A major goal of our sunsetting process has been to reflect on our work over three decades, sharing what we have learned with movement allies and acknowledging our strengths and weaknesses. The assessment that follows draws on both long-running internal conversations among our staff, board, and Advisory Council as well as the extensive feedback we received from collaborators, especially through our conversations in 2025. Where possible we include additional context to better explain why we and our partners came to the conclusions we did.

The reflections below begin with aspects of AJP’s work which people suggested were our primary contributions: first, our vision and our efforts to change the narrative in agriculture; and second, our efforts to build community and coalition. We follow with a few reflections on our smaller successes, where good things happened but AJP played a secondary or indirect role. Finally, we address some of the many challenges and contradictions we faced in this work, including our own shortcomings. Along the way we include sidebars with greater detail on a few related topics, as well as some of our favorite quotes from partners. Together all of these reflections help paint a more detailed portrait of AJP over time. 

Some people will read these assessments as overly critical while others will think they are not critical enough. There is plenty of room for multiple interpretations of our work, and the reflections here represent not so much a group consensus as an attempt to hold together a variety of different viewpoints shared through our assessment process. In the end, our hope is that these perspectives help our movements navigate the contradictions we experienced more skillfully in the future.

Vision and Narrative Change#

AJP facilitated an extended grassroots visioning process through convenings and dialogue across movements, developing a wide-ranging vision for justice in US agriculture. Alongside the organic movement’s emphasis on ecological stewardship, our vision emphasizes the values of human rights, equality, accountability, and cooperation, with special attention to power dynamics. (See the vision, values, and standards sidebar for more detail, as well as our original vision statement in the appendix.) We promoted our vision through our coalition-building, through our advocacy, and especially through our certification standards. Many of our movement partners cited this vision as our greatest contribution, and people felt our work in this area played a part in shifting the conversation in sustainable agriculture towards recognizing the importance of labor and fairness, rather than just ecological values.

To be sure, that conversation needed (and still needs) shifting.¹ AJP’s founders experienced pushback in the 1990s when they called for fair labor conditions and fair pricing to be part of the nascent National Organic Program (NOP). Despite this resistance, the founders believed that many organic farmers held values similar to their own, making them at least potential allies for farmworkers. This hypothesis led AJP to pursue our own certification program that could hopefully address farmers’ and farmworkers’ needs simultaneously, building a basis for greater solidarity. As a market-based strategy, certification meant that our target audience has been primarily commercial farms and the businesses that buy from them; and while the certification strategy has had a range of shortcomings (see below), we nevertheless believe it is an important contribution to try to carry movement values into the workplace and into the market. 

One reason is that our movements are most often in a defensive posture, fighting poverty wages, toxic environments, deadly working conditions, or debt peonage, for example. We set ourselves incremental goals to end these egregious abuses against our people. The farmworkers and farmers who helped craft the AJP standards spend a lot of their energy on these fights, which are necessary and urgent. Yet through our grassroots process, these allies took up the challenge of naming not just what we’re fighting against, but also what we’re fighting for. This is a difficult question for many in our movement to answer (see quotes from partners). And yet at key moments this becomes a very practical question, as it was for the Kaolin Workers Union of mushroom workers, who helped write AJP’s standards at the same time they negotiated their first contract.² An affirmative vision is crucial for inspiring and guiding our short-term struggles and preparing us for wins: we have to draw a through-line from our present position to the future we want and deserve.³

Too often this grassroots vision—as well as our certification program—has been perceived as uncomfortable, inconvenient, or threatening, especially by farm operators and farmer advocates. Even though the vision proposes to improve conditions for farmers and farmworkers alike, farmworkers’ priorities are often treated as non-starters by growers. Many other ‘multistakeholder initiatives’ that include both farmers and farmworkers go to great lengths to avoid challenging growers in any way. This was founders’ experience in the NCSA organic committee, as Richard Mandelbaum recalled: “When you dig into a lot of issues like immigration, labor rights, things that are off the map of the consensus—the narrow consensus—then you realize, Oh no, we don’t actually all share the same values at all.”⁴ AJP’s founders came together around troubling that narrow consensus in sustainable agriculture circles, identifying allies and building a constituency that’s activated and committed to justice for all. We reject the short-sighted power play of employers over workers and instead see farmworkers’ and farmers’ interests as inextricably linked. We have always resisted sweeping thorny issues under the rug, though this orientation meant that “we were chased out of more than one meeting.”⁵

