There’s an ever-growing preponderance of “eco-labels” in the food marketplace—203 in the U.S. alone, by one count. Inspired by an “increased demand for ‘green’ products,” according to a 2014 study in the Journal of Business Ethics, these labels alert consumers to everything from animal welfare to whether the food was grown without chemicals, GMOs, or harm to forests and birds. American consumers can seek out a fair trade label ensuring the well-being of banana and coffee growers and communities in Southeast Asia, South America, or Africa. But very few labels make such claims for food workers here in the United States.

One organization bucking this trend is the Agricultural Justice Project (AJP), a non-profit in Gainesville, Florida, that’s committed to the fair treatment of workers all along the food chain. AJP has been offering worker-justice-related certification and labeling since 2011, before the Equitable Food Initiative or Fair Trade USA (FTUSA) dipped their toes into the domestic arena, certifying their first farms here in 2014 and 2016 respectively.

Regardless of the size of a farm or other food-related business, AJP’s Food Justice Certification program requires that an employer offer workman’s comp, disability, unemployment coverage, social security, unpaid sick leave, maternity/paternity leave, “comprehensive requirements to ensure safe working conditions” even for migrant and seasonal workers, in addition to environmental standards—all with USDA Organic certification as its baseline.

Last November, AJP granted certification to its sixth business, Grafton, New York-based Soul Fire Farm, whose co-founder Leah Penniman recently received a Leadership Award from the James Beard Foundation for her commitment to tackling racism in the food system. AJP’s rigorous audit can be daunting, and its label is largely unknown to consumers. So, the decision to get certified was not a decision that Soul Fire’s founders took lightly. A firm belief in the concept, and a desire to see more farms engage in the process, convinced them to put in the time and effort.

“As thought leaders who are becoming more of a recognizable name, part of doing this certification was to say, ‘we believe in the values this represents,’ and to uplift the process,” says Soul Fire’s co-director, Larisa Jacobson.

Certainly, more farmers, food workers, and consumers are likely to now learn about AJP through Soul Fire’s connection to it. As a result, it’s possible more farms and food business will deem AJP certification a worthy pursuit, and more consumers will seek out its label. But the label is not AJP’s stand-alone goal. Much of the organization’s heavy lifting occurs behind the scenes, where it seeks to influence discussions about food worker rights in ways often less visible than its quiet (for the moment) third-party certification scheme.

Behind the Scenes

Farm work ranks as one of the most exploitative and dangerous jobs of the 21st century, responsible in the U.S. for the second-highest number of deaths in 2017 (260) after truck driving. About 20,000 workers on American farms contract acute pesticide poisoning every year. Additionally, since many farm workers are migrants, they’re exempt from labor laws meant to protect against wage theft, poor living conditions, and poor treatment—including physical and sexual abuse—according to a report by fair-trade nonprofit Fair World Project. Similar dangers exist in restaurants, too, and in grocery stores.

Leah Cohen, AJP’s general coordinator, first cottoned to the cause at the root of the organization’s mission after driving a mobile dental clinic around migrant worker camps in Oregon. “I thought I was making a difference, but as I started to peel back the layers, I realized a dental van doesn’t do anything [about] the pesticide-drenched earth, holes in unheated [residential] shacks, living in fear of being separated from your family and deported, or wage theft,” she says. “Likewise, it’s not going to do anything for farmers who can’t make enough to cover the cost of production, regardless of whether they pay a working wage to their employees.”

These issues were top of mind for AJP’s five founders from the beginning. Elizabeth Henderson, who’s also a founding member of the Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA), currently sits on AJP’s board. She and her collaborators fought to write worker rights into the fabric of the USDA’s National Organic Program. When they failed, in 1999, they decided to write up their own standards. They intensively researched the issue and reached out to a wide swath of stakeholders in the early aughts, conducted pilot audits in 2006 and 2007, then officially began offering certification in 2011.

Still, the certification process—which Henderson calls “very much against the grain”—is not the main point. Rather, it’s the “bigger impacts on the consciousness of the organic movement” that is the true measure of what she and her partners set out to achieve.

