Strategies to get fair compensation for workers and owners

This essay is featured in The Natural Farmer Spring 2024 issue.

As part of my technical assistance role at the Agricultural Justice Project, I frequently coach farmers on how to achieve living wages and fair working conditions, both for their employees and for themselves. Implementing fair working conditions seems easier than fair wages, not least because many policy changes don’t come with direct costs, and employees themselves can help with the managerial burden of planning and training. Many fair practices also hold out the promise of improving the bottom line over the medium to long term, as I describe below.

Fair wages, on the other hand, require cash on hand. That money has to come from somewhere, so how can we move towards fair compensation when our budget is tight? There’s no magic formula that’s guaranteed to achieve living wages on a given farm, but I do have suggestions for how to move towards that goal:

• Step 1: Set a target wage. Understand what a “living wage” is and calculate it for your area and local circumstances. Surveying your employees helps with figuring out local conditions. (See AJP’s living wage resources)

• Step 2: Figure out where you stand now. Shore up your recordkeeping and understand your financials so you can know your costs and your revenues. Then calculate how much of a gap you’d have to make up to offer living wages. (See our resources on farm finances)

• Step 3: Consider conventional business strategies, such as direct sales, higher margin crops, mechanization and process efficiencies, value-added products, and so on. Extension services and business coaches offer lots of resources on this point.

• Step 4: Find new efficiencies and revenues through cooperative relationships with your customers, community, and team. This part is open-ended and can go in many different directions, so I’ll spend most of the rest of this article elaborating on this point.

Step one sets a benchmark to measure your progress in later steps. Step two is foundational for any business: you may not pinpoint exactly where all your costs are, especially in a diversified operation, but you need to know the basic lay of the land to make good business decisions. This is an ongoing process of learning and discovery as you become more familiar with accounting.

Step three is important and often yields positive results for the bottom line—especially for relatively new businesses—but it’s rarely transformative. This step is about trying to play the market more strategically while still operating on the market’s terms. The open market is stacked against smaller producers, with market power increasingly consolidated by larger corporations and middlemen. This asymmetry is reflected in rising costs, in the unilateral dictates of wholesale buyers, in corporate-friendly government actions, and so on. When market-based strategies really succeed, it’s often because of special conditions limited by location or time, such as access to a particularly affluent market, finding a trendy new crop, or similar situations. This is why small-scale producers increasingly compete against each other for limited local markets.  After more than fifty years of the organic movement, we remain marginal to and often exploited by the much larger corporate-dominated food system.

It shouldn’t be that way. I don’t know who said it first, but even mediocre farmers would make a decent living in a good food system. We owe our dystopian food system to the twin evils of capitalism and colonialism, each founded on profit through exploitation and dispossession. Capitalism as a system has ruthlessly exploited social differences—race, class, gender, citizenship, ability and more—as a way to legitimize inequalities and pit people against each other. Capitalist markets also turn the fruits of our labor and fruits of the land into mere commodities, shrinking opportunities for connection and solidarity. 

Step four is to try to overcome how folks in food and farming are cut off, alienated from the people they feed—this is the individualistic, disempowered, disconnected, anonymous aspect of the market. It’s also about building solidarity instead of hierarchy or competition. Instead of justifying inequalities and individual privilege, we try to build equality and collective power with the folks around us, across lines of race, class, citizenship, gender and sexuality, whether they’re workers, farm owners, or community members.

These are aspirational goals. As a farming community, we’re a long, long way off right now. But if we’re going to overcome the urgent threats to our farms and enable new farmers to thrive, we need to build a food system that operates on a totally different logic from what we’ve inherited. This is exactly what many farms have begun to do, and I’ll describe a few examples below.

Reaching out: Customers and community #

If the market price won’t cover fair compensation and the true cost of running a sustainable farm, growers need something better than the market price. This is usually the case, which is why the organic movement has generally targeted more premium markets and affluent consumers, excluding many less affluent eaters in the process. Any effort to get better prices from buyers has to grapple with the problem of equity and accessibility.

This is one reason sliding scale models have taken off, especially where more affluent customers subsidize the purchases of customers who are less well off, ensuring the farm still earns sufficient revenues. Some farms have pushed the envelope in getting bigger commitments from their members by engaging them more deeply in the farm business: the core member group from Peacework CSA (New York) took it upon themselves to recruit new members and peg the sliding scale price at a level that afforded health insurance for the farmers; and Temple-Wilton Community Farm (New Hampshire) has a process for their members to place bids on shares until the farm’s annual budget is covered.

