In 2026, after almost 30 years of work as a coalition, the Agricultural Justice Project is ending operations and archiving our work. We made this difficult decision because we see no clear path forward amidst a near total collapse of funding. We take this step with great heaviness: while we feel that our programs and strategy need a revamp, we nevertheless believe that our core project of building solidarity and people power is more important than ever. Never has there been a time when farm people—and especially farmworkers—have so badly needed new allies committed to defending their dignity and humanity.

We arrived at this decision through an extensive process. We first considered sunsetting in 2024 when several organizational challenges converged at once, but movement partners encouraged us to try to find a way forward. Somewhat encouraged, we convened an Assessment Committee from across our network to oversee an outreach and strategic planning process, and this committee drew insights and reflections from interviews with over 50 partners: some longtime allies, some new friends. With support from an experienced organizer and facilitator, this committee and the AJP board considered a range of ideas that surfaced through this process. While each proposal held promise and spoke in different ways to needs and gaps in the movement ecosystem, in the end we were missing two key ingredients: the money and the people to carry out the program. We considered reconfiguring our organization by returning to fiscal sponsorship or by spinning off parts of our work to interested allies; these remain possibilities, but we have no viable leads at this time. For now, we hope that others—including some current members of our coalition—will carry parts of this work forward in new ways. To that end, this record and reflection on AJP’s work is intended as a resource for those who share our goals and values. We share it in the hopes that others will learn from our commitments, our successes, our challenges, and our mistakes.

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AJP sprang from the meeting point of major movements – for farmworker rights and dignity, for farm livelihoods, for ecological farming, and for fair trade – that in the 1990s were looking for new ways to advance their causes in the face of movement retreat, corporate consolidation, and neglect by the state. Our founders specifically came together to offer an alternative, holistic vision for agriculture, with an emphasis on accountability to farmers and especially farmworkers, after the National Organic Program disappointingly excluded all social issues and questions of fairness. AJP set out to establish our own supplementary certification and spent years convening workers, farmers, and advocates to codify their visions into a set of standards that could be implemented at working farms, food businesses, retailers, and brands.

There were exciting moments as we developed this certification, such as when allied farmers connected with worker organizations and advocates to demonstrate that another agriculture was possible; or when big gatherings of food and farm movements cheered for justice and solidarity; or when farmworkers spoke back to big food brands; or when worker- and farmer-led groups demanded accountability from major fair trade certifications seen as too lax on corporations. During the early years it often felt like there was genuine momentum behind our project, and many of us found great joy in working together across the usual divides and building a nationwide network of collaborators. Our grassroots process yielded standards that were practical but rigorous and took on major taboos such as collective bargaining and wage and price negotiation. We aimed to level the intense power asymmetries in food and farming which harm workers and farmers alike. 

We had to wrestle with the contradictions of certification as a strategy. Our scrappy group of amateurs lacked the promotional skills and business acumen that a market-based strategy like certification really needs. Farms and food businesses were reluctant to take up certification, many because they wouldn’t or couldn’t accommodate key standards, others because they saw no financial benefit to certification. In the way we pursued it, certification relied on employers and business owners voluntarily committing to uncommon practices with little reason to expect reward; in the hyper-competitive world of food and agriculture, and without strong movements rallying behind the effort, this strategy struggled to make headway. As scholars like Julie Guthman, Christy Getz, and Sandy Brown pointed out along the way, certification was always going to be a bit of a mismatch for our ambitious goals.

Admittedly, our relationship to the certification strategy was more instrumental than most. We did not expect runaway success and instead used our position to try to hold more prominent certifications to a higher standard; ultimately we demonstrated that it’s possible for farms and food businesses to adopt rigorous fair practices. Our struggling programs helped demonstrate the structural nature of injustice in agriculture and the contradictions and weaknesses of using market-based strategies against that injustice. If we had greater capacity, we would broadcast those lessons much more clearly and widely than we have.

We are willing to accept that AJP, as it has been, has run its course. Indeed, much has changed since the moment of the 1990s when founders Nelson Carrasquillo, Richard Mandelbaum, Michael Sligh, Elizabeth Henderson, Marty Mesh, and Óscar Mendieta started working together on what would become this organization. At that time, neoliberal capitalism was on the upswing, proclaiming the end of history and politics, co-opting movement energies, rolling back rights and freedoms, and rolling out new market-based forms of governance. New waves of globalization and free trade deals such as NAFTA devastated livelihoods in the US and the Global South, sending new waves of immigrants that were increasingly treated as criminals by the government. In this period of movement weakness, certification seemed like a promising strategy to enlist the public into solidarity with workers and farmers, first as customers and later as allies.

Fast forward thirty years and many similar ‘vote with your dollar’ schemes have also played out with only limited success. The 2008 financial crash revealed the hollowness of the neoliberal economy for many people, and popular mobilizations helped politicize younger generations and spur new, more ambitious formations such as Black Lives Matter, youth movements for climate justice and for immigration justice, and the socialist upsurge coinciding with Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaigns. In 2026 we face an authoritarian right-wing movement, with an explicit disdain for democracy and human rights, that has captured all three branches of the US government; and elites’ neoliberal, free trade consensus has given way to explicit geo-political rivalries.¹ These are very different conditions from when AJP started, presenting a range of increasing threats—as well as opportunities.

