The founders of the Agricultural Justice Project took part in the national ferment that followed the devastating farm losses of the 1970s and 1980s. At that time farmers and advocacy organizations like the National Family Farm Coalition found new energy to launch a movement for more sustainable agriculture, including by expanding organic farming. Farmworkers joined in this effort as part of their struggle against exposure to toxic pesticides. One result was a consumer-led legislative effort culminating in the Organic Foods Production Act (part of the 1990 Farm Bill), which required the US Department of Agriculture to develop and oversee a national certification for organic production—what was to become the National Organic Program (NOP). Like other attempts to institutionalize a movement effort into state bureaucracy, the adoption of organic oversight by USDA was fraught with challenges and contradictions and subject to the pushback, lobbying, and horse-trading of our political system.
AJP takes shape#
“We began a discussion in the early nineties within [CATA] about, Okay, we need to protect workers from being exposed to pesticides, but what would be the alternative? For us, the best alternative is not to be exposed to pesticides [at all]. Simple as that. So then [we began] looking into organic, but when we began...talking with organic farmers, we realized that they have the same type of mentality that non-organic farmers have in terms of their relationship with workers, in terms of how they treat the workers, whether because of financial constraints or [just] in terms of the mentality. That's when we began to make the link about the economic reality and...how workers were treated.”
“What set us onto standards was in part because we were all working on standards [for the National Organic Program]. When you have a hammer, everything is a nail. The other part was Nelson and Richard’s insistence that whatever process we set up that made a claim of fairness had to be credible for farmworkers. They're not quick to say, Oh, we're all one happy family, which is what a lot of farmers will tell you…. So the farmworker contingent in our little committee was very insistent that we come up with a process that gave them a veto, a strong voice, and something that would be credible to farmworkers. And that meant it was something that would be painful for most farmers to accept. That’s just the way it is.”
During the 1990s the National Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture (NCSA) held a series of meetings in Washington, D.C., with organic farmers Michael Sligh and Elizabeth Henderson co-chairing the ‘organic committee’ of farmer, farmworker, and organic industry representatives. The committee identified “sixty-six points of darkness” in the proposed National Organic Program.1 When this group sent comments to the USDA noting their failure to include fair pricing for farm products and fair labor policies, the department replied that these policies were not within their purview. Out of frustration, a small group began to strategize how to affirm the principle of social justice in organic agriculture. This group was comprised of farmers Henderson, Sligh, and Marty Mesh (of Florida Organic Growers, FOG) and farmworker advocates Nelson Carrasquillo and Richard Mandelbaum (General Coordinator and organizer, respectively, at Comité de Apoyo a los Trabajadores Agrícolas, CATA). They all shared the frustration that so many other farm advocates were loath to take up the cause of fair labor or even fair pricing in any serious way.
This informal group continued strategizing how to address fairness in a way that acknowledged the shared interests and interconnections of farmworkers and small-scale farmers. With the addition of Óscar Mendieta of Fundación RENACE in Bolivia, these six would eventually form the Agricultural Justice Project. Together, they believed that fairness was both possible and necessary, and they shared a belief in the dignity of labor. Although they were aware that a market-based strategy would be subject to the contradictions of the capitalist marketplace, they nevertheless decided to develop their own certification program with standards focused on ‘social stewardship,’ supplementing the strictly ecological approach of the NOP. Starting around 1999, they embarked on a years-long process of dialogue, discussion, and visioning, spanning local, national, and international meetings of farmworker groups and organic farmers.
The farmworker representatives insisted that the standards and process be rigorously accountable to farmworkers themselves, who were routinely left out of decisions that affected them, both in farm advocacy discussions and at the USDA. For that reason, accountability to farmworkers has been a core principle of AJP’s work since the beginning. CATA led outreach to farmworker groups, connecting with the Farmworker Association of Florida, Community to Community Development (WA), Centro Campesino (MN), Lideres Campesinas (CA), and others. They also drew in CATA members who had formed an independent mushroom workers union (Kaolin Workers Union) in Pennsylvania. Some of these farmworkers and organizers joined AJP’s trips to Vancouver and Bangkok (2002–03) for meetings of the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM) and to Uruguay (2005) for a meeting of the IUF (International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers’ Associations), working to build a shared vision with international allies.
