Technical Assistance
Helping farmers & food businesses implement fair practices
Many farms and food businesses want to provide fair working conditions to their employees and fair trading relationships to their buyers and vendors, but it’s hard to know where to start. It’s also hard to measure your progress without referring to a set of standards. For these reasons, a central part of the AJP’s work is helping farms and businesses implement fair policies and practices.
Our technical assistance program began as a way to support businesses seeking Food Justice Certification, but we offer these services to any farm or business regardless of whether they pursue certification or not. Most of our resources and services are free to family- and community-scale farms. See below for more information on what we offer, including:
Free resources, especially our Farmer Toolkit
Educational workshops & networking events
Certification assistance, including preliminary assessments
Outreach & public relations materials for FJC businesses
All of our guidance and resources are designed to help you meet our Food Justice Certified (FJC) standards, which are a gold standard for fair labor and fair trading practices in agriculture and food production.
Resources & AJP Toolkit
Most of our resources are gathered in our AJP Toolkit, including guidance on policies and practices, templates for policies and documents, and examples shared by farms, businesses, and other organizations. The toolkit covers various topics, including:
-
- Employee handbooks
- Writing & implementing a farm health & safety plan
- Communication, negotiation, & building a collaborative workplace culture
- Disciplinary, grievance, and conflict resolution processes
- Calculating a living wage
- Legal requirements for employment
- Employee performance evaluations
- Teaching programs, interns, and apprentices
- Fair pricing, calculating production costs, and negotiating with buyers
- Communicating your values & social commitments to customers
- PR & outreach materials for FJC businesses
Workshops & Networking Events
Photo by Walter Hergt, www.walterhergt.com
In partnership with a variety of food & farm organizations, the AJP presents on average a couple dozen workshops and networking events each year, most of them open to the public and many of them free of charge. For upcoming events please see our events calendar. For resources shared in past presentations, please see our workshop linktree (note that all resources are also available in the Farmer Toolkit, above).
The AJP also facilitates a Fair Farming networking group on the non-profit social media platform Ag Solidarity Network, a project of Marbleseed, the Wisconsin-based organic farming organization. We encourage interested farmers and farm employees to join the on-going conversation there by joining the platform and opting into the fair farming group.
Certification assistance
Farms & food businesses who want help preparing for Food Justice Certification should contact us for an individual consultation, as described above. Food businesses can reach us through our contact form, and farmers and farm employees should start with our intake survey. For more details, see the consultations section above.
The AJP offers a range of possible services for entities seeking certification, from direct consultations on implementing compliant policies and practices, to on-site audits in preparation for an inspection, to on-going consultation throughout a certification and inspection process. Some of these services can be time- and labor-intensive and are likely to incur costs. We can advise you on what services will be most helpful and cost-effective for your needs, and in most cases we have been able to provide assistance to certification applicants at low cost or no cost. We have an hourly rate for consultations and presentations for larger farms or food businesses that aren’t eligible for our free tier of services.