert W. Herdt * "Agricultural Development Planning: Economic Concepts, Administrative Procedures and Political Processes" (1974) * "American Farm Policy, 1948-73" (1976), with Mary E. Ryan * "Agricultural Economics At The University Of Minnesota 1886- 1979" (1983) * "The Long, Slow Slide Into Economic Mediocrity" (1991) * "Reforming Farm Policy: Toward a National Agenda" (1992), with C. Ford Runge * "The Development of American Agriculture: A Historical Analysis" (1993) * "The Curse of American Agricultural Abundance: A Sustainable Solution" (2003)

Bibliography

References

Further reading