Class divisions in the organic movement
“The world of organic and sustainable ag…was and still is full of individuals with really strong values who on their own are doing things really deeply and thoughtfully, but there’s a lot where that’s not the case at all. And the kind of ‘good guy’ image and sweeping things under the rug… Meaningful conversations about labor, hard conversations, not just the easy, ‘oh, yeah, sure, we all agree, we all think there shouldn’t be violation of labor rights.’ Well, what does that mean?” Read more…
The farmers in the group brought their respective organizations along with the effort: Elizabeth Henderson, the Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA); Michael Sligh, the Rural Advancement Foundation (RAFI-USA); and Marty Mesh (FOG). They based their standards on the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Óscar Mendieta especially helped the group to harmonize their nascent standards with those of the international Fair Trade movement and the conventions of the International Labor Organization (ILO).
Through this “hyper-participatory” process, grounded in movement principles and grassroots vision, the group released the first edition of AJP’s standards in 2003, officially titled Toward Social Justice and Economic Equity in the Food System: A Call for Social Stewardship Standards in Sustainable and Organic Agriculture.2 AJP circulated these standards to organic farmers and organic farming associations, labor and farm labor organizations, non-profit advocates, certification programs, and eco-labeling experts. For two years, AJP circulated successive drafts of their standards in the US and abroad, in English, French, and Spanish, incorporating public comment and suggestions from stakeholders around the world. In this early period, some founders volunteered their time and others were supported by their organizations. Each of the founders acquired their own resources to support their travel, whether with personal funds, speaker fees, organizational resources, or support from groups they consulted with.
From dialogue to certification#
“We very much wanted to weld the need for workers' rights and farmers' rights together because so many of our challenges have been pitting all the different movements and portions against each other. So that was a core principle that we wanted to adhere to, which has been very difficult to achieve.”
After these initial years of outreach, the founders of AJP spent the following years developing a working certification program which, after much debate, they named Food Justice Certification (FJC). Florida Organic Growers already operated a certification agency, Quality Certification Services (QCS), and drew in QCS staff member Leah Cohen, who would join Sally Lee of RAFI as the first employees of AJP. Leah worked to refine the standards into a form that could be verified through audits, interviews, and documentation.
In 2005, the AJP team tested their new program through a pilot audit at Jim Cochran’s Swanton Berry Farm in California, one of the first unionized organic farms. In 2006-2007, AJP joined with the Minneapolis-based Local Fair Trade Network (LFTN) for a larger pilot of AJP’s certification process. LFTN connected AJP with farmers, co-ops, farmworker organizations, and consumers who were already engaged in the regional movement, leading to pilot certifications of four farms (Featherstone Farm, Hoch Orchard and Gardens, Keewaydin Farm, and Harmony Valley Farm) and one food co-op (Bluff Country Co-op) spread across Minnesota and Wisconsin. Staff time and pilot expenses were funded from a range of sources, including contributions from the nascent Domestic Fair Trade Association, the Ford Foundation, and natural products brands including Dr. Bronner’s, Clif Bar, and Organic Valley.
These pilot efforts identified some outstanding practices at farms and co-ops but also revealed key obstacles to certification. First among these was a lack of written documentation that a certifier would require for verification. To help farms and co-ops implement and document fair practices, Elizabeth Henderson started gathering resources developed by like-minded farmers and allies, laying the foundation for our technical assistance program and the resource library we later called the AJP Toolkit. A second obstacle was the cost of inspections. AJP’s inspection process bases its claims to accountability on direct participation by inspectors from worker organizations. Instead of one inspector, there are two who split the job: an organic inspector talks to managers and audits the farm office and worksite, while the inspector from a worker organization interviews employees confidentially. This practice of accountability entailed increased complexity and expense, so AJP established a fund to offset certification costs for mid-sized and smaller farms seeking certification.