And yet, as we discovered, the practices in our standards are within reach for many of the farms operating in North America, especially smaller-scale farms in more favorable markets.⁶ Many more farms might adopt these practices if they felt they had the breathing room to do so, or if conditions didn’t make them dependent on practices which crossed a red line for the farmworkers in our coalition, such as use of labor contractors and recruiters (see sidebar for more reflections on farmers’ adoption of the standards). The farms we certified are not perfect, and their models can be fragile or hard to replicate under current conditions. But they show what we as a society can achieve and what we would have to change if we really wanted justice in agriculture. Basic structural conditions—including labor law, immigration law, and market conditions that reward exploitation and punish solidarity—need to shift in order to spread better practices to the rest of the agricultural sector. Political problems like these demand bold visions and big, powerful movements if we hope to win justice beyond just a small minority of farms.

Our vision, and the certification program founded on it, has been a wedge that opened many doors. Even if some of those doors were promptly shut on us, we used those openings to push conversations that disrupted business as usual, and we helped show the limits of ‘ethical trade.’ We are glad to have contributed that much to our movements.

Encounters, Coalition, and Community-Building#

Our allies have also valued AJP’s commitment to broad participation, mutual understanding, and accountability to front-line communities, as well as the relationships that this commitment made possible. Michael Sligh commented that

We had learned very early on that [the organic farming world] is what I call ‘hyper-participatory,’ and everybody wants to have their say, and that’s very important. And so we used that model for thinking about Domestic Fair Trade and AJP.⁷

But mere participation was not enough to guarantee a voice for farmworkers, who, as noted above, are routinely sidelined in ‘multi-stakeholder’ spaces. Nelson Carrasquillo and the other farmworker advocates won a commitment that AJP would take accountability to workers seriously at all levels, from writing the standards to running inspections to overseeing the organization. In this spirit, AJP adopted a consensus decision-making model which effectively gave farmworkers veto power. We later brought these same principles into the DFTA, as well.

This combination of participation and accountability enabled us to create valuable spaces of encounter, where farmworkers, farmers, co-op retailers, food brands, and certifiers came face-to-face and made important connections. The DFTA especially played the role of convening these different stakeholders, and DFTA meetings and working groups were spaces where many disagreements and contrasting perspectives were brought out into the open, encouraged by the group’s commitment to accountability. Farmworkers confronted certification labels; farmers confronted the management of their producers’ co-operative; certification labels confronted each other. As noted in Chapter 3, this level of having to face your critics helped drive away the more corporate members. Yet the DFTA also facilitated at least as many positive encounters and relationships: farmworkers made connections with retail co-ops that later helped make a worker-owned cooperative farm possible; new farmers were welcomed into a community that shared their values; farmworker organizers took part in high-level discussions of fair trade; both the Food Chain Workers Alliance and HEAL Food Alliance were inspired in part by relationships forged at the DFTA; and the list goes on. While AJP was deeply involved in DFTA, we also convened our own gatherings and dialogues, primarily in the early years when we were developing our standards. Certification created new and different opportunities for collaboration: inspections and recurring training events brought both organic inspectors and farmworker organizers to farms and businesses, and standards revisions and Advisory Council gatherings brought representatives of all of our stakeholder groups into dialogue.

Participants we spoke with valued the network of workers and farmers we built up through these convenings and collaborations, spanning divisions that are rarely crossed. We can be proud that we made some progress bridging one major division which affects most commercial farms in the US: that typically racialized class divide between employers and employees, between predominantly white farm operators and predominantly Latine, immigrant farmworkers. It is powerful that our standards intervene against working conditions on the farms that produce a majority of our food, and it’s powerful that our process gave farmworkers opportunities to advocate for themselves without censorship. Our worker organization partners valued AJP because we strived to be an ally and advocate that carries farmworkers’ priorities to farmer audiences; and our position as a coalition means we have done so with at least some amount of credibility.

