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. Doing so will require us to resist and erode corporate power over both producers and the wider public. Because these tasks are essentially political—not merely technical—farm people need to mobilize much bigger, much more politicized, winning coalitions.

Fight for agroecology to win a livable future#

The long view of US agriculture is one of corporate domination reaping super-profits—only now the agribusiness giants have gotten bigger and more organized, concentrating control of our food systems in the hands of a small number of multinational players. This causes a range of problems, as GRAIN and the ETC Group describe:

Concentration gives [agribusiness] corporations more power to dictate prices and lobby policy makers. They can use this power to disrupt scientific research, block regulations that protect people’s health and the environment, and undermine democratic participation in the shaping of food systems. Concentration increases their ability to crush alternatives and ensure the expansion of a model of agriculture that is immensely profitable for them while being hugely destructive for people and the planet. The industrial food system is responsible for a third of global greenhouse gas emissions and it is the leading source of soil and water pollution and biodiversity loss. It destroys local food systems and economies, displaces peasants and indigenous peoples from their territories and forces them to migrate far from their homes. It is also built on the severe exploitation of workers. Actions are urgently needed to take down the monopoly power of these corporations and to get power back into the hands of the world’s food producers, workers and consumers.¹

This corporate consolidation also extends to distribution and retail—including natural foods—so that farmers, workers, and eaters are squeezed on all sides.²

Consolidation in agribusiness and marketing has accompanied consolidation in production, as well. In the 1980s Frederick Buttel and Pierre LaRamee warned about the rapid decline of mid-size “family farm” producers, those for whom “the household owns the bulk of the assets, provides the bulk of the labor, and derives most of its livelihood from farm income,” typically selling wholesale.³ That hollowing out has continued unabated, leading to consolidation and intensification of production at a small number of the largest farms, accompanied by a proliferation of small-scale producers that often sell direct in local markets.⁴ By 2023, just 8% of US farms were responsible for 65% of production value.⁵

The landscape of large farms is deliberately opaque and hard to track: many large producers do not own land, equipment, or livestock. Fruit and produce growers often do not hire workers directly, preferring labor contractors. Especially in California and other major regions of industrial production, more successful land-owning producers have left production to become packers and shippers, landlords, and so on. Big ag has increasingly come to resemble a shell game, which not only facilitates profit-making at the expense of producers but also allows for plausible deniability when supply chain abuses are inevitably brought to light. Large corporate producers and shippers have increasingly shifted production to Mexico and other points south, leading to rapid growth in imports and dropping prices for farmers—while simultaneously undermining workers on both sides of the border.⁶ Meanwhile Trump’s coercive trade wars have created serious problems for commodity growers who rely heavily on exports.

Other corporate interests have also turned their attention to agriculture as a profit-making machine. The 2008 financial collapse sent big investors like banks, hedge funds, university endowments, pension funds, and sovereign wealth funds into a planetary race to snatch up farm land as a safe investment in a scarce asset, typically displacing farmers in the process.⁷ In the US alone, about 40% of farm land is now owned as investments by non-farmers, with significantly higher rates in key areas like California.⁸ Globally land prices have doubled in 15 years.⁹ More recently the tech, finance, and agribusiness sectors have teamed up for predatory “precision agriculture” and “carbon farming” schemes.¹⁰ The tech sector especially continues to hype their pipedreams of revolutionizing (and capturing the profits of) farming, through schemes such as automated production and harvest; so-called “vertical farming,” or skyscraper greenhouses; and “3D printed” gardens.¹¹ Collaborations between agribusiness and the tech sector threaten to wrench ever greater profits from our soil and our communities.¹²

In their recent strategy report, A Long Food Movement, ETC Group and IPES-Food contrast this “agribusiness as usual” trajectory with alternate pathways to agroecological food systems, controlled by small producers, workers, and communities organized as grassroots movements.¹³ Contrary to the claims of agribusiness, agroecology is no fantasy: despite the political and economic clout behind agribusiness, peasants and smallholders still produce the large majority of the world’s food, with estimates as high as 70% of all food consumed.¹⁴ Despite the suppression of research on agroecology and smallholders, community-driven research has made great progress demonstrating the efficiencies and resilience of agroecological practices, broadcasting grassroots innovations and best practices, and undermining the claims of agribusiness marketing.¹⁵ What we lack, however, is democratic control over the food system—that is why agribusiness can wield their influence and political muscle to remake food systems to their benefit.