Ominously, these years were marked by devastating floods, cruel immigration raids, and finally the Great Financial Crisis, leading to significant hardships at the pilot farms and lean times at natural food co-ops. While the 2008 crisis was unique for its depth and lasting impact, the compounding catastrophes of these years highlighted the fragile situation of most farms. AJP sought to leverage certification to deliver more financial stability to farms. We were slow to develop the public-facing certification seal and marketing supports that pilot farms requested in order to demonstrate their participation to consumers. Even more concerning, we were unable to find wholesale or retail buyers willing to pay a price premium to certifying farms. This lack of committed buyers was a strategic gap that would remain constant throughout the years of our certification.
Board and staff celebrate the opening of AJP’s dedicated office space, in Gainesville, Florida.
Adapting lessons from the pilot phase, Leah Cohen and Sally Lee developed the first drafts of AJP’s Policy Manual outlining governance roles, responsibilities, and processes, including the requirement—rare among certifications—that worker-led organizations both interview workers directly and serve as the primary point of contact for grievances and complaints. AJP began its first standards revision process in 2009-2012, adopting the ISEAL five-year cycle for continuous standards development, featuring consultation with a range of stakeholder groups and periods of public comment and response.3 Informed by the pilot certifications, the revisions committee expanded the standards to include operations throughout the whole supply chain, including grower cooperatives (at the urging of the Farmer Direct Co-op).
AJP expanded its outreach, research, and education work in the southeastern US through a USDA Southern Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SSARE) grant. Eleven surveyors consulted organic farmers across the southeast about their labor and trade experiences and challenges, as well as customers about their priorities in food purchasing. The team also delivered health and safety training for farms aimed at fair working conditions, beyond mere legal requirements, and provided technical assistance to farms and food businesses that wanted to apply for Food Justice Certification. Out of all of this regional outreach, one farm eventually became certified in 2012: the Family Garden of Gainesville, Florida.
DFTA: Building the “larger stakeholder”#
“We've always been in search of how do we build that consumer demand for something that, unfortunately, many of them already believe is taking place, particularly in organic. We did a lot of exit interviews at various food co-ops asking people, what do you think farmworkers get paid? What do you think farmers get paid? What do you think—? And it was incredibly frightening what they did not know about the situation.”
During the decade of the 2000s, AJP’s founders connected with like-minded advocates in the fair trade movement, natural food cooperatives, and farmworker movements about the need for greater dialogue, cooperation, and accountability across the food system. The founders acknowledged that a certification could never achieve their transformative goals on its own. There was a need for education: wholesale buyers and individual shoppers needed to understand and connect with the issues workers and farmers faced if they were going to be motivated to action, especially since action had to go beyond mere shopping choices. There was a need for advocacy: this was the period of rapidly proliferating ‘ethical’ labels, many of them advanced by large corporations with questionable claims or focused only on imported products. There was a need for market development: the solidarity economy badly needed values-aligned supporters who could bring more resources to bear, since farmworkers and farmers typically had only sweat equity to offer.
For these reasons, AJP joined with other partners to found the Domestic Fair Trade Association (DFTA) in 2008, hoping to establish an institution that could take on the coordination and advocacy needed to grow justice across US food and farming (see sidebar). Early meetings of the DFTA were hosted in the upper Midwest by National Cooperative Grocers (NCG), a strong and consistent supporter of AJP’s work. DFTA set out as its primary goals supporting family-scale farming; ensuring just conditions for agricultural workers; reinforcing farmer-led initiatives such as farmer co-operatives; and bringing workers and farmers together with brands, retailers, and concerned consumers to grow the movement for more equitable agriculture in North America.