Our other programs provided other kinds of on-ramps, as well, and AJP’s certification helped connect farmers to movements. We got to know a good number of exceptional farmers who are leaders and role models in the struggle to bring justice to farming, and we learned much from our collaborations with them. Certification offered these farmers some recognition for their efforts, and we helped them share their knowledge and values out to the wider community of farm people, by sharing space as speakers and presenters at various events and by sharing their resources and stories through our technical assistance and AJP Toolkit. 

Our technical assistance served as another important point of contact for farmers that reached far beyond our certification program. Most farmers have limited opportunity or inclination to get involved in movement work, so we met farmers where they were. Through our outreach, hundreds of farmers received one-on-one connection, coaching, and support for implementing fair labor practices, well beyond questions of mere legal compliance. We combined a social justice framework with resources and guidance in a unique way. We may have reached some farmers who usually avoided thinking about power or fairness, but more often we reached farmers who cared about fairness and needed help taking the next step. Both farmers and AJP staff suffered from limited capacity to sustain these relationships, and it was easier to help with labor practices than with buyer negotiations or pricing (see sidebar). All the same, farmers often expressed their gratitude for our consultations.

All in all, our egalitarian approach and hyper-participatory process brought a range of benefits. It made AJP’s standards more rigorous. It expanded our understanding of each other’s experiences and of the food system as a complex whole. It served as an example of thoughtful coalition-building, modeling the solidarity and accountability we tried to cultivate in the food system. It helped us to resist the depoliticizing tendencies of nonprofit advocacy spaces. It lent us credibility in our outreach. And it built up a rare community of farmworkers, farmers, and other allies across a range of positions in the food system. Our efforts often fell short of their promise—as we discuss below—yet we are still proud of our work in this area. Many of us have derived great joy and satisfaction from building these connections, and various people shared that they miss the spaces of encounter we helped create. AJP likewise has missed our sister organization, the DFTA. We hope that new efforts will fill those gaps in ways that are attuned to the needs of this moment.

Small Successes and Glimmers of Hope#

Participants in AJP noted a range of promising developments that were less directly related to our main programs but benefitted from our work all the same, and we gather some of those small successes in this section. In one case, AJP was starting to explore promising new directions and collaborations; in another, AJP played a background role in major struggles waged by allies. In other cases, as in our certification, AJP’s overall work in an area may not have felt particularly successful but certain small wins still deserve to be acknowledged and celebrated.

One promising recent collaboration has been our work with the Good Food Communities network (GFC), led by the HEAL Food Alliance and the Food Chain Workers Alliance (FCWA), our partners in public food procurement campaigns. AJP only gradually began to work in local supply chain campaigns in the last handful of years, as General Coordinator Leah Cohen’s work in Gainesville, Florida, took us in new directions. First at the University of Florida and later in Alachua County, this work brought our certification and standards into the realm of advocacy and policy to benefit food chain workers, local BIPOC ranchers, and public school children. Over that time Leah became an active member of the GFC coalition, but procurement work was not yet fully integrated into our programs. When we shared our organizational difficulties in 2024, HEAL and FCWA hoped to find a way to continue our certification: first, because certifications like ours play a key role in qualifying vendors under the Good Food Purchasing Program (GFPP) labor standards; and second, because our certification aligns closely with the core values of their campaigns, ensuring workers’ right to organize and combining the highest standards for fair labor, fair trade, and environmental stewardship into one certification. The hope was that AJP, through our certification and our technical assistance, could help these campaigns build regional economies accountable to frontline communities. We are glad we have been able to support their work, and we hope that this promising collaboration can continue in some way.

One example of an indirect benefit of AJP’s work is the background role that the DFTA played in the fights of two independent, Indigenous-led farmworker unions, SINDJA and FUJ. These unions developed close relationships with Community to Community Development (C2C), a farmworker organization that was a leading member of DFTA and a partner to AJP. Each union separately found themselves fighting an employer that sought to sidestep their union drive by seeking certification with prominent ‘ethical’ labels. DFTA became an arena of their struggles: C2C helped the unions with corporate research, and the unions confronted the labels over their role in union avoidance and worker repression. The DFTA provided an important venue for parts of this fight, and the other labels were measured against AJP’s higher standards. This episode might offer strategic insights for the future, as one interviewee suggested: Are there ways that some future iteration of AJP’s work could offer even greater benefits to grassroots organizing, perhaps as a complement to a union contract?

