Desert Hawk Books

Richard A. Levins

 

128 pages
7 Photographs
6" x 9"
Hardback

Quantity:   $30.00 & S/H

 

Willard Cochrane watched the dramatic decline in American family 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 family 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 family 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.

"We are undergoing an agricultural crisis which threatens the very existence of the family farm.  this ought to cause urban dwellers as much concern as it does their rural neighbors.  This book beautifully show how central the family farm is to our country, our democracy, and our way of life.  this is a powerful book." - Senator Paul Wellstone.

"I have the greatest pleasure in giving this book a strong recommendation." - John Kenneth Galbraith.

""Willard Cochrane is a member of a declining and necessary breed in academe precisely at the moment when his tribe needs to expand." - Wes Jackson, author of New Roots for Agriculture.

Richard A. Levins is a professor of agricultural economics at the University of Minnesota.