History of the DFTA
AJP was a founding member of The Domestic Fair Trade Association (DFTA), an initiative to promote social justice in the North American food system by bringing accountability to the growing economic sector of fair trade-certified products. Read more…
Certification goes live#
In 2010 AJP officially launched Food Justice Certification, inaugurating the label’s new name and certification mark with the announcement of Farmer Direct Co-op (Canada) as a Food Justice certified grower group. Farmer Direct supplied their grains and lentils to retail co-ops and several Whole Foods stores across the country, carrying the Food Justice Certification mark into the homes of exponentially more families. Other early certified farms included Gathering Together Farm (OR), Hoch Orchard and Gardens (MN), and Spring Hill Organic Farm (OR). AJP also certified the Midwest Organic Services Association (WI), an organic certifier, as a business with fair labor practices. The Family Garden (FL) was certified by AJP in 2012, followed the next year by West Haven Farm, GreenStar Food Coop, and The Piggery butcher shop, all located in Ithaca, NY. In 2014 Pie Ranch and Swanton Berry Farm of California became certified. Each of these audits was combined with training events for new inspectors as we sought to build the infrastructure for the program. AJP also produced a short advocacy and promotional film Hungry for Justice featuring the Farmworker Association of Florida, AJP, and newly FJC- certified farmer Jordan Brown (The Family Garden), screening the film at a number of public events in 2014 and beyond.
In 2012 AJP incorporated as its own 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, governed by a board comprised of delegates from the partner organizations of CATA, NOFA, RAFI-USA, and (until its departure in 2019) FOG.
During this period AJP tried to recruit additional farms and food businesses for certification with little success. Some balked at the requirements, especially standards on financial transparency with workers and neutrality towards labor organizing and unionization; others balked at the cost, unsure there would be any financial return for the effort. More commonly, farmers struggled to find the time to implement new systems and fill out paperwork, as they were already stretched thin across many managerial demands. Some farms that were closely aligned with the standards and AJP’s principles nevertheless declined to seek certification: a couple had undocumented employees and did not want to expose them to unwanted publicity, especially with escalating deportations under the Obama administration. Some farms were eager to certify but had one or two issues out of compliance with the standards, such as using occasional short-term labor contractors or using a recruiter for hiring H-2A guestworkers (AJP standards require direct hiring).
For a handful of years, AJP convened meetings for domestic fair trade preceding the NOFA summer conference.
Despite these difficulties, AJP continued to forge new relationships to try to advance the program. In 2014, AJP joined with the Pioneer Valley Workers Center of Massachusetts to recruit farms and co-ops and spread fair labor practices in the Connecticut River Valley. In 2015, AJP team member Louis Battalen worked with NOFA to recruit farmers across New York, Vermont, Massachusetts, and New Jersey, inviting farmers to do extensive self-assessments of their labor and pricing practices and providing resources to make their workplaces more fair.4 Soul Fire Farm (NY), Wickenheiser Farm (Alberta, Canada), and Higher Level Organics (WI) achieved certification in 2018, and a handful of other northeastern farms began slowly working towards certification. AJP also hosted annual Domestic Fair Trade gatherings at the NOFA summer conference from 2015 through 2019, galvanizing closer relations among regional organic farming associations, Migrant Justice/Justicia Migrante of Vermont, and CATA. These events bore fruit as participants from the annual gatherings joined campaigns that won driver’s licenses for undocumented drivers in Vermont, New York, New Jersey, and eventually Massachusetts.
Through the DFTA and other relationships, AJP spent years trying to convince several food brands that had been leaders in establishing the organic label to take up certification for their supply chains, but in the end none of them signed on. In both AJP and DFTA, the financial plan relied on having better-resourced corporations provide foundational organizational support through either dues (DFTA) or certification fees (AJP). The brands occasionally gave donations to AJP but declined to get certified or offer a premium to certified suppliers. They eventually stepped away from donations, as well.
In interviews for this project, founders each expressed that AJP just needed a “lucky break” that never came. In Richard Mandelbaum’s words:
It’s sort of like somebody trying to be an actor for their career path. Only 1% or less make it. Maybe it had nothing to do with you—you just never got that lucky break. It felt for several years in there that if that had happened, that could have been just the lucky break that could have opened up a lot of things.5
In the case of DFTA, the brands eventually left, one by one, until only nonprofits and grassroots groups remained. After that, the coalition’s finances and capacity bottomed out. In the case of AJP, it gradually became clear that Food Justice Certification was not on track to generate self-sustaining revenues. No brand wanted to “stick their neck out” and take a chance on a certification with such high standards.6 This situation left us entirely reliant on philanthropy and grants while simultaneously increasing our fundraising goals, as AJP sought to bring in donations to offset the prohibitive cost of certification for small farms and businesses. It also meant that AJP’s certification struggled to get the kind of press and name recognition that a well-known brand could have brought to it. AJP staff and board members regularly lamented that, without support from a corporate marketing department, the people involved lacked the kind of marketing skill required to successfully promote our own brand—a major gap, given our market-based strategy.