For example, the new Regenerative Organic Certification (ROC), which is led by a coalition that includes the Rodale Institute, Dr. Bronner’s, and Patagonia and is currently in its pilot phase, did not originally include rights for farmers in its social fairness pillar. “Because of the advocacy of our AJP team members and allies, [ROC] added farmer rights standards,” says Cohen. Other examples of AJP’s influence are found in the evolution of Whole Foods Market’s Responsibly Grown program, Fair Trade USA’s standards, and Ben & Jerry’s Caring Dairy Program. “This work takes years of organizing, and sometimes results in official organizational transformation if we are patient and persistent,” Cohen says.

Another way change comes to pass is when farms and food businesses hire AJP to provide technical assistance to various aspects of their operations. Even though they might not make it all the way through to certification, according to Cohen, “they take bits and pieces and incorporate them to make improvements” to bringing their workers into the decision-making process, for example.

AJP receives grant money from ecologically conscious organizations such as Dr. Bronner’s and the Clif Bar Family Foundation (CBFF). (Editor’s note: Civil Eats has also received funding from CBFF.) “There are not that many groups out there trying to create market incentives for social change in the food system, and we felt that was worth investing in,” says CBFF director of programs for food systems and economics Allen Rosenfeld.

Would Clif Bar also consider adopting AJP’s label for its own products? “Our cross-functional sustainable sourcing team has met with AJP and we continue to evaluate their certification program, as well as others that could meet our social justice goals,” Clif Bar & Company communications manager Dean Mayer explained by email to Civil Eats. “We’re also exploring the development of our own proprietary programs for smallholder farmers.”

One way or the other, with or without formal adoption of its Food Justice Certification label, AJP seems to be managing to steer the conversation toward greater worker fairness.

What’s in a Label?

Eco-labels pose something of a conundrum; the more of them turn up in the marketplace, the wider the so-called “credibility gap” grows, as consumers struggle to understand what the labels’ promises effectively mean (if anything).

As the Business Ethics study pointed out, “an eco-label may or may not involve an open- and consensus-based standard-setting process…may or may not be under government control…can be first-, second-, or third-party [certified], by verifiers who may or may not be accredited.” Additionally, since “labeling schemes are voluntary standards that are developed by private institutions … there is no commonly accepted legal standard” for them.

The confusion is compounded when it comes to social justice issues, says Magali Delmas, director of the UCLA Center for Corporate Environmental Performance and author of The Green Bundle: Pairing the Market with the Planet. “The question is, what is the tangible benefit, and how can we clearly convey [that] to the consumer? This is still a work in progress,” she says, “because it’s more difficult to measure and communicate social impact than it is environmental [benefit].”

But for consumers willing to do a little independent research, this is becoming easier. Consumer Reports rates food labels on its Greener Choices site. It calls AJP’s Food Justice Certification, conducted by third-party certified entities accredited in organics, “highly meaningful,” and confirms that its standards set a high bar.

Fair World Project (FWP) published a report called Justice in the Fields in 2016, specifically to evaluate seven farmworker justice certification labels—including AJP’s.

“Labor justice labels are important; just because something is grown organically or comes from a ‘local’ farm, that’s no guarantee that the people who grew it were treated well,” says FWP’s executive director, Dana Geffner. Her organization gave AJP a top rating because of what it calls the meaningful impact of its standards: “It’s one of the only certifications out there in the hired labor category looking to eliminate piece rate work”—paying per piece or per pound of produce picked rather than hourly—and “they also consider all the participants in the supply chain: farmers, workers, and retailers.”

Higher Level Organics in Viola, Wisconsin, became the seventh AJP-certified farm this month—the first hemp producer in the world to certify as fair trade. “It’s simply the right thing to do [a]s hemp production continues to rise…[and] an increase in agricultural labor [becomes] necessary,” founder Luke Zigovits said in a company press release.

Swanton Berry Farm in Davenport, California has a union for its workers—a deeper commitment to the tenets of their AJP food justice certification. For Nancy Vail and husband Jered Lawson, co-owners of Pie Ranch in nearby Pescadero, AJP certification is deeply linked to their farm’s outreach to local youth and its partnership with the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, whose ancestors once worked the surrounding land before “suffering the most outrageous trauma, genocide, and exploitation you can imagine” at the hands of white colonists, says Vail.

