This write up first appeared in the Agroecology Knowledge Hub Digest from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Learn more, contribute, and subscribe to the digest.
At the University of Vermont Institute for Agroecology, our international colleagues often pose a provocative question: How do we build and support the practical, political, and intellectual work of advancing agroecology in the U.S., AKA the belly of the beast? As an institute rooted in the United States, working with collaborators across Vermont, the country, and a global network, we constantly grapple with this challenge.
Given the outsized influence of the United States on global food systems, economies, and cultures, transforming agriculture and food systems within the U.S. is both a global responsibility and a strategic imperative. For agroecologists, this means confronting the harmful impacts of U.S. foreign policy, economic structures, and cultural power, while simultaneously cultivating viable alternatives within one of the world’s most industrialized agricultural landscapes. At a time of intensifying climate disaster, accelerating biodiversity loss, violence, deepening inequality, and growing geopolitical instability, the need to transform food systems has never been more urgent.
Thankfully, another story is unfolding. Across the world, movements in agroecology and food sovereignty are taking deeper root in communities. This is transpiring through powerful relationships between people and land, among differing yet complementary knowledge systems, across institutions and civil society, and among social movements that are eschewing the corporate agribusiness narratives of simplistic technological fixes and one-size fits all solutions.
Agroecology, long championed among the Global Majority and embodied in the ancestral Indigenous practices in North America and around the world, is gaining renewed momentum and increasingly connecting with efforts to build food sovereignty, farm and food justice, and broader just transitions in society. This was evident in June when more than 600 participants gathered at the University of Vermont for the 2026 Agriculture, Food & Human Values Society and Association for the Study of Food and Society conference - “Just Transformations: Reimagining Sustainable Food Systems and Cultures.” The conversations made it clear that agroecology is not simply about farming practices; it is about power, governance, and the reimagining of food systems as sites of justice.
Emerging from the Margins
While agroecology is grounded in common principles, values, and commitments, it looks different in different places. We often hear people question agroecology’s relevance and broad-scale potential in a place like the U.S. But when it is viewed as an alternative paradigm for agriculture and food systems – politically, socially, ecologically, and practically – agroecology resonates strongly with many efforts already underway.
From this perspective, transformative agroecology demands an “uncompromising commitment to each of the ecological, social, political, and cultural dimensions of sustainability, addressing power imbalances, and prioritizing the agency, voice, and knowledge of local people, peasant farmers, and Indigenous communities.” (Anderson et al. 2026). As articulated in the 2015 Nyéléni Declaration, Agroecology is intended to be a container and a meeting place for diverse place-based approaches to build sustainability and justice, while also bringing together diverse methods and knowledge systems in dialogue across geographies.
To this point, agroecology in the United States has been gaining strength in the margins for decades. It is rooted in Indigenous stewardship and food system efforts, nurtured through ecological farming experiments and practices, codified in the scientific work of agroecological scholars, and sustained by activist networks often excluded from mainstream agricultural policy. The confluence of these efforts all adds up to important initiatives across the country that are building alternatives and advancing social justice, ecological sustainability, and community resilience.
For example, in Vermont,where the Institute for Agroecology is based, communities are building food systems rooted in ecological regeneration, mutual aid, justice, and collective governance. Efforts such as the People’s Agroecology School of Vermont support and share lifelong agroecological skills, political education, and uplift the culture of collectivism and internationalism while addressing the needs of agrarian communities in Vermont. Bread and Butter Farm’s agroforestry work and the Agrihood Collective are fostering innovative collective approaches to address farmland access and build farm community collaboration, while building an evolved form of land stewardship that meets the needs of farmers, land-based educators, food entrepreneurs, communities, and the ecosystems they are part of. Liberation Ecosystem, a network by and for Black, Indigenous, & People of Color advancing racial equity in land, environment, agriculture, & foodways to co-create a dignified future that is an equitable and safe place for Black, Indigenous, People of Color. These are just a few of the meaningful initiatives in the state of Vermont alone, let alone across the country. They illustrate how the values and principles of agroecology (if not always the exact name) are being cultivated through practice, education, and movement-building.