While a few small foundations dug deep to try to sustain AJP’s work, our early funders fell away fairly quickly. Funding varied significantly from year to year, affecting staffing levels and leaving some projects half-finished. AJP’s ideal organizational plan called for seven full-time staff to cover the certification, technical assistance, advocacy, and administrative workload, but we usually had only one to three part-time employees and occasional contractors. Turnover and the untimely death of beloved staff member Sue Mihalyi caused setbacks. Lacking in staff capacity, AJP’s workload often fell to volunteers, including founders and board members. The AJP team was able to leverage occasional federal grants for technical assistance work to expand our outreach and offer one-on-one coaching in fair practices for farms—which was generally popular and well received—but these grants entailed significant management burdens and did not offer core support for the organization.
AJP tried new directions to draw attention to our certification and engage the public in advocacy. AJP and the Farmworker Association of Florida partnered to hold a regional “food justice dialogue” in 2018. Attendees brainstormed how to motivate the public to care about the rarely recognized injustices of the food system, inspiring AJP’s multi-year education project titled “Hungry for Justice: Whose Voice is Missing?”7 This project, available through Instagram, used 20 video interviews with farmworkers, farmers, and community members to highlight the disparate but interconnected experiences of different groups in food and agriculture, in order to build mutual understanding and lay the foundations for solidarity.
Rebuilding, sunsetting#
“The standards process and who was involved was really valuable and transformational, the who and how. And yet our ability to offer market differentiation was hindered without marketing expertise on our team.”
AJP’s funding collapsed during the COVID-19 pandemic, but there were some promising developments and signs of a possible recovery. In 2019 QCS departed as the certifying agency for AJP and passed the certification torch to the Ohio Ecological Food and Farming Association (OEFFA). OEFFA operates a well-established organic certification program, and they were strongly interested in taking on our certification as well. This was no simple task. FJC presented many novel problems, and OEFFA had to develop various policies and processes anew. Staff turnover, along with AJP’s own capacity problems, prolonged the process of onboarding OEFFA’s team. Thankfully, OEFFA and AJP received a generous NCR-SARE8 grant to support OEFFA’s new certification and technical assistance endeavors, running from 2022-2024 and enabling us to conduct extensive outreach and recruitment in the Midwest region. Generous donations from National Cooperative Grocers enabled AJP to cover certification costs for farms and also overhaul our technical assistance resources.
Following the earlier food justice dialogue in Florida, in 2020 AJP joined the Florida Food Justice League coalition, a student organizing campaign calling on the University of Florida to end its use of prison labor via its food service vendor, Aramark. The coalition eventually accomplished this goal in 2022. This work at UF paved the way for AJP to join with other Gainesville (FL) partners working to get public institutions to adopt the Good Food Purchasing Program (GFPP), an ethical food procurement program developed by the Food Chain Workers Alliance (FCWA) and the Los Angeles Food Policy Council. AJP’s General Coordinator, Leah Cohen, helped lead the Gainesville effort, joining the national Good Food Communities network initiated by the FCWA and the HEAL Food Alliance.9 Unfortunately, the Gainesville area campaign was dealt a serious defeat in 2024 when vegan activists convinced Alachua County to scuttle plans for a publicly-owned, fair-labor slaughterhouse that would have enabled the local community of small-scale, BIPOC ranchers to sell into Alachua County schools.
The Food Justice Coalition of University of Florida demands fair labor practices in the university’s supply chain, 2019.