We also draw some satisfaction from the small successes of our certification program. Farmer Direct, the Canadian co-operative of pulse and grain growers, said that our certification brought tangible benefits in terms of market access and improved pricing, as it helped them secure distribution across the US through Whole Foods and natural food co-ops (see sidebar on price premiums for more discussion of their case). It’s a reflection of AJP’s relative weakness in the marketplace that more AJP-certified farmers didn’t experience similar financial benefits, but we are glad that Farmer Direct growers benefitted in this way. Where we had personal relationships with farmers, we did learn of benefits for farmworkers from certification, as well. In one case, an AJP-certified farmer acquired workers compensation insurance to meet our standards when they were not required to have it by law. Some time later, a worker experienced a serious injury on the job and was able to claim workers compensation, avoiding major financial strain. We should certainly work to win universal healthcare and a stronger social safety net.⁸ In the meantime, every personal financial crisis avoided is a win—which is why we strongly encourage all farm employers to invest in workers compensation.

These indirect benefits and small successes offer glimmers of hope that AJP’s programs could have had much greater impacts than we did, and they may suggest promising directions for future work, as well. We turn next to the many setbacks and challenges we have faced in our work, which any future effort should also reckon with.

Challenges and Shortcomings#

Though allies have expressed appreciation for various aspects of our work, we have not delivered on our aspirations as much as we hoped. There is much to learn from our challenges and shortcomings, so we would be remiss if we left out those parts of our story. Many of the difficulties we share here are interconnected, but they fall into a handful of different categories: weak uptake of certification, contradictions of our governance processes, difficulty sustaining engagement, gaps in our coalition, issues of strategy,and our own mistakes and shortcomings.

Limited uptake of certification. Of everything AJP has done, it is hardest for us to see our certification program as a success, at least by the typical metrics of success for a certification program. From 2008 to 2026, from our pilot phase through the end of the program, we certified a total of 20 entities, with only a small handful of active certifications at any one time. The program has never come close to paying for itself through revenue. In the last few years we had only one qualified inspector from a worker organization. We don’t have extensive evidence that we improved working conditions for employees at certified businesses, beyond merely recognizing and supporting workplaces that were already exemplary—although admittedly we didn’t have strong systems for feedback and evaluation, and, as noted above, we did sometimes learn of important benefits for workers. Except for Farmer Direct, no certified farms or businesses reported financial benefit from participating in our certification.

There are a range of reasons for these disappointing outcomes, including structural and macro-level trends:

Farm businesses are plagued by tight margins and other challenges caused by a capitalist food system ransacked for profits by agribusiness and investors. These challenges have fallen especially hard on those farms most likely to benefit from a certification: the “ag in the middle” farms that are too large to sell direct-to-consumer but too small to have significant market clout.⁹ Most farms face fierce competition over pricing and have little room to maneuver in business decisions. The same conditions also constrain those retailers and buyers who have been most interested in AJP’s certification and vision, including natural food co-ops. Very few buyers have ever been willing to abide by AJP’s standards for paying fair prices.

A burgeoning market of ‘ethical’ certifications flooded the food system with well-funded propaganda and fair-washing. AJP also occasionally experienced aggressive competition by other certifications (see sidebar). Without corporate backing or professional marketing expertise, AJP was poorly positioned to compete.

Major organic food brands failed to follow through with certification by AJP and declined to sustain DFTA over the long term, despite their initial interest and support for both organizations. Some of these brands established their own competing certifications while others backed away from social commitments. In retrospect it seems like a fatal weakness that our plan for financial sustainability relied on the backing of corporations.

Farm operators and their organizations showed a weak commitment to solidarity with workers—or even outright antagonism. There are of course a good handful of important exceptions that otherwise prove the rule.

On this last point, we must name the fact that farm employers and farmworkers are divided by class, and class antagonism is a major reason why more farmers have not been aligned with AJP’s work. Farmers often see their interests as opposed to those of farmworkers, and this opposition is often exploited by agribusiness.¹⁰ This is a structural power relationship and can’t be taken lightly: employers control the means of production and own the value that farmworkers create with their labor. That doesn’t mean that employers are the top of the pyramid: they themselves are typically exploited by even more powerful actors further up the supply chain. It also doesn’t mean that farm owners can’t be part of a cross-class alliance with farmworkers—to the contrary, we believe such an alliance is absolutely necessary! But the nature of their exploitation is different. Class division is a major contradiction that our movements have to navigate; it is also a contradiction that our individualist, class-blind culture has not equipped us to manage well. While AJP and our movements generally have made a little headway on this issue in the last few decades, we have a long way to go. Even when our message of solidarity resonates with employers, they often feel that they are powerless to get better terms with their buyers and thus avoid making commitments (such as higher labor standards) that reduce their flexibility in managing their business (see sidebar on price premiums). Voluntary progress at the individual farm level seems unlikely until we can enforce better working conditions more widely.

