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Jim Cochran is an Organic farming strawberry farmer, who was the first person to grow strawberries organically on a commercial scale in California.
In 1983, he started Swanton Berry Farm, located North of Santa Cruz, California, in Davenport, California. In 1987, his farm became the first CCOF-certified organic strawberry farm in the State of California. He subsequently developed a wide range of new methods, which include , such as broccoli and , such as Mustard plant and alfalfa, and the use of natural predators, to control strawberry specific pests and diseases. His mostly intuitively developed methods were later verified scientifically in a series of studies by University of California, Davis plant pathologist Krishna Subbarao and his collaborators.
Cochran originally found it difficult to get funding for his experiments from the California Strawberry Commission, stating that "The industry blockaded our efforts to get money to research alternatives, and spent a lot of money in Washington making sure our proposals didn't get funded." Cochran's methods have been credited for making a large-scale commercial organic strawberry industry possible in California. Cochran was also the first, and still one of the few, California organic farmers to have a contract with the United Farm Workers.
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