Our movements must fill critical gaps in our movement ecosystem. Because we need much more power in order to win our goals, and because movement power is measured in masses of activated people, 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.

Gaps in the ecosystem weaken our movements#

In our landscape analysis and throughout this report, we highlight the challenges, threats, and opportunities of this political moment in order to make the case for an ambitious set of long-term goals—a reconstruction of US agriculture and society. The only force capable of achieving such a reconstruction is a movement of movements, a society-wide upsurge of people demanding real change. Yet US movements are in a weak state after many years of defeats and state repression, including Jim Crow, multiple Red Scares, COINTELPRO, and union-busting, as well as the softer tactics of philanthropy and the “nonprofit industrial complex.”¹

Few sectors bear the marks of this repression as much as agriculture, where discriminatory farm policy, industrialization, immigration policy, and—especially in the case of farmworkers and Black farmers—vigilante violence have all undermined the basis for popular power (see Chapter 2). Into the vacuum of popular mobilization swept the nonprofit sector, first with the rise of food banks and later with the entry of the USDA into sustainable agriculture and community food systems.² Today the majority of policy and advocacy work in food and farming takes place within a dense complex of nonprofits, only rarely anchored in grassroots movements. While the organic movement has some roots in the New Left and occasionally hearkens back to the radical agrarian tradition, the politics of the movement have never been uniformly progressive, long since muddled by the rise of the organic industry; by an agrarian mythology of family farms with questionable politics; by an emphasis on personal lifestyle over collective action; and by the anti-poor, white supremacist legacy of the “pure food” and “health food” movements.³

In the wider view, there are promising signs of revival for our movements today. The years after 2008 have brought a resurgence of organizing and protest, when many newly politicized young people began turning to labor and community organizing with renewed hope for social change. Yet many veteran organizers offer a sober assessment of movement conditions: while new generations of organizers have brought refreshing levels of creativity and commitment to the work, they enter a movement ecosystem that mostly lacks strong anchor institutions to mentor and develop new recruits.⁴ Without mentorship that’s grounded in organizing traditions, movement participants have difficulty making sense of their experiences and forming realistic expectations of themselves and others, leading to burnout, conflict, and other destructive tendencies. Without strong movement anchors, our organizations often operate without clearly defined goals, power analysis, or strategy; and our movements are low in strategic capacity—that is, we lack the skills, orientation, and venues to involve large numbers of people in an on-going, grassroots process of developing and executing movement strategy.⁵ Years of straitened circumstances and urgent needs have drawn us to provide services to our people and build welcoming community spaces, leaving us with little energy or resources for organizing.⁶

In the context of this weakened movement ecosystem, our connection to radical ancestors is broken, our power and our ambitions shrink, and it becomes harder to organize collectively towards transformative goals. In the case of the organic movement, this has led to an excessive emphasis on entrepreneurialism, individual lifestyle and consumption, and charity. We lack the people power to win our policy proposals; we build alternative institutions that we can’t scale up; and we develop ecological growing practices that we can’t spread widely. In the case of the farmworker movement, we are stuck largely in defensive fights against the most immediate harms—sexual harassment, wage theft, pesticide exposure, deportation—with little hope of making the work itself less exploitative or back-breaking. Breaking out of these ruts will require people power plus a lot of coordination and alignment, and those are not things our current movement ecosystem is geared towards building.

We need to address these institutional gaps if we want to actually build grassroots power and reverse our long-term trajectory of demobilization and defeat. Movement veterans emphasize the need for spaces for reflection, debate, and political education; on-ramps for new recruits and development of committed cadre; clarity about professional organizer roles and status; practices that build healthy, resilient organizations; skill-building around formulating and executing strategy; and much more (see appendix for resources).⁷ Relatively little of these discussions has reached farm movements, but our movement has much to gain from attending to these gaps.

In the rest of this chapter, we highlight three gaps in particular that need to be addressed by movements in agriculture: the need to strengthen and politicize the ties between the solidarity economy and the rest of the movement; the need to orient farm movements towards deep organizing; and the urgent need to strengthen our coalition practice and build united fronts to defend democracy. If our movements can sharpen our practice in these ways, we will be much closer to winning the agriculture that we deserve.