The failures of our certification are thus tightly bound up with major structural and systemic challenges that our movements face, and it’s unsurprising that an ethical food label would struggle to make headway against powerful forces that made the food system so oppressive in the first place. However there were various issues we faced that were internal to AJP, as well:

Coalition process and governance structure. AJP’s democratic, egalitarian approach has had its contradictions and challenges, and practical reality did not always live up to our aspirations. Our attempts at rigorous accountability sometimes manifested as diffuse responsibility and a lack of clear direction. Most members of our coalition governance put their limited capacity toward priorities other than AJP and thus found it hard to consistently follow along and contribute. For years we paid for members’ travel to Advisory Council retreats twice a year, and these were joyful occasions; but when funding faltered, we fell back on video meetings, usually with low attendance. Two meetings a year were not enough to feel like advisors had sufficient context to make decisions, and these meetings often took the shape of brainstorming sessions rather than decision-making. Given our commitment to group governance, staff sometimes found it hard to know their role and cultivate direction where clarity was needed (we later learned this is a common problem in coalition spaces, where staff are often the people best positioned to consistently track the work at hand). The intentional and relational aspects of our process slowed us down and required more financial resources than if we had taken a more conventional approach. Strapped as we often were, staff needed more resources to fulfill our commitments well. Yet our emphasis on process felt like a hard sell to foundations that wanted to see concrete results.

We also experienced contradictions around our formal structure as a coalition of four partner organizations (later three after FOG’s departure in 2019). These partner organizations’ boards choose their representatives on AJP’s board and have other limited powers. While they have not provided funding for AJP’s operations, they provided significant staff and volunteer support over time. The founding idea was that these partner organizations would be invested in AJP as a shared project. Unfortunately, AJP did not succeed in deeply integrating the coalition work into the partner organizations’ programs, and most often the partners treated AJP as an independent project of whichever founder tied them to the group. We failed to cultivate a younger generation of board members, and in the rare cases when we brought on board members from beyond the original partner organizations, they have not been very active. This founder/partner organization relationship, while aspirational and well-intended based on relationships in the 2000s, may have limited the AJP board’s ability to adapt and grow in new directions.

Engagement difficulties. Despite periods of high participation, AJP over time came to experience low engagement with farmworker organizations and especially with farmworkers themselves. That’s not surprising given that we relied on farmworker organizations as a bridge to their memberships, yet we failed to build long-term, meaningful on-ramps for workers or organizers other than through governance or inspector roles, which primarily fell to staff from farmworker organizations. Farmers, by contrast, were a direct target of our outreach for both technical assistance and certification. Governance and inspector roles turned out to be burdensome for worker-organizers already juggling heavy workloads, a situation exacerbated by our limited capacity to offer support and language accessibility. There is also a gap between AJP’s programs and those of the farmworker organizations that has proven difficult to reconcile: as noted above, AJP’s programs aim beyond urgent daily fights to improve bad conditions and meet glaring needs. Perhaps for that reason, certification and AJP’s sometimes unclear strategy felt abstract and convoluted and required a lot of scaffolding for workers to engage with meaningfully. The fact that our standards are 75 pages long illustrates the problem well.

The upshot is that while we have been in relationship with our farmworker partners throughout our history, our shared work has mostly been consultation and alignment rather than shoulder-to-shoulder collaboration on projects. Recently, when we talked with partners about how we could shift our work to be in closer engagement and collaboration with farmworkers, we found ourselves wondering what such a collaboration would look like. It’s disappointing that we haven’t had obvious answers to that question, but it has also been interesting to hear what farmworker organizations have valued about AJP—often it’s been our visioning process, our advocacy around high standards and working conditions, and our ability to address farmer audiences on farmworkers’ priorities. There is much room to further clarify the ways that a future coalition could flank and support organizing by farmworkers, as well as what structure that collaboration could take in order to foster closer ties. There is also great need to think more deeply about how to coordinate organizations doing complementary kinds of work—such as defensive ‘block’ strategies vs. solidarity-economy-style ‘build’ strategies—which is one likely reason why AJP’s programs have been poorly integrated with our farmworker partners’ work.

