Willard Cochrane watched the dramatic decline in American family farming from a vantage point few can claim. 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 the 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.
Willard Cochrane watched the dramatic decline in American family farming from a vantage point few can claim. 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 the 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.
From its inception, the U.S. Department of the Interior has been charged with a conflicting mission. One set of statutes demands that the department must develop America's lands, that it get our trees, water, oil, and minerals out into the marketplace. Yet an opposing set of laws orders us to conserve these same resources, to preserve them for the long term and to consider the noncommodity values of our public landscape. That dichotomy, between rapid exploitation and long-term protection, demands what I see as the most significant policy departure of my tenure in office: the use of science-interdisciplinary science-as the primary basis for land management decisions. For more than a century, that has not been the case. Instead, we have managed this dichotomy by compartmentalizing the American landscape. Congress and my predecessors handled resource conflicts by drawing enclosures: "We'll create a national park here," they said, "and we'll put a wildlife refuge over there." Simple enough, as far as protection goes. And outside those protected areas, the message was equally simplistic: "Y'all come and get it. Have at it." The nature and the pace of the resource extraction was not at issue; if you could find it, it was yours.
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