Elsewhere in the U.S., we are seeing efforts to bridge the gaps between agroecology and complementary food-justice efforts, such as from the Minnesota-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) who states that agroecology, “offers us the most effective pathway to transform both conventional (capital intensive) and traditional food systems to become healthier, diversified, resilient and democratically governed at all levels — local, subnational, national and international — while being accountable and responsive to the needs of those actively engaged in the system, including food eaters, food system workers and food producers.” Their website offers a useful FAQ that includes descriptions of the relationship between organic agriculture, regenerative agriculture, and agroecology in the USA.
Other advocates, such as the National Family Farm Coalition, a national coalition representing grassroots farm, ranch, and fishing organizations, are fighting for specific legislation and amendments to the U.S. Farm Bill that are agroecological, even if they do not explicitly mention agroecology. These include policy solutions such as dairy reform with supply management and price floors, strengthening land access and fighting land consolidation by corporations, and improving access to agricultural credit.
These initiatives remind us that agroecology is not merely a package of techniques but a living process of social and ecological transformation. All of which may come in different forms depending on place-based needs and strategies.
Food Sovereignty, Governance, and Power
The theme of this issue of Agroecology Digest—Food Sovereignty, Governance, and Power—could not be timelier. While some narrow understandings of agroecology shy away from analyzing power, transformative agroecology weaves together the biophysical transformation of agroecosystems and political change. One powerful way this is done is by affirming the link between agroecology and food sovereignty.
Food sovereignty requires analyzing the structures and cultures that prevent people and communities from making decisions about their own food systems. It also requires affirming people’s right to food and their ability to grow, forage, and hunt in their communities. Ultimately, food sovereignty provides a social and political bedrock that complements the growth of agroecology. Agroecology and food sovereignty, especially in the United States, are undermined by the entrenched power of corporate agribusiness, structural racism, the erosion of democracy, factory farming, concentrated land ownership, the dispossession of Indigenous communities, and the persistent exploitation of migrant farmworkers. Tackling these issues isn’t incidental or tangential to agroecology; rather, they are the fundamental domains of transformation needed to build a foundation for agroecology and, in turn, food sovereignty, to grow.
Ultimately, Agroecology without food sovereignty risks becoming a technical toolkit stripped of its transformative potential. Food sovereignty without agroecology risks neglecting the ecological foundations necessary for resilient futures. Together, they offer a coherent vision for transforming food systems.
Many of the ideas presented at the “Just Transformations” conference reflected this convergence. The sessions moved beyond discussions of production practices to also engage questions of rights, political economy, climate justice, knowledge co-creation, building agroecological markets, and transforming policies and institutions. Importantly, they underscored a growing recognition that agroecology requires both ecological and political transformation, which will only be accomplished through deep relationships and network building.
Building Networks, Cultivating Change
Agroecology does not spread through standardization. It grows through relationships, including grassroots organizing, farmer-to-farmer exchanges, community-university partnerships, and alliances that bridge sectors, geographies, and movements. Recent examples of this relationship-building include the 2025 Nyeleni gathering in Sri Lanka, and the 2024 Right to Food Community of Practice gathering. These convenings highlight powerful processes of network and alliance building that create spaces where practitioners, organizers, researchers, and community leaders can learn from one another as peers. Such spaces help foster a different approach to the co-creation of knowledge that values lived experience and community-located analysis alongside formal expertise. Most importantly, these spaces call for collaboration over competition.
Grassroots led processes, like those described above, are in need of further investment and support in the United States and globally. They are essential for navigating the complexity of transformation by enabling participants to share lessons, amplify local innovations, coordinate collective action, and build solidarity across diverse contexts. In a country as large and fragmented as the United States, they are critical for connecting isolated efforts into a broader movement.
