Willard Wesley Cochrane (May 15, 1914 – March 5, 2012) was an agricultural economist and a leading architect of farm policy in the United States. He was born in 1914 in California and went on to earn degrees at the University of California, Berkeley, Montana State University and Harvard University, where he received his Ph.D. In the late 1930s and 1940s, he served in government and United Nations agricultural agencies. He served in the Navy during World War II. He became Professor of agricultural economics at the University of Minnesota in 1951.