Small-scale farmers and peasants have shown their strength, though, forming an integral part of the global justice movement and helping to make corporate-friendly trade deals politically toxic—as when Hillary Clinton was forced to distance herself from Obama’s support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) in 2016. Those fights helped break the neoliberal stranglehold on policy, but authoritarian opportunists quickly seized the moment. Donald Trump and others coopted and twisted our movements’ critiques for their own enrichment, using similar anti-globalization rhetoric but “inverted to justify more labor exploitation instead of less, more corporate power instead of less.”¹⁶ This inversion—plus Trump’s bullying—helps explain why the same multi-national corporations that previously pushed free trade deals now curry favor with a committed ‘trade warrior.’

In this context, the Long Food Movement authors call on us to focus on levers of power, diversify our tactics, commit to long-term struggle, and collaborate across scales, sectors, and struggles. On this last point, we must reassert our movements’ vision for global justice, alongside allies from La Via Campesina and the Nyéléni Global Forum, fighting agribusiness at home and abroad simultaneously and building unity among people of the land.¹⁷

Fighting agribusiness requires ambitious tactics#

In recent fights against agribusiness, one important field of struggle has been anti-trust action. With Lina Khan at the helm, Biden’s Federal Trade Commission adopted an activist approach to breaking corporate power, most recently derailing the proposed merger of grocery giants Albertsons and Kroger in 2024.¹⁸ Yet our movements need more clarity on the anti-trust agenda, and not just because that agenda is unlikely to advance under the Trump administration: anti-trust action will have limited benefits on its own and must be linked to other movement strategies and goals.¹⁹

Some farmers are calling for a modern version of parity, the New Deal-era policy agenda that covered farmers’ costs of production and ensured stable prices.²⁰ Under the parity regime, price floors functioned as a minimum wage for farm producers. At the same time, supply management curtailed overproduction, and farmer-controlled grain reserves protected both producers and consumers from price swings. Under parity, wholesale buyers were required to pay fair prices to farmers, saving many farms from foreclosure; under the current subsidy regime that replaced parity, that burden is shifted to the government—welfare for agribusiness, in other words, in the form of payments to the largest growers. A new policy regime that limits corporate profits, offers minimum wages to farmers, and cuts government handouts to agribusiness is likely to win broad appeal in the current crisis of affordability.²¹

Another natural counterpart to anti-trust—one rarely discussed—is land reform.²² Such a program could help advance both racial and economic justice by redistributing the massive tracts of farmland bought up by investors, potentially reversing Black land loss and serving as the basis for a greatly expanded public-goods approach to agriculture, which will be needed to advance agroecology. Land reform could break the high cost of land, which helps drive the industrialization of agriculture and keeps exploitative production patterns in place (see next section).

We must also win significant public investments in growing the cooperative economy at local and regional levels, establishing cooperative farm communities and land-based enterprises. Cooperatives of different kinds formed a major part of New Deal development strategy, and the most ambitious of these programs—including cooperatively-owned and -run agricultural settlements—are worth revisiting.²³

All of these strategies are aimed at rolling back corporate power over regular people’s lives. They have also all been part of past efforts to reconstruct American society, including the First Reconstruction and the New Deal. (Unlike the New Deal, we must ensure that such policies intentionally advance racial justice.)²⁴ These strategies should once again be part of a broad social-democratic platform that connects farm people’s needs to the visions of multiple movements: from land stewards and climate justice activists working for agroecology, to racial justice movements calling for reparations in many forms, to tenant movements demanding housing as a human right, to the labor movement’s demands for ‘Workers and Communities Over Billionaires.’