Solidarity economy: block and build#

The “social and solidarity economy” (SSE, or often just “solidarity economy”) is both an ecosystem of alternative economics and also a movement to grow those alternatives (see Social & solidarity economy sidebar). The movement has grown significantly over the last few decades with the founding of network and support organizations, not least the US Solidarity Economy Network (following the 2007 US Social Forum) and the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives.⁸ Union co-ops have come to form a promising opportunity for mutual support and benefit between labor and cooperative movements.⁹ In the realm of agriculture, younger farmers and farmworkers are building worker-owned cooperative farms, developing a model for democratic, egalitarian farms that share both the burdens and benefits of farm ownership more equitably. Grower cooperatives have long been a strategy for mutual aid in agriculture; and while these cooperatives often have difficult managerial challenges, being grounded in community and commitment to each other is a source of strength through hard times—an exemplary case being the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, an association of Black-owned farm co-ops.¹⁰ Retail natural food cooperatives remain some of the most movement-aligned anchor institutions in local solidarity economies.

To the degree that the solidarity economy as a movement is rooted in vision and values—that is, to the degree that it seeks to win community control over the value that our communities create—it is a threat to corporate capitalism.¹¹ For this reason, the success and growth of the solidarity economy requires a mass movement. It needs the strength that widespread popular support and consciousness bring, because the powers that be will not tolerate an economy that resists the commodification of everything.

That level of politicization and conscious identification with a movement is not very advanced in the US at the moment, when compared with other places or even with other times in US history. SSE as a movement orientation is much more developed in Latin America, for example, where strong political parties and movements provide members with both a political home and material needs: examples include Ciudad Futura (Argentina), a relatively new political party that also runs dairy farms that both employ and feed members; the Landworkers’ Union of Argentina (Unión de Trabajadores de la Tierra - UTT), through which thousands of small-scale producers grow and distribute food across a national distribution network; and the Landless Workers Movement (MST; Brazil), which, in addition to occupying and rehabilitating disused farmland owned by elites, built a rural educational system that educates children and helps to sustain and grow the movement.¹² We can learn a lot from these movement peers who operate at a large scale and with explicit political goals.

We can also learn from important examples of politicized solidarity economies in US history. In the late 1920s the Co-operative Central Exchange was the largest consumer co-op in the country, operating 80 stores across the upper Midwest; CCE grew out of the Finnish Workers Party and the need to provide credit for groceries to workers out on strike, and it had ties with both the Socialist and Communist parties.¹³ Mutual aid and cooperatives (including the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund) have long been important strategies for survival and community advancement for Black farm communities struggling against white supremacy.¹⁴ But especially instructive is the example of the Black Panther Party’s (BPP) survival programs—most famously their free breakfast for schoolchildren program—which provided a “model for community self-help,” filling glaring gaps in social provision as part of an explicit strategy to contest for political power.¹⁵

In this moment, various movement voices are calling for a combined strategy of “block and build,” both resisting authoritarianism and building our movements’ power and capacity to advance our cause.¹⁶ The more politicized examples above suggest that the solidarity economy movement has important contributions to make to both blocking and building, since alternative economies can double as both survival strategies and as political homes—shaping the movement consciousness we need to rally our people to the fight. Solidarity economics can foster farms that are not just sites of production but anchors for our movements; and the solidarity economy offers a model for building a democratic food system, through cooperative ownership of processors, distributors, retailers, and entire supply chains.

At this moment, though, ties are weak between groups building alternative economies and groups engaged in political fights. Many people in our movements would agree that these orientations are complementary, not antagonistic; but, as AJP experienced, it is often difficult to put these strategies in conversation with each other in practice.¹⁷ Despite the challenges, that is the path to power; if this moment teaches us how to make these links, our movements will be the better for it.

Matching strategy to ambitions: investing in organizing#

AJP has always insisted that grassroots power is the key to winning justice in agriculture. In practice, however, we have not been very successful at fostering the kind of broad participation by regular people that is the source of movement power. By following movement strategists, we’ve come to understand that weak participation is a widespread problem for movements in the US, a result of shifts over time in how our movement organizations approach social change.

