AJP’s pitch has been that farmworkers’ and farmers’ interests are deeply linked, and justice in agriculture requires addressing the needs of both groups. This compelling message has often seemed like a ‘chicken and egg’ problem, however: farmers feel powerless to get better terms from buyers, and this serves as a justification for not adopting AJP’s fair labor practices. On the one hand, we feel this justification doesn’t bear much scrutiny: most of AJP’s labor standards are cost-neutral; and some standards have the potential to actually improve farmers’ businesses directly, for example by reducing accidents and conflicts or improving morale and employee retention. Our impression is that a bigger turn-off for farmers has been the way that they interpret standards on wage negotiation, collective bargaining, and open books management as an erosion of their authority in the workplace. One large-scale organic dairy farmer we spoke with in our early years commented, “Social justice is a threat to our way of life as we know it.” 

All the same, fairness in agriculture must entail both better prices and better terms for farmers, and these supports play a central role in the ethical certification strategy: certification, as a market-based strategy, is about offering incentives for participation. Yet certification by AJP almost never earned price premiums or better trading terms for farmers. This was a major gap that hamstrung our programs. Without concrete benefits, we could only appeal to farmers’ values (which, as Julie Guthman found in her study of organic farmers in California, are often not what people assume).¹

The farmers who certified with AJP confirmed that they did so because of their personal alignment with our mission—neither wholesale buyers, nor individual customers, nor anyone else cared if they did it. Unsurprisingly, our certification often attracted non-profit farms for whom sales were secondary to their social mission. A number of farmers were interested and aligned with AJP—and some even implemented all our standards!—but failed to follow through with certification because it brought no direct benefits and entailed a significant administrative burden. Such outcomes were perfectly understandable but still disappointing, since certification was how we aimed to build public, visible momentum towards fairness in agriculture.

In some cases farms were certified as part of a regional effort—such as our pilot in the Upper Midwest, or later in Ithaca, NY—where AJP and allies recruited both farmers and wholesale buyers in a given area, supported by outreach and advocacy in the local community. These efforts at building regional ecosystems had some of the strongest momentum and greatest promise out of all of AJP’s work. Our evaluations have only scratched the surface of how those relationships worked out, how negotiations took place between buyers and sellers, and so on; there is much more to learn there for someone who has the capacity. Yet both of the examples noted above hailed from the heyday of interest in fair trade and local economies. In the end we failed to expand those regional networks beyond the initial participants, and even they fell away after a few years.

Without ready buyers open to fair trading relationships, our technical assistance to farmers increasingly leaned on the pitch that fair labor practices could benefit their bottom line, especially in times of tight labor markets. We remain generally confident in this assessment (though labor markets have experienced big shifts, of course, and there are no guarantees). Nevertheless, farmers were hungry for strategies to improve their finances, and price negotiation remained mostly theoretical in our coaching. In order to prepare farmers to even attempt negotiation, we encouraged them to take the first step of analyzing their farm’s production costs—which any farm service provider can tell you is a heavy lift, especially for relatively small, diversified operations. We shared anecdotal examples of innovative CSAs who each year worked with their members to ensure the farm’s costs are fairly covered (Temple–Wilton Community Farm in New Hampshire, or Peacework CSA in New York, which AJP co-founder Elizabeth Henderson farmed for). We hoped to develop more detailed case studies that could help farmers implement such strategies, but those plans were derailed by AJP’s financial shortfalls in 2024.

It is interesting that Farmer Direct Co-op, the Canadian co-operative of grain and pulse growers, was the only certified business to report financial benefits from AJP certification, and there may be lessons there. Their member farms are highly mechanized, family-run farms with minimal hired help. On the one hand, they sold at a volume that tied them to wholesale markets, where product distinction was more important and relatively small price premiums could be meaningful. On the other hand, being producers of row crops meant that they were not competing with farms that rely heavily on super-exploited farmworkers, so fair labor provisions did not put them at so much of a financial disadvantage. The super-exploitation of farmworkers is a major subsidy to fruit and vegetable growers, by comparison. (We can also note that Canada’s universal health care system and social safety net are subsidies for working people that US farm folks should envy and seek to replicate.) AJP’s certification might have had more luck replicating Farmer Direct’s success if we targeted sectors of agriculture with less hired help, but our certification was designed to benefit farmworkers and not just family farms.

These issues are top of mind as we evaluate the performance of our certification over more than fifteen years. AJP’s certification rarely brought tangible benefits to farmers or, especially, to the working-class, immigrant farmworkers who grow most of the food we eat. Those who valued our certification—including especially our farmworker organization partners—were willing to look past this shortcoming and appreciate our effort to change the narrative and raise expectations in agriculture. Those who would consider certification as a strategy toward similar goals, however, should take note of the difficulties we faced.

One highly-respected farmer we worked with suggested that a prerequisite for being a fair employer is being willing and able to accept very low income over many years of hard work. Our movements have to offer something better than that.

On market-based strategies and competition#

One major weakness of market-based social change strategies is competition among those who should theoretically be allies. While AJP tried to resist a zero-sum, brand-focused, competitive approach to advancing our certification, this competitive dynamic still exacerbated some of the pre-existing turf battles that unfortunately arise in our movements. This problem is not limited to certification. Any entrepreneurial effort by a movement organization creates conflicting incentives that can undermine the goal of building common cause across the movement, both by narrowing what’s possible and introducing conflicts of interest. This is just one more way that capital disorganizes and divides our movements, and it stands as a major obstacle to achieving our long-term goals. The market offers organizations badly needed revenue and the promise of ‘win-win’ solutions, but the tradeoffs are significant. The rise in entrepreneurial strategies for social movements correlates with a historic demobilization of mass movements and, consequently, a loss of the popular power that won major victories for regular people in the past (see Chapter 7 on the movement ecosystem).