[2] Cochran studied child development and European intellectual history at the University of California, Santa Cruz in the late 1960s, where he became interested in alternative farming methods.
[3] He subsequently developed a wide range of new methods, which include crop rotations, such as broccoli and brussels sprouts, trap crops such as mustard and alfalfa, and the use of natural predators, to control strawberry specific pests and diseases.
[4] 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.
[5] 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.
"[1] Cochran's methods have been credited for making a large-scale commercial organic strawberry industry possible in California.