Gaps in our coalition. We have increasingly come to recognize that key allies were not at the table during AJP’s formative stages. It took years for us to develop closer relationships with Black farmers and advocates (and we’re still catching up). Similarly, while we had a working relationship with an Indigenous community in our early years in the Midwest, our focus on certification (and thus commercial farms) led to that relationship falling away, as they prioritized growing food for community consumption. Racial justice and decolonization have long been part of our stated vision, but we have had gaps on both counts in terms of understanding and practice. One observer suggested that adopting the lofty name Agricultural Justice Project demands more direct engagement with the legacy of the Black Freedom Struggle and the justice visions of African American farmers, and we agree. We have at times been less than skillful in our attempts at being more inclusive, and that has been a setback for relationships that we valued. We could do a lot better involving BIPOC farm folks in our leadership, and we could be a lot clearer about how our work advances the vision of racial justice and decolonization. For the last number of years we have been working in that direction—including through this assessment process—but much remains to do.

Ambiguous strategy. As a market-based strategy, certification brings with it a range of constraints and challenges. One constraint for AJP has been narrowing our frame and our target audience to commercial farms and food businesses. This is a strength insofar as it let us translate movement values into practices that could theoretically be adopted across our capitalist food system. Yet this translation also sidelines important dimensions of justice, so that the standards are unable to address certain key issues in any direct way: land access and reparations, for example, or immigration justice. Tomás Madrigal described the paradox this way: on the one hand, a certification label is one of many “false solutions” to the problems of capitalist agriculture, incapable of bringing about the transformation we need; on the other hand, the work of AJP, DFTA, and our allies was occasionally threatening enough to draw strong opposition by corporate interests.¹¹ AJP’s organizational strategy has lived in the gray area between these two truths, and it has often been difficult to navigate that ambiguity.

For founders of AJP and many participants, certification was a “tool in the toolbox” (in Madrigal’s words), a means to an end rather than a goal in itself. From the start, most of us have been ambivalent to certification as a strategy and even to our own certification program, recognizing that success as a certification would not necessarily mean that we were achieving our goals—practicing accountability, building solidarity, building the movement. In fact, success could easily come at the expense of our goals if it meant we had to compromise our principles to attract more clients. At times certification (or at least our approach to it) seemed to serve our purpose; but our conflicted feelings towards that program suggests that AJP’s strategy was something more like narrative change. We convened farmworkers and farmers to envision justice; we translated their visions into high standards that could hold others accountable; we helped exemplary farms meet those standards in order to push the limits of what’s possible. All of these paths were roundabout ways to change the common sense in farming. Sometimes we seemed to embrace failure as a certification because it helped prove the point: if these reforms are so impossible, that shows how rotten our food system has become. We never articulated this narrative change strategy in a systematic way, though that probably would have been helpful. In practice our messaging was often unclear, shifting between advocacy around our transformative vision and promotion of our more mundane certification. The complexity of shifting between these two different registers at times led to confusion and misunderstandings.

Given the limits of certification as a strategy, it’s ironic that AJP was frequently dismissed as radical and utopian—our values might be that, but our standards are not.¹² In most cases they merely hold the agricultural industry up to the same standards as higher-status parts of the economy. Farming has resisted the reforms won long ago by regular people in other sectors. With its roots in plantation slavery and colonialism, and with a workforce largely drawn from the most vulnerable workers of the Global South, industrial agriculture remains one of the most obvious legacies of our brutal history (see Race, Labor, & Land). If AJP’s standards seem impractical, that is only because of how thoroughly exploitation has been naturalized in farming—and how much our movements will have to grow before we can win AJP’s standards across the food system.

