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.