The year 2025 was difficult and disorienting for many of us, and 2026 will be no different. In this period of rapid change, we at AJP feel an urgent need to take stock of the threats and opportunities that our movements, organizations, and communities face. In this part of our report, we lay out our assessment of current conditions. This important movement practice of analyzing the conjuncture is more common in other countries than in the US, and we have not yet seen such an analysis that centers the conditions that food and farm movements face in the United States. We hope these initial assessments can, first, convince many more farm people of the need to transform society and agriculture in radically liberatory ways; and second, highlight promising pathways towards achieving such a transformation through coalition-building. Seriously pursuing these goals will require a much more detailed power analysis, down to the individual people and organizations that will make up those coalitions, who those coalitions will target, and with what strategies.¹

These chapters focus on struggles in agriculture, but wider political conditions frame the analysis. We are clearly in a new phase of contestation over power: an authoritarian right-wing coalition has brought their violent death-cult to the US government; liberal elites and their institutions show a staggering inability to recognize and counter the authoritarian threat; and communities and grassroots social movements fight bravely for a livable future but start from a place of relative weakness.² Neoliberalism is not gone, but its stranglehold over political debate is loosened. This moment resembles what Antonio Gramsci called a “crisis of authority” or “interregnum,” when “the old is dying and the new cannot be born.”³ This is a time of opportunity as well as great danger.

Social movements’ successes helped precipitate this political crisis by calling out the failures and brutality of decades of neoliberal governance. Since 2008, regular people have increasingly shown their willingness to take collective action for racial, economic, environmental, and gender justice in ways that defy political elites. While this rapid growth in both protest and organizing marks a break from the period when AJP took shape, movements remain in a position of relative weakness after decades of repression and disorganization (as we discuss in Chapter Seven). Our movements shaped some early aspects of the Biden administration but we never set the agenda. Elites in both parties have consistently indulged in militarism, war-making, nationalism, and xenophobia while ramping up repression to stifle dissent. The limited alliance between progressives, the Left, and the Biden administration broke down for good over the Democratic party’s support for genocide in Gaza, and this falling out helped propel the 2024 electoral victory of Donald Trump and his MAGA coalition. Now the second Trump administration has ramped up attacks on the entire working class—which is disproportionately people of color—through cuts to health insurance, public health, environmental regulations, education, and much more. The administration is most intensely terrorizing immigrants, disappearing and deporting them with unrestrained, performative cruelty, while also delighting in attacks—including outright murder—on anyone standing in the way of their growing domestic occupation force of ICE and Border Patrol paramilitary units.

Our communities have shown great creativity and courage in meeting these urgent threats, but across all our movements we inherit an ecosystem of organizations with long-standing challenges—challenges now intensified and made more obvious by new circumstances. It is slow work to build the infrastructure to effectively wield power and defend our people at the scale we need, but we do not have the luxury of time.We must organize as who we are, not who wish we were. On the positive side, large numbers of people reject the Trump administration’s actions. #NoKings and #MayDayStrong protests have drawn some of the largest crowds in US history, and organizers are working to make these formations into platforms for building broad, durable coalitions to defend and advance democracy. We are forced to quickly learn how to move from protest to the kind of sustained disruption and power-building that we will need.

As farm folks, these conditions affect us deeply, though not equally. Many of us are immigrants or children of immigrants, and we grieve the senseless cruelty that our friends, co-workers, and loved ones are enduring. People of the land rely on health systems, on schools, on environmental regulations, on agencies and programs that protect us in myriad ways, on civil rights and due process; attacks on these basic institutions—along with predatory economic and trade policies—all pose serious threats to us and our communities. We must fight for our rights and dignity, our livelihoods and economic security, our health and safety, our land and our planet, and our very survival. 

These chapters emphasize that we wage these fights on shifting and often unfamiliar terrain. Old alliances and patterns are breaking down, including the longstanding, bipartisan neoliberal consensus; and out of this current mess a new political landscape is taking shape.⁴ In these difficult times, farm folks need new alliances and new vehicles for action. Creativity and innovation are necessary, but changing our situation will require political power more than clever ideas. Our only hope for progress is linking our struggles to wider social movements and helping those movements be as powerful and focused as possible. By joining the growing chorus of regular people who are hungry for justice and democracy, who demand that our country put “communities over billionaires,” we can claim our movements’ rightful place in defining the future of agriculture—and ensure that our fights in agriculture help advance social justice for all.

* * * * *

With these goals in mind, we make the case in the next chapters for a range of strategic priorities aimed at winning an agriculture that centers people and planet. We believe these priorities should unite farm and land movements in this period:

• Win a people-centered immigration policy, towards securing greater labor rights for all workers.

• Build bigger, more powerful coalitions to win a democratic food system by de-commodifying food and land.

• Fill critical gaps in our movement ecosystem by shifting to a deep organizing and power-building orientation.

• Help build a united front in order to defend and advance democratic rights against authoritarianism.

Chapter 5: Farmworkers, the labor movement, & immigration

An exclusionary immigration policy and violent enforcement regime disempower not just immigrants but all working people, and this regime is a primary obstacle to making the agricultural industry more fair and just for everyone.

Chapter 6: Agriculture

Our movements must build bigger coalitions to de-commodify food and land. In order to win a livable future, we must replace chemical-industrial agriculture with agroecology. Because these tasks are essentially political, farm people need to mobilize much bigger, much more politicized coalitions.

Chapter 7: Movements & organizing

We need to shift our movement’s orientation firmly in the direction of organizing and power-building. And because we face urgent threats from an authoritarian regime—potentially setting our struggles back by decades—farm movements must take an active part in a united front to defend and advance democratic rights.