AJP certification doesn’t translate into a price premium for the food Pie Ranch grows, like an organic label does, and Vail says the pore-scouring process takes an enormous time and resource toll. But, she says, “We still feel committed to staying certified, to keep the conversation alive.”

For Brandon Kane, general manager of the GreenStar Food Co-op in Ithaca, New York (currently in the process of recertifying), “AJP was a natural extension of expressing our values—marketable proof that we are living up to our self-imposed expectations around a living wage [for our 225 employees] and supporting [over three dozen] farmers.”

In a quiet part of Tucson, Arizona, only a few miles southwest of the city center, the San Xavier Cooperative Farm honors the agricultural legacy of the Tohono O’odham, a Native American tribe that has farmed the land for over 4,000 years. Located on the ancestral village of Walk, the 860-acre operation, one of the few farms on an Indian reservation at last count, is a lush green oasis in the otherwise dry desert.

Julie Ramon-Pierson, president of the San Xavier Co-op board, grew up hearing stories about her grandparents and great-grandparents cooking traditional O’odham foods such as tepary beans, squash, and corn, and she remembers seeing her mother harvest and clean the native beans. She hopes the co-op will help resurrect narratives like the ones she was raised with.

“The primary goal of the co-op is to create economic development in the community, re-educate people about traditional foods so they can prepare them at home to adopt a healthier lifestyle, and preserve O’odham values, like respect of land, plants, animals, and elders,” she says.

The Tohono O’odham Nation spans 4,460 square miles in Southern Arizona and includes 28,000 enrolled tribal members. The land is divided into 11 districts, and the San Xavier District is home to about 2,300 members. Founded in the early 1970’s, the co-op leases farmland from the landowners, called allottees, and about 90 percent of its 25 to 28 employees are O’odham tribe members, according to Gabriel Vega, the co-op’s farm manager for 13 years.

While the co-op grows alfalfa as its primary money-maker, other parts of the property are home to orange, plum, and apple orchards; an assortment of vegetable crops; and native foods such as tepary, pima lima, black, and white beans, wild mesquite trees, and pima wheat.

In addition to growing and selling crops, the co-op hosts blessing and spiritual ceremonies and provides educational opportunities for the tribal community. In early March, for example, it hosted a cooking and culture workshop for women tribe members.

Jacelle Ramon-Sauberan, a doctoral student at the University of Arizona, is focusing her dissertation research on water and land rights, as well as the impact of the San Xavier Co-op. She sees the co-op’s impact as three-fold: “It keeps traditional ecological knowledge alive, assists with food sovereignty, and allows the community to know its history,” she says.

There is a real effort, says Ramon-Sauberan, to keep doors open and educate people. If a member of the O’odham community wants to learn how to cultivate a certain food, she says, the co-op creates a teaching space to achieve this goal. More importantly, this attitude helps foster a “communal spirit among the members” that extends beyond the organization.

Bringing the Water Back

Though the O’odham has built an agricultural history in the Sonoran Desert over the course of thousands of years—one that recently helped earn Tucson the honor of becoming the first U.S. city designated a UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy—the tribe’s farming legacy has been threatened in recent decades by a conflict over the desert city’s limited water supply.

Traditionally, the O’odham people structured their fields to channel water into planting areas, using the Santa Cruz River as the main source. When Tucson began to develop, however, its water demands drained the aquifers from the area, and by 1950, Vega says, “much of the agriculture ceased.”

When the farm formed in 1971, it fought to reclaim tribal water rights and reintroduce farming practices that had been halted during the dry years. In 1975, the San Xavier District sued the City of Tucson over water rights. Ten years later, the Southern Arizona Water Rights Settlement Act granted an allotment of 56,000 acre-feet of water yearly from the Central Arizona Project—enough to sustain roughly 900 acres of land.

“Water to this community is a sacred element,” Vega says. “To have a running flow of water is fulfilling the prayers of the O’odham people.”

During the period when water supplies were nonexistent, the connection between the land and its people diminished, according to Vega. “Wells went dry, farming decreased, and it led to the decline of mesquite trees,” which in turn led to the loss of agriculture and tradition, and a rise in diet-related diseases like diabetes.