Beyond ‘alternative’: replacing chemical agriculture#

Organic agriculture has grown significantly since AJP’s founding, but it remains marginal to US agriculture as a whole. On the one hand, US sales of certified organic products reached a record high of $71.6 billion in 2024, with a year-on-year growth rate of 5.2%.²⁵ Yet actual conversion of chemical-industrial farmland to certified organic production has barely grown in many years, and organically certified acreage has even shrunk over some years.²⁶ Organic acreage has plateaued at less than 1% of all US farmland; and actual organic farm sales were only $11 billion in 2021, a small share of total organic sales (which includes processed and prepared foods).²⁷ Local markets, an important outlet for organic producers, have long been highly saturated, offering little opportunity for new operations to start or for existing operations to expand. CSAs are still a promising strategy for growing the movement and developing genuine reciprocity between farmers and customers; yet CSA growth has largely stalled. As early as 2014, these various signs led Julie Guthman to observe that organic and natural foods have achieved “alternative” status in the US and no longer pose a threat to conventional farming as an industry.²⁸

As a movement for ecological agriculture, our goal must be to replace the chemical industrial farming system, not merely supplement it. The organic industry, by contrast, may not particularly care if we end chemical agriculture or not—after all, many large organic growers have mixed operations, where a portion of their acreage is conventional and a portion is certified organic. If we hope to make agroecology the dominant paradigm and establish a right relationship with land, people, and all life, we must address the structural factors that drive the industrialization of farming.

Those structural factors will sound familiar: hyper-competitive markets have resulted in high costs and low prices for farmers, limiting their ability to change methods. As Julie Guthman explains:

Land values…reflect past rounds of intensification and valorization [i.e., price-setting]. With values capitalized on past profitability, all growers become subjected to the logic of faster crop turnover, careful pest management, and continual cash cropping, to name a few. This is the main reason that agroecological patterns of agricultural production have not radically changed in organic production. The fact that growers are so squeezed also contributes to the taken-for-grantedness of existing labor relations, increasingly the crucible of organic agriculture. Even the most well-intentioned growers have trouble radically reconfiguring farm work…. Although those with highly diverse, intensive, direct-marketing operations can make some economic space for better and more stable remuneration, they are still constrained by payments to land (in the form of mortgage or rent)…. In short, payments to land effectively reinforce preexisting patterns of agricultural production. For this reason, as well as from habit and for convenience, organic growers tend to replicate many aspects of conventional production.²⁹

Organic farmers are subject to the same pressure as all growers, so it’s not surprising that, as the organic industry has grown, the price premium has all but disappeared for producers (though not for consumers). Agroecology must retain value at the levels of the community and of the soil, preventing it from being captured or siphoned off by agribusiness and the investor class. Insofar as food and the means of growing it are made into mere commodities traded in a market, they will be subject to ruthless hoarding and extraction of value by the largest, wealthiest actors in the market. That’s why market interventions that erode the power of agribusiness and investors—including parity, anti-trust, land reform, as well as fair labor laws—are necessary for agroecology to compete against industrial-capitalist agriculture. Winning agroecology is thus a problem of political power—our ability to wrest control away from powerful market actors—not merely production methods or marketing.

Build a political coalition strong enough to win agroecology#

For any theory of change, your strategy must be able to generate the amount of power you need to win your goals (see the ‘organizing’ section in the next chapter). Our movements currently lack the power to win the kind of agriculture that our people and planet so badly need. Climate change, biodiversity loss, the political situation, and the myriad harms being visited upon our people all lend urgency to the question of strategy and power-building. So what are the prospects for growing our power, as movements for winning agroecology and justice on the land? To answer that question we have to consider who all of our possible collaborators are; and, out of those possible collaborators, who do we need to work with in order to win?