Nevertheless, the Good Food Communities campaigns to link up institutional food procurement with ethical supply chains are one of the most promising avenues for advancing solidarity and fairness all along the supply chain, with the potential to simultaneously benefit farmworkers, farm operators, food and logistics workers, and the communities they feed. AJP’s own certification is one way that vendors can qualify for preferential status under the “Valued Workforce” (fair labor) category in GFPP, and we have been in dialogue with the Good Food Communities campaigns about ways AJP could support the growth and development of local values-aligned vendors to participate in the program. This remains a strong interest for our coalition, though we have not been able to secure funding for that work.
Since 2020, three new farms achieved certification: Lola’s Organic Farm (GA, 2022); Roxbury Farm (NY, 2023); and Foxtail Farm (WI, 2024). OEFFA identified several other strong candidate farms, but when the SARE grant support ended in 2024, their FJC program was still far from self-sustaining. At that time OEFFA estimated they would need 40 certification clients in order for the program to break even—many times the five farms that were certified at that time and twice the total number that had ever been certified. Faced with this stark shortfall, OEFFA decided they could not continue administering the certification program for AJP.
We drew some optimism from our collaboration with OEFFA, but due to the consistently low uptake by farms and businesses, the staff and board at AJP had already been concerned about the trajectory of our certification program for some time. Additional difficulties in 2024 prompted us to initiate our current process of assessing our options for future work: first, the departure of long-time General Coordinator Leah Cohen for another position; and second, our continued difficulties in securing sufficient funding to grow or even maintain our staff capacity. In the spring of 2024, our Advisory Council encouraged the staff and board to undertake an outreach and evaluation process for discerning the future of our certification.
Faced with a dire outlook in summer 2024, Interim General Coordinator Jon Magee proposed we conduct this project as a final, intentional sunsetting effort in order to leave a history, self-assessment, and archive of our past work. This suggestion met with wide approval, given our desire not to replicate the hasty closure of the DFTA, but our Advisory Council strongly encouraged us to try to find some way forward rather than resign ourselves to sunsetting. This report is the culmination of that attempt—exploring our options while also preparing for a possible closure—which has lasted from the fall of 2024 through summer 2025, coordinated by staff, waged through more than 50 conversations with allies and partners, overseen by an assessment committee of eight stellar friends from our network, and coached along by a skilled organizer and facilitator contracted for the purpose. As of July 2025, we had no concrete leads on funding for any of the future scenarios we considered, so, with heavy hearts, we decided to close AJP as an independent organization.
This moment feels ripe for a change, as our movements work to reorient ourselves and address new threats. We value much of the work we have accomplished, and we have found great joy in building this coalition together. We also acknowledge that we have faced persistent challenges that we have struggled to overcome. In the next chapter, we try to draw out the successes, challenges, and mistakes from our past efforts in the hopes that our experience can inform allies doing related work. Even as we close this iteration of AJP, we invite allies to continue the work of building effective solidarity. In whatever formation, we will do our best to broadcast the vision that all of us deserve a life of dignity, and, despite our differences, we can all thrive if we choose to work together.
National Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture Organic Committee, “The Sixty-Six Points of Darkness.” ↩︎
Michael Sligh, interview. ↩︎
International Social and Environmental Accreditation and Labelling (ISEAL) Alliance. ↩︎
See the report on this work by Elizabeth Henderson. ↩︎
Interview. ↩︎
Michael Sligh, interview. ↩︎
Available at https://www.whosevoiceismissing.org/ or on Instagram at @whosevoiceismissingproject. ↩︎
North Central Region Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education, US Department of Agriculture (USDA). ↩︎
The Good Food Purchasing Program (GFPP) is a framework and set of standards that are overseen by the Center for Good Food Purchasing. The Good Food Communities (GFC) network is not directly affiliated with GFPP. GFC is a coalition of organizations conducting local and regional campaigns around public procurement. In their words, “Good Food Communities (GFC) provides a framework for grassroots coalitions to prioritize four equity outcomes in their policy and organizing efforts, and for participating public institutions to give preference to food vendors and suppliers with shared principles. It also provides pathways for institutions participating in the Good Food Purchasing Program to gain extra points and therefore improve their overall score in the Program based on equity goals.” ↩︎