Punjab has a large number of farm unions, most of them called some variant of Bharatiya Kisan Union, and they split and recombine constantly.
The largest have their roots in the Kirti and communist traditions of the 1930s and 1940s, in the Naxalite movement of the late 1960s, and in the agrarian agitations of the 1980s.
They organise by district and by village, hold permanent protest sites, run their own dispute resolution, and can mobilise very large numbers at short notice.
The Samyukta Kisan Morcha, formed in 2020, brought several dozen of them together for the Delhi borders protest and held that coalition for over a year, which nobody expected.
Farm labour unions, organising the landless who work on other people's land, are a separate and much weaker set of organisations with a different set of demands, and the relationship between the two is uneasy.
Punjab's capacity for organised collective action is the strongest in India and it is directed almost entirely at the centre rather than at anything inside the state.
The Bharatiya Kisan Union split repeatedly and the fragments are known by their leaders' names, which is how a Punjabi describes them: Ugrahan, Rajewal, Dakaunda and the rest.
They are among the most organised farmers' movements anywhere in India, with a village level structure, a membership that pays, and the capacity to hold a permanent protest for a year.
The 2020 and 2021 protest at the Delhi borders was run by that structure. The unions rotated people, ran langars and kept the camps supplied from Punjab for thirteen months.