In union organizer Jane McAlevey’s account, deep organizing, focused on building ordinary people’s power, has lost out to advocacy work and shallow mobilization-style campaigns, shrinking our movements’ horizons in the process (see Advocacy, Mobilizing, & Organizing).¹⁸ For decades, AJP and similar organizations have been focused on advocacy- or mobilization-style strategies that are calibrated to a weak movement ecosystem, where staff play a central role pulling off top-heavy campaigns while ordinary people play the lesser role of “symbolic actors, not central participants.”¹⁹ In other words, regular folks show up for the photo, but not for the planning. Because movement power is measured in numbers of people and depth of commitment, this approach sharply limits what we can achieve.

McAlevey situates this story in the decades-long decline in mass membership organizations and civic participation.²⁰ There are many reasons for that decline, though movement organizations share some responsibility, since organizations often fell back on survival strategies and clever campaigns because we lacked the numbers to win more transformative goals.²¹ The solution, McAlevey insists, is to reinvest in organizing—to focus on the slow, intensive work of cultivating grassroots leadership, building the people power that makes transformative goals possible, one organizing conversation at a time.²²

This diagnosis of the need for clear strategy and deeper organizing practice is widely shared.²³ This is not to argue that mass organizing is the only kind of movement work that we need, but a stronger movement ecosystem—one that builds and sustains movements that achieve big wins—will require much more investment in base-building organizations that activate and empower mass numbers of ordinary people, as well as a range of organizations and institutions to nurture base-building formations and a wider culture of organizing. To be clear, the base-building model is not a quick fix: these organizations also face real challenges at this time around sustaining participation, aligning towards transformative rather than local goals, recruiting funding sources that value the intensive work of organizing, and more. Like the rest of our movement ecosystem, the base-building model was built for different circumstances—shaped especially by compromises with the liberal, anti-communist state in the Cold War era—and we have work ahead of us to adapt and reinvent this model to win our big goals today.²⁴ But base-building organizations are also the stewards of crucial organizing skills that are poorly understood and under-appreciated across the rest of our movements. It will not be easy to shift our movement ecosystem in a different direction, but we have no alternative: without a mass base, our movements have no viable path to power.

Stronger coalitions & a united front to defend democracy#

Although movements often invoke ‘solidarity’ to mean a sense of connection and shared fate within a group, AJP specifically invokes solidarity to mean building connection across diverse groups: building coalition, stitching together our different struggles, to build a bigger ‘we.’ The reason we make this call is that farm movements’ fights cut to the heart of how American society is structured, and our different organizations—even our different movements—aren’t strong enough to win without a lot of backup from others. But, as Bernice Johnson Reagon discusses in her celebrated speech on the topic, coalition is not easy. Good coalition is necessarily uncomfortable. Many coalition efforts struggle with the amount of commitment and flexibility that this work demands, leading to “very light, unmeaningful coalition.”²⁵ Sometimes this is due to a lack of capacity, sometimes a lack of alignment or coordination, sometimes bad habits around competition with our potential allies. The actual experience of coalition can often be discouraging, but movement history offers important examples of when broad coalitions—however temporary, however imperfect—have won transformative change, from abolition of slavery to the best parts of the New Deal, and more. Coalition is our movements’ path to winning in our time, as well.

Veteran organizers have suggestions for how to practice coalition more effectively. Bill Fletcher, Jr., and Fernando Gapasin call for a systematic strategy of “identifying individuals and forces…that have sufficient common cause to unite” in order to coalesce our different struggles into an effective “social-political bloc.”²⁶ As they explain:

“To borrow an idea raised by the South African Left, we must delineate the minimum bases for unity to accomplish a set of objectives that strengthen the power of the working class. This larger objective requires organizers to think very broadly about who needs to be in the room to craft a strategic plan. Many efforts stumble on this step. Too often, unions and other progressive formations focus only on groups they happen to like working with, have a history of working with, and feel comfortable working with—rather than on who should be in the room if they are to accomplish their objectives.”²⁷