There’s a related strategy which aims at government and corporate institutions instead of individual customers. These institutions purchase food in large volumes, and their significant purchasing power can be used to support producers that otherwise struggle in hyper-competitive wholesale markets. These institutions are also more or less accountable to the public, creating opportunities for communities to apply pressure and exert influence over their purchasing. Across the US, major campaigns are led by Good Food Communities, which works to shift the purchasing of state and local government institutions under the Good Food Purchasing Program; Healthcare Without Harm, which aims to shift hospital purchasing; and Real Food Generation, which targets university dining services.¹ Producers earn preferred vendor status and (sometimes) higher prices if they meet the program standards for local, ecological, community-scale producers; fair labor practices; or status as historically marginalized, BIPOC producers.

For growers that sell wholesale, grower cooperatives offer an opportunity to increase grower leverage in setting prices and keep a larger share of sales by cutting out distributors. Dairy cooperatives are widespread (including Organic Valley), with a handful of smaller produce cooperatives established at the regional level (including Deep Root Organic Co-op and Lancaster Farm Fresh). Farm cooperatives have been a key economic survival strategy for Black farmers (as recounted by Monica White in her book Freedom Farmers) demonstrating how community cooperation dovetails with broader struggles for justice and liberation.

The food sovereignty movement charts a more radical path to decommodifying food. Organizations like the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network draw on movement ancestors like the Black Panthers’ community survival programs, working to ensure that everyone has the right to both good food and the means of subsistence. Farmers and activists are exploring how mutual aid efforts like these can also support the livelihoods of farm folks and vice versa, especially in the face of lackluster support from philanthropy and the state. Their efforts offer important lessons: first, that an ethos of mutual aid is essential if we really want to transform our society, and second, that people don’t have to rely on dismal wages if they can meet their needs outside of the market.

Reaching in: Fair working conditions #

Conventional business thinking makes managers pit themselves against their employees. Too many managers mainly see labor as an expense, a source of disorder to be disciplined and controlled. At the macro scale, this approach to labor—driven by big ag and the Chamber of Commerce, aided and abetted by the government—has made farm work one of the worst compensated and most dangerous jobs. This is a key reason why it’s become so hard to hire farm workers at prevailing farm wages.

But treating workers like your opponents is a losing strategy. Jim Cochran of Swanton Berry Farm (California) provides a leading example of the alternative approach, going so far as to invite the United Farm Workers to organize his crew. He speaks of the many benefits that have come from that process:

“I feel that the union contract is a really important part of our operation… [T]he process of generating a contract is a process of discussion and negotiation, and it’s a really good process because people sit down—workers and management—sit down and discuss in detail all sorts of issues that are generally not dealt with systematically, especially in a farming business, generally not dealt with systematically in any kind of business.… It really is almost like having an HR department…. [I]t systematizes things in a way and formalizes things in a very positive way, I believe, so that the owner can’t be capricious about things. And then, of course, the employees… feel some ownership in the process themselves.”

Read more on Jim Cochran’s experience with unionization and negotiations.

Sandy Brown, formerly of Swanton Berry Farm, has said that the union, as well as an Employee Stock Ownership Plan they implemented, are “how Swanton has maintained its place in a highly competitive market. We’ve done that with loyal customers, with consistently high-quality fruit, and we believe that the key to those things is having workers who are invested in the farm.”

This is a lesson that’s been demonstrated over many years in all kinds of industries: When workers are respected, when they are included rather than alienated, and when they are valued as human beings, they routinely deliver big gains for a business, both in productivity and in intellectual contributions—streamlining processes, helping with production challenges, shaping business decisions, all informed by their often underappreciated, intimate knowledge of their work. Workers want to keep a good job, and that means they have a stake in the business’s success. Some evidence also suggests that managers make better business decisions when they have to fulfill their commitments to workers.

Achieving these benefits requires more than token appreciation. Living wages are a part of this picture, but there’s strong evidence that workplace democracy is key to unlocking real productivity gains. That means genuinely collaborative management, including a commitment (like Swanton’s) to collective bargaining and negotiation in good faith. The data also show that unionized workplaces tend to stay in business longer and weather downturns better.

Your team might or might not choose to pursue a bargaining contract, but managers can still implement (and employees can call for) basic principles of workplace democracy: Share the farm’s finances and business challenges (“open books management”) and invite the whole team to figure out how to achieve better compensation. Establish a worker-directed safety committee that’s empowered to deal with safety issues as they come up. Drop your employee handbook’s language about “at will” employment and commit to due process (“just cause”) for discipline, grievances, and termination. Recognize employees’ right to negotiate and commit to negotiating openly and in good faith over working conditions and wages. Owners considering retirement can explore converting their business to a worker-owned cooperative and selling to their employees.

Whatever you do, workers’ priorities should lead the way.

* * *

The strategies I describe here are about moving from the “micro” of the individual farm to the “macro” of building collaborations with more and more people around the farm. The horizon doesn’t stop with the local community, however. For most people in the US, agriculture is “out of sight, out of mind.” Small farms and the people who work on them face serious and urgent challenges right now, and our best hope for survival is building power as part of a broad-based movement for justice, freedom, and a healthy planet.