When water returned, it opened the door to reintroduce native foods, a healthier way of living, and a pathway to reconnect to the land. And that’s where San Xavier comes in.

Even with the busy undercurrent of activity, the farm is a tranquil space where a palpable sense of peace permeates the air. This isn’t accidental, according to Vega. “Many of the O’odham elders wanted this area to return to an agricultural community,” he says.

Reconnecting with Tradition by Saving Seeds and Cultivating Wild Plants

Although the water has returned to the area and re-enabled agriculture, healthy eating habits are slower to catch up. Vega says for many people the reality of day-to-day life on the reservation includes fast food.

To reverse this trend, San Xavier Co-op is preserving the “genetic resources” stored in seeds. Though the O’odham have 19 different varieties of corn, San Xavier has access to only two. Recently, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) awarded the farm a grant to build a 2,400-square-foot cold storage facility to preserve its seeds.

“The plan is to go door-to-door in the community and see if families have corn seeds that were lost in the last few decades,” Vega says.

Organizations like Native Seeds/SEARCH (NS/S) help preserve indigenous seeds and serve as a repository to protect cultural heritage. Although there isn’t an official partnership in place, Laura Neff, an associate at NS/S, says that San Xavier Co-op recently received two community seed grants from the organization. Additionally, San Xavier sells its products in the Native Seed/SEARCH retail store. With efforts like these, the O’odham people may be able to return to the foods their ancestors enjoyed.

Another focus at San Xavier is cultivating wild foods. In the past, the O’odham relied on the pods of mesquite trees to supply them with protein. Once the pods dry, the O’odham harvest, mill, and eventually turn them into flour. “Traditionally it was eaten with water, and these high nutrients provided energy,” Vega says.

Diversity of Sustainable Crops

San Xavier Co-op remains viable—and able to aggressively pursue growing native foods—“because it invests in alfalfa crops, its best-seller on the farm,” Ramon-Pierson says. But the focus on income doesn’t mean sacrificing what is good for the land, Vega emphasizes. The co-op is Certified Naturally Grown, he says, which means it grows everything without synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, or GMOs.

“This farming community has been here for several thousand years, and there is an intentional purpose to how the O’odham use the land,” says nursery coordinator Cie’na Schalaefli. Keeping it chemical-free helps the tribe maintain its traditional values.

The co-op has also formed a partnership with the Compost Cats program through the University of Arizona, a student-run organization that collects food waste and scraps from local businesses, processes the material at the San Xavier Co-op, and sells it as compost to the community.

The co-op constantly looks for ways to diversify its offerings in order to stay afloat, Vega says. San Xavier has a blossoming partnership with both the food bank community and Tucson schools, says Ramon-Pierson, where it sells broccoli and melons. It also runs a catering business that blends seasonal indigenous O’odham foods with non-traditional items like tortillas and tamales.

Several other projects are in the works or already underway, Vega says. “Bridgestone, the tire company, recently contacted the co-op about the Gualye, a woody shrub which thrives in the desert Southwest,” he says. The interest is to produce rubber for tires. There’s also the possibility that pork production could begin on the property, he adds.

Giving Back to the Community

Even though the farm looks for numerous ways to be profitable, the O’odham Nation is the first priority. Workshops like the Wild Harvest teach community members how to harvest, process, and prepare traditional foods such as cholla buds from a cacti, also known as ciolim, mesquite, and prickly pear.

A colorful mural serves as a reminder of San Xavier’s ancestral roots. (Photo by Rudri Patel) 

“Once they learn how to harvest, they can do this on their land at home, bring it back to the farm, and we pay them by the pound,” Vega says. This fosters economic resiliency and a way to reintroduce traditional foods to children and families.

The workshops also cover the basics of how to cook foods like tepary beans—which can easily boiled in water with chiles—and sends participants home armed with how to search for online recipes used in making traditional O’odham meals. A resurgence of traditional foods, according to Ramon-Sauberan at the University of Arizona, is working to reduce the rates of diabetes and other health issues among the O’odham people.

San Xavier Co-op’s multi-pronged approach to caring for its community, is merely a “continuation of what’s in their ancestral genes,” Vega says. “Not many spaces that allow you to pay your bills, take care of your elders, and adopt a healthy way of living.”