One constituency is the organic movement. The popular base of the organic movement is comprised primarily of regionally-based, non-profit membership organizations that bring together farmers and aspiring farmers, hobbyists, advocates, activists, and community members. In our farm-facing work, AJP has been in closest dialogue and partnership with these organizations. Like AJP, they have struggled in different ways to adapt to changing times and shifting fortunes—most recently with the whiplash from Biden’s unprecedented climate funding to Trump’s deep cuts. These organizations consistently work to support policy advocacy and lobbying by their membership, especially around the Farm Bill; and some have adopted language and methods from organizing, including by hiring a limited number of organizing staff.³⁰

Questions of power and political analysis are not foreign to these organic movement spaces, but they are frequently crowded out by an emphasis on entrepreneurialism, technical production knowledge, and lifestyle—all of which are important for building a movement that starts from where we are, but on their own these approaches are incapable of anchoring a movement. There is great need in these groups for more political education, diversity in race and class, and connection to social movements. Some groups have made progress on these fronts in response to critiques around racial justice, fair working conditions and class difference, and more.

There are many other groups beyond these legacy organic movement organizations that are carrying the banner of agroecology in different ways. One is the broad and diverse landscape of community food and farm organizations, most of which focus on one community or city, doing the necessary, place-based work of building community and connection to the soil. Among these organizations, those led by Black, Indigenous, and other people of color have especially prioritized equity and justice—from a range of ideological starting points—offering different blends of mutual aid, agroecological knowledge, enterprise development, political education, and cultural organizing. Some of these efforts are embedded in broader community organizations, including churches and faith communities or immigrant community organizations. Many farmworker organizations (and organizations with farmworker members) are advocates and practitioners of agroecology, as well, addressing the dual need for healthy food and work that’s free from toxic chemicals.

Many of these community groups overlap with another important set of allies: the US food sovereignty movement, aligned with the international peasant movement La Via Campesina, the Nyéléni Global Forum, and the global justice movement. Compared with the organic movement, the agroecology and food sovereignty movement is much more explicitly internationalist and anti-capitalist.

Another constituency is the self-identified family farmers, with a whole additional ecosystem of organizations that sometimes parallels, sometimes intersects with the organic movement ecosystem. Some of these organizations have roots in farmer struggles from the Populist Era. Here, too, some groups have thrown their lot in with the food sovereignty movement.³¹

Looking further afield, there is the wide landscape of movement allies: food workers and the labor movement; the solidarity economy and cooperative economy (see below); social movements for racial justice, climate justice, immigrant justice, gender justice, indigenous sovereignty; and a range of progressive political groups. Then, of course, there is the wider public, many of whom are neither politicized nor connected to the source of their food.

Everyone listed here stands to benefit from a society-wide shift toward agroecology and food sovereignty, not least because these goals are central to ensuring a healthy planet and livable future. The devil is in the details, of course. As movements that are already committed to agroecology, our task is to create a political center of gravity that pulls people into a collective effort to win a new agriculture. On one level this is an ideological project, one that faces competition from regressive forces such as the so-called “MAHA movement” of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.—which sprinkles a few legitimate concerns about agrichemicals and pharmaceuticals into a dangerous stew of conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, eco-fascist tropes, and attacks on the very agencies that will be essential to rein in food, chemical, and medical corporations.³² Our movements need to offer people a clear analysis of the harms of industrial agriculture that is anchored in movements, liberatory politics, and a vision for a just future.

But our task is foremost one of coalition-building. Our different organizations each have strengths and weaknesses, but none of us—and none of our existing coalitions—is capable on our own of creating the conditions for agroecology to replace chemical agriculture anytime soon. We need more power, which means more people, more focus and commitment, and more coordination. We must ask ourselves: Given who we are already, who do we need to ally with in order to win our bigger goals? What do we have to do in order to build an effective, powerful coalition with them? We address these questions at length in the next chapter, but there is no doubt that farm and land movements in the US are at a historic low ebb of power. Our position requires us to link our fights with those of wider social movements, to ensure that broader fights for justice benefit farm people, but also to ensure that farm struggles benefit everyone else, too.