And yet our certification strategy was somewhat impractical in other key respects, as it highlighted important gaps in our skills and capacities. Certification entailed a heavy administrative burden on AJP staff, farmers, and business operators, and it shaped our work in ways that made it hard for volunteers to pitch in. It also placed burdens on the farmworker organizers we enlisted as inspectors. Our approach of using two inspectors—one organic inspector, one worker organizer—greatly increased the cost and complexity of inspections. The resulting high cost was an additional turn-off for potential clients. We resolved to offset those costs by raising donations, eliminating the costs entirely for farms and businesses that were BIPOC-led or small-scale; but our fundraising was never particularly robust or successful compared to the resources we needed to stabilize our programs. We needed to recruit certifying agencies who would manage applications and coordinate inspections, and those agencies needed a certain volume of certifications to make it worth their while. We needed to advertise and promote our certification to multiple audiences, including potential clients and the wider public, which required skills and inclinations that the scrappy, passionate amateurs who took part in AJP generally did not possess. We may have been stronger than some other certifications on questions of vision and advocacy, and it often felt like we were “punching above our weight”—especially in the DFTA as we rubbed elbows with much more polished corporate types—yet those strengths did not enable us to launch a successful certification program in the end.¹³

Given our ambivalence to certification, we have to wonder: did we sabotage ourselves sometimes? Possibly, though our shared sense is that we gave it an honest effort and tried to adapt our program over time and reconcile our contradictory goals. At times, we also made mistakes and poor decisions. With our low capacity and big ambitions, we often spread ourselves thin and struggled with follow-through. We appreciate our partners who have been understanding with our shortcomings, and we apologize to allies who we let down at different times. Mistakes are inevitable, and many other factors noted here increased the cost of our mistakes. It would have been a tall order for any group to make progress toward all the goals we took on; but given how much our project cut against the grain, success would have required a very high level of performance. We take solace from the better outcomes of our work and look forward to doing better and being sharper in whatever comes next.

Conclusion#

These reflections are part of our effort to document and understand the outcomes of almost thirty years of work as a coalition. Looking back, we can now make some broad assessments. While our emphasis on certification had benefits, it no longer feels as promising to us as a movement-building strategy, not least because certification provides weak on-ramps for participation at a time when our movements need to bring many more people on board. As we discuss in chapter nine, we agree with the diagnosis put forward by many movement groups: that the present threat of authoritarianism demands we rapidly pull together broad formations to defend democracy and strengthen it moving forward. If we do not take this urgent action, our other goals will be off the table for a while and our people will face terrible consequences. The question is whether we can build an alliance of the working and middle classes in farming—workers, farmers and small business owners, and allies—and polarize these groups against our shared enemy (the investor class) while staying true to our principles. A looser approach to coalition—the ‘united front’—can help us build common cause, but there is still a need for principled, visionary leadership by those who call for a reconstruction of our oppressive society, especially workers and frontline communities. That question of how to stick to principles while reaching out to a broad range of possible allies is one that AJP has wrestled with for a long time, and we hope that our experience helps others take on this work in new ways.

We noted the problem of class divisions above, and our movements struggle with other divisions, as well. But not all farmers are the same, and most farmers (as small business owners) are not of the same class as agribusiness and Wall Street (large capitalists, billionaires). Some farmers may align with the political agenda of agribusiness at times, but there are also major conflicts between farmers and agribusiness (as in rural fights against large CAFOs, for example).¹⁴ We need clarity about what causes some farmers to align with an anti-worker, agribusiness agenda, and we need to split that alliance where we can.¹⁵ How can we bring more farmers into a cross-class alliance? 

Shared values are important, and we still believe there is plenty of room to reach potential allies through appeals to people’s hearts and sense of justice. Vision, strategy, skillful communication, and relationship-building are also necessary, and that’s where AJP could have benefited from thinking more like organizers. Our certification strategy was complicated, and greater strategic clarity could have led to more impact. Movement tools like the Midwest Academy Strategy Chart prompt organizers to harmonize all the different parts of a strategy: who is with us, who could be with us, who we’re opposing, what we aim to win, and how we propose to achieve those goals.¹⁶ Our answers to those questions should be rooted in a careful landscape analysis, and we should evaluate our progress and change tack as needed. The remaining chapters of this report offer our first attempt at such an analysis, as well as reflections on strategy and practice. While AJP as an organization is not in a position to shift our programs in new directions, we hope that these reflections can still inform the next chapter of our movements.