We and many of our allies believe AJP still has something to offer in these times. Our certification did not succeed as a label, though there is small but sustained demand by farmers and farmworkers for our resources on implementing fair practices. There is great and enduring need for policy advocacy that holds together both farmworkers’ and farmers’ needs, with special emphasis on justice for marginalized workers and farmers, without caving to dishonest and hard-hearted claims by the loudest, most commercial farmers. There is also great need for our movements to build our own, politicized institutions that can educate and develop our people into movement leaders and organizers, rather than merely entrepreneurs, administrators, or policy professionals. As partners have emphasized to us, our movements need holistic, practical, and ambitious visions of an agriculture that uplifts human rights and dignity as well as ecology. We believe AJP made modest contributions on each of those points, and we hope that new and existing formations of allies can carry those efforts much, much further than we ever did.

As this iteration of AJP comes to a close, we use the second half of this report to reflect on what we see as the tasks ahead for our movements. We believe effective movements must be grounded in history and visionary about our future. Food movements need to understand the history of US agriculture as one of racial capitalism, imperialism, and settler colonialism, even as we try to salvage the best parts of that conflicted history: long-suffering resistance to domination and white supremacy; visions of liberation on the land; bold experiments in radical democracy, cooperation, and socialist community; and solidarity across races and borders and everything else that divides us. This grounding is all the more urgent as the worst parts of US history are celebrated by a neo-fascist movement with control over much of the federal government. Effective resistance will require us to know both what we’re fighting for and what we’re fighting against. Here we make the case that our movements must align around two near-term goals: winning a people-centered immigration policy, undoing the current regime that terrorizes communities everywhere; and de-commodifying food and land, unwinding corporate control over our ability to satisfy basic human needs.

Our movements must also take stock of our own organizations, which are currently weak and depoliticized despite some promising recovery from decades of repression and defeat. Veteran organizers point out how many of our movements’ recent strategies have neglected the foundational work of organizing large numbers of people to build power and win ambitious goals. In this report we consider how AJP’s experience relates to that narrative. For those of us who believe liberation is calling us, we have to reckon with how our bold movements of the past became the weak movements of the present; we have to regain what was taken from us, overcome bad habits, repair divisions among potential allies, and develop our capacity to act strategically. We have to bring many, many more people into movement. In 2026, we urgently need to do our part in a broad front that prevents the authoritarian Right from consolidating their power and, in the words of Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson, turning our 10-year goals into 50-year-goals. We at AJP are not experts on organizing or large united front formations, but we believe our experience in practicing solidarity can inform how we all build a bigger and more effective movement to win justice on the land.

About the ‘we’#

This report uses the word ‘we’ in multiple ways. In discussions of AJP’s past and present, ‘we’ usually refers to the AJP as a collective actor: founders, staff, board, and our closest collaborators. But we are also narrating stories of coalition at multiple scales, reflecting on the past and dreaming of the future; so the bigger ‘we’ gets tricky.

When this report discusses the wider landscape or possible future formations after AJP’s pending closure, the ‘we’ is ‘our movements.’ This phrase is slippery and aspirational. Social movements don’t have clear boundaries, and organizations have complex relationships to the movements they’re part of. Speaking as ‘we’ implies a level of unity and shared identity that does not usually exist in practice, and some people we’re calling in may not see themselves as part of a movement yet. This report doesn’t try to define ‘our movements’ too tightly, so the phrase is our way to acknowledge that AJP is part of a collective that’s much bigger than our own organization or network, where many of us share certain basic values (human rights, dignified work, and harmony with the natural world) and pursue those values through some kind of work around the food system.

We say ‘movements’ instead of a single movement because AJP’s coalition straddles different groups: not just the ‘farmworker movement,’ or the ‘organic movement,’ or the catch-all ‘food movements,’ and not just racial divisions or the class divide between farmworkers and farm owners and employers; but also different political tendencies, nationalities and ethnicities, regions, cultures, and more. We have been divided in many ways. When the report speaks of ‘our movements,’ we are calling allies to work towards unity and strength: to rally people who love justice into a powerful, liberatory movement that wins a fair deal for all land workers. AJP also wants to persuade you that this goal of a ‘fair deal’ must entail agroecology and a reconstruction of our political system.

This aspiration foreshadows one of our calls at the end of this report: following movement wisdom around strategy and organizing, we (AJP) believe that our movements need to get much more rigorous about our ‘we’: naming who we are and who we are with; who we are against; who we are trying to win over; who we’re accountable to; what we want; and, given the urgency of this moment, what we’re willing to sacrifice in order to win. Our movements can and should develop clarity on all of these questions—clarity that AJP fell short of achieving—and we must calibrate our answers to the needs of the moment and to a long-term vision.

We believe that the present threat of authoritarianism, combined with the relative weakness and disorganization of our movements, means that we need a much bigger formation that can at least block authoritarian advances in the short term. Historical movements fighting authoritarianism have made important advances by adopting this strategy of a ‘united front.’ That bigger, looser front needs the visionary leadership that our justice-loving movements can provide because elite liberal institutions have long since lost credibility—a key reason that authoritarian populists have been able to grow their power in the first place. If our movements demonstrate leadership in a broad, united front, we believe we can come out the other side with a lot more people primed to fight for a new and better world—in the cities, on the land, and everywhere.

Multiple united front efforts are already underway as a response to current political conditions, but the shape of that big ‘we’ is still to be determined. Our movements must carve out a role for farm people in those efforts. We the authors can’t speak for everyone, but we will agitate for a bigger ‘we’ that blocks our enemies and carries our people safely into the next period, when we can get into a better position to make our visions into reality.