A Season for Solidarity

Documenting the Agricultural Justice Project &
Growing the Coalition for Food Justice

Executive summary#

After a year-long process of reflection and assessment, the Agricultural Justice Project (AJP) is closing our doors due to a shortfall in funding. Our goals in this report are to document our history; share reflections on our work; and offer our perspectives on the present tasks that face all of us who want to make farming radically more fair and just. We draw on extensive interviews with movement partners as well as our own internal conversations in order to share collective wisdom that can hopefully equip our movement allies—and whatever future efforts we ourselves may be involved in after AJP—for the hard work ahead. We also share movement history and analysis throughout this report, in an effort both to fill gaps in our past messaging and to share sources of inspiration and strategy that we find meaningful. We hope that others can learn from our commitments, our successes, our challenges, and our mistakes.

AJP’s founders came together in the 1990s out of shared disappointment that the USDA’s National Organic Program ignored the many serious social and economic issues of agriculture. In response, our small group of farmer and farmworker organizers sought to promote a far-reaching vision for fairness in farming. AJP spent years convening workers, farmers, and advocates to flesh out their grassroots visions into a set of standards for working farms, food businesses, retailers, and brands. We gradually developed a program to certify businesses that followed those standards. Along the way, we helped establish the Domestic Fair Trade Association, which for a time served as a major space of encounter for all these stakeholder groups. AJP faced persistent challenges: our certification program struggled to attract participants, and our organizational direction became less clear with the decline and closure of DFTA. But for our coalition, certification was a means to an end—a ‘tool in the toolbox’ for building common cause across differences and proving that another, more just type of farming was possible. In that regard, we experienced some success.

Valuing AJP’s work and legacy#

In this report we strive to account for both our successes and our challenges. Based on the feedback we received, we believe AJP made small but important contributions to winning the transformation we seek:

• A grassroots vision for justice in agriculture that centers the values of human rights, reciprocity & accountability, and ecological stewardship.

• A rigorous set of standards and practices that challenges hierarchies of power yet are still within reach for actually existing farm and food businesses.

• Shifting the conversation in sustainable agriculture towards recognizing the importance of fair labor and fair trade.

• Governance and coalition processes rooted in accountability and solidarity, countering the common tendency to sideline farmworkers’ priorities for fear of driving away employers.

• Building institutions to support people- and planet-centered enterprises.

These successes were unfortunately troubled by a number of persistent challenges. On various levels a certification program was a poor match for our group and our broader goals, and we failed to secure stable, movement-aligned resources to sustain the organizations we built. These challenges were not surprising: from the beginning, AJP’s founders were skeptical about whether a food label based on rigorous standards could succeed in the marketplace, though at times it seemed like we might get a “lucky break.” Other challenges were of a different kind, however, including our failure to build close relationships with Black and Indigenous farmers early on.

Our decision to close AJP is most immediately due to a lack of resources, but we also have hope that new, more promising avenues are arising for building solidarity in US agriculture. Given the significant changes that have taken place over the time of AJP’s work, certification no longer feels as promising to us as a movement-building strategy, not least because political conditions in 2026 call for a more ambitious approach.

Looking forward#

At this moment, faced with rising authoritarianism and shifting movement conditions, we follow the many leading voices in our movements calling for a pro-democracy united front. We believe there is a critical need to defend and expand our democratic institutions, to value workers and communities over billionaires, to fight hate and xenophobia and build peace—all tasks that are sorely needed in food and farming. Movement strategists call for this ‘big tent’ approach because the fight is urgent and our wider movements are not positioned to win on our own. While this strategy is a major point of discussion in our movements more widely, we feel there is much more need to discuss how food and agriculture movements might relate to organizing in united fronts. We also believe AJP’s experience in coalition-building may help inform that work.

With the glaring failures of the political class, many people are increasingly hungry for real change, and that hunger is palpable in the united fronts that are taking shape. Our movements stand to win many more people to our cause, potentially achieving a scale and level of power that might just win the justice we seek. But our movements in agriculture and beyond will need to address key weaknesses in order to recruit and keep the many people who are ‘movement-curious’ right now. In Chapters 7 and 8, we consider AJP’s own challenges alongside organizers’ assessments of wider social movements, in order to reflect on what it will take to grow and strengthen our movement formations. In this report we amplify recommendations that speak to common challenges AJP has also faced:

• Adopt a deep organizing orientation that can build people power at scale;

• Build many more movement on-ramps for participation by regular people; 

• Value organizing as a practice and build our skills in it, including strengthening our skills of strategic analysis and debate; and 

• Better integrate our defensive fights with the work of building people-centered institutions.

While AJP as an organization is coming to a close, we and our movement partners believe that the call to solidarity is more relevant than ever. A strong coalition of farm people could have much to offer and much to gain by taking part in a united front across civil society. In the immediate term, we need allies to help defend vulnerable workers in the food system, the immigrants who are in the crosshairs of a sadistic administration. At the same time we must call all our movement allies to repair the exclusions and injustices our food system inherits from white supremacy—from weak labor laws to food apartheid to a militarized border policing complex—that have rendered farm workers so vulnerable in the first place. In the short term, we also need allies to prevent the liquidation of yet more farms at the hands of corporations and investors. At the same time, we must also build momentum to de-commodify food and land in order to make a better farming possible—and break the cycle of off-loading harms onto the next vulnerable group or country. By speaking clearly to the long legacy of dispossession and exclusion in agriculture, farm movements can help make the case (as Martin Luther King, Jr. and many others have) for a “radical reconstruction of society”—which is what it will take to actually win an agriculture that honors both people and planet.¹

These are the tasks that we in AJP see for our movements at this time, and we look forward to being part of a coalition that takes up this work going forward.

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Contents#

For AJP's history and work, see Chapters 2 through 4.

For our assessment of current conditions and movement priorities, see the Landscape Analysis, Chapters 5 through 7.

About the report

Statement from the AJP Board

Dedication & Acknowledgments

Foreword

by Julie Guthman

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: Dreaming of justice in neoliberal times

Where AJP came from and why we approached the problems of agriculture in the way we did.

Chapter 3: History of the Agricultural Justice Project

The story of AJP and DFTA as organizations.

Chapter 4: Reflecting on AJP’s work

Assessing our strengths and weaknesses.

Landscape analysis: Movement Conditions in 2026

Three chapters assessing conditions across labor (5), agriculture (6), and organizing (7), in order to suggest priorities for collective action.

Chapter 8: Conclusion & Looking Forward

Considering our past and future together.

Appendix

Appendix A: AJP’s Vision for a Sustainable Food System

Adapted from a talk by Elizabeth Henderson delivered at the Eco-Farm Conference and published in 2003 with the first draft of the AJP’s social stewardship standards.

Appendix B: Summary of AJP Standards

AJP developed the following summaries to introduce our standards to farmworkers, farm operators, and the wider public.

Appendix C: All Food Justice Certified entities

All farm and food businesses that achieved Food Justice Certification, 2007-2025.

Appendix D: Principles for Domestic Fair Trade

Principles of Domestic Fair Trade as envisioned by the Domestic Fair Trade Working Group, precursor to the Domestic Fair Trade Association.

Credits & Permissions