At the same time, network-building needs to go further and be mobilized in processes of change. Existing agricultural institutions remain heavily oriented toward industrial production models. Thus, reorienting public investment and governance toward agroecological futures requires deliberate collective action. Strengthening organizations and building Nets that Work, a term referring to networks that go beyond connection and information sharing (Peña, 2024), is a potential next step, as it enables deeper collective work toward changes in policy, research, and institutions.
The Role of the Academy
As agroecology gains visibility in the United States, universities have a role to play in advancing transformative agroecology, though it is important to proceed with humility and care, as articulated by the Agroecology Research Action Collective in the Operating Principles for Engaged Scholar-Activism. This role is not as leaders standing apart from movements or as experts extending knowledge to farmers, but rather as partners working alongside communities to build a just and sustainable food future.
While farmers continue to innovate through diversified and regenerative practices, and communities strengthen local food systems grounded in justice and resilience; scholars and academic institutions can contribute by supporting these efforts through participatory research, co-learning, and long-term partnerships. By co-creating knowledge, researchers can help to build thick legitimacy for agroecology (Montenegro de Wit and Iles, 2016) and add to the tapestry of change-making needed to advance just transformations.
Recognizing this need, the UVM Institute for Agroecology is actively fostering collaboration among academic institutions and centers aligned with a transformative agroecology approach. Grounded in the principles of knowledge democratization, the IFA aims to connect researchers and educators at universities with local organizations and policy advocates. This can support the coordinated co-creation of knowledge and co-learning that accompany and complement the work led by farmers, grassroots organizations, and other food system advocates.
The IFA is exploring how to weave place-based knowledge co-creation work across the country to build the evidence base for agroecology, highlight bright spots of agroecology and agroecological work throughout the U.S., and exchange innovative approaches to strengthen transformative agroecology. By learning across regions, and coordinating among community-university partnerships, the IFA anticipates that this will lead to deep co-learning and co-creation of knowledge at the national scale. But the work doesn’t stop there. Moving forward, there is also recognition that significant steps remain to be taken to transform academic institutions to support transformative agroecology and deepen their accountability to communities.
A Call Forward
These are perilous times in the U.S. and around the world. What emerged from our experience at the "Just Transformations” conference at UVM was not naïve optimism but grounded hope and commitment. Agroecology offers a pathway to address multiple crises simultaneously: climate disaster, biodiversity loss, food insecurity, and social inequities. While it provides ways to introduce more sustainable practices into the food system, its transformative power lies in its work at the foundations of food systems, shifting them from commodities to commons; from reductionism to holism; from universal solutions to pluriversal pathways to transformation; from extraction to regeneration and care; and from competition to relationship, through political, social, and ecological means.
Meaningful participation in this global movement requires listening to and learning from communities, particularly those leading from the margins in the U.S. and the Global Majority. These communities have much to teach, as they have long advanced agroecology, food sovereignty, and social justice. It also requires solidarity with struggles abroad while transforming food systems at home.
In the end, agroecology is about far more than food. It is about how we live together on this planet and how we relate to one another and to the ecosystems that sustain us. The seeds of transformation already exist, but it takes concerted effort to weave together the many collective efforts grounded in shared values and mutual accountability.
For the Institute for Agroecology, the question isn’t whether agroecology can take root in the United States. It already exists in ancestral Indigenous practices; social movements; agroecological, regenerative, and organic farmers; transdisciplinary and participatory researchers; and labor and gender justice organizing in food systems.
Rather, the questions are: what strategies can further build the infrastructure to grow agroecological power? And how does that infrastructure nurture showing up in solidarity with farmers and movements for justice around the world?
Montenegro de Wit, M., and A. Iles (2016) Toward thick legitimacy: Creating a web of legitimacy for agroecology. Elem Sci Anth 4 (000115). https://doi.org/10.12952/journal.elementa.000115.
Peña, D.G. (2024) Enantiomorphs no more: Indigenous agroecology and the future of food sovereignty: Reflections on the U.S. Agroecology Summit 2023. Journal of Agriculture Food Systems and Community Development 13 (3): 35-38. https://doi.org/10.5304/jafscd.2024.133.014.