Today, bold regional coalitions demonstrate what this strategy looks like in practice. Teachers unions in Chicago and Los Angeles have won historic victories—powered by unprecedented community alliances—by using their contract fights to win benefits for students and the community, such as improved facilities, prohibitions on immigration enforcement at schools, and much more.²⁸ An even broader informal coalition of labor unions, tenant unions, and community organizations in Minneapolis and St. Paul “has yielded gain after gain: free school meals and driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants; getting Amazon to negotiate with workers for the first time; a $15 minimum wage”; and much more (see From Deep Alignment to United Front).²⁹

This ambitious, systematic approach to coalition is not widely practiced, and we at AJP have not been this systematic ourselves. But the call for better coalition strategy forms an important part of internal movement debates about how to improve our organizing practice, and the success of the examples above suggest this approach is worth studying. For farm movements, this raises various questions that we will need to wrestle with; one big question is how our various needs and goals line up with those of potential allies beyond our usual coalition partners.³⁰ It will take time and effort to build deep alignment around the longer-term, transformative goals we have highlighted in this report, but this moment calls us to address some urgent priorities that are already widely shared. Most immediately, we need to defend immigrant workers and farmers from a sadistic mass deportation campaign that is tearing communities apart and trampling over basic civil rights. Though they attack immigrants first and foremost, the national paramilitary force that the administration is building and training through these urban occupations threatens everyone. In addition, all farm people face serious threats from climate change, and this administration is gutting the institutions that protect regular people before and after catastrophes—emergency response, healthcare, labor and environmental regulators, and more.³¹

Defending our people and our democracy from these urgent threats is a goal that farm movements share with a broad majority of regular people across the US (and beyond). To succeed in those goals, our movements need a different kind of coalition than we have attempted in the recent past.³² We need masses of people who are not deeply politicized but who value life and cherish what democracy we have; we need liberal and centrist institutions and their resources, including many unions, Democratic-party-aligned organizations, and philanthropy; and we need the vision, strategy, and platform of progressives and the Left, in order to help people envision a real alternative to the neoliberal status quo that made Trump’s rise possible. 

Past movements have successfully fought authoritarianism through such united fronts—broad coalitions who join forces against a common enemy, at least temporarily.³³ United fronts are not as tightly coordinated as a deeply aligned coalition, but the idea is to work together toward one goal—blocking authoritarianism, advancing democracy—through scalable, disruptive actions. Such was the case in South Africa (which Fletcher and Gapasin mention), where the African National Congress, South African Communist Party, and others formed a United Democratic Front to defeat the apartheid regime. This is not a model most of us have experience in, and it rubs against common tendencies in our movement cultures. Yet united front work has deep roots in organizing traditions, including the Black Freedom Struggle and the New Deal.³⁴

A number of movement organizations are rapidly building a united front to counter the authoritarian threat in the US. Current leaders include People’s Action and the Organizing Revival Network; the labor movement coalition May Day Strong; and the broad alliance of No Kings. These formations, as well as smaller groups like Freedom Trainers, are training thousands of people in mass noncooperation tactics, focused on levers of power. May Day Strong members are organizing local community and labor ‘solidarity schools’ to build towards coordinated regional actions. Organizers are working to quickly shore up and scale these efforts.

Many farm people are already taking part as individuals and in our communities, but we believe it is important to show up to this fight with our farm movement organizations, as well, however we can. In this way, we can draw more farm people into the united front, improve our coalition skills, and link our struggles to those of movement allies. Farm movements have good reason to invest in a united front even beyond our immediate goals. If a united front effort is able to not only defend democracy but advance it further, we will be in a position to start winning our longer-term goals: ending the exclusion of certain classes of workers from basic rights and protections; ending the terror, scapegoating, and super-exploitation of immigrants; ending the domination of land and housing by the investor class; winning racial justice and reparations in many forms; and winning a livable future and a society that promotes peace and justice. 

Farm movements also have strengths we can draw on to persuade a united front to go beyond defense and fight for a just future. Drawing on the history of exclusions of farm laborers, we can make the case that rights and freedoms must apply to everyone. Drawing on the history of industrial agriculture, we can steer movements toward an ecological agriculture that works in harmony with the soil, ecosystems, and communities that sustain us. With our allies around the globe, we can make the case for global justice and food sovereignty, for a food system that protects land stewards no matter where they live.

People are rising up and moving, and people of the land need to be in the front lines. Our collective future depends on it.