When agrarian imaginaries touch uncertain grounds: moving beyond paradigms in agroecological farmers’ visions of a desirable future in the Valle Inferior del Río Negro, Argentina

The rising number of people affected by hunger and the climate crisis underscore the urgent need to reimagine agricultural systems for sustainability. However, debates among scholars and politicians on agrarian futures often polarize into two imaginaries: the ‘conventional,’ driven by technological productivism, and the ‘alternative’, emphasizing low-input approaches such as agroecological farming. Farmers’ visions of agrarian futures remain underexplored, particularly those of agroecological farmers, as they are often essentialized as embodying ‘pure’ alternative imaginaries based on their self-identification. This study, based on long-term participatory research in the Valle Inferior del Río Negro, Argentina, explores how agroecological farmers navigate between the dominant conventional and alternative farming paradigms. Using a multi-method approach, including visual and creative tools, the research reveals that farmers’ future agrarian imaginaries are anchored in the coexistence of conventional and agroecological farming at various scales. Informed by a de-/postcolonial Political Ecology lens, this study highlights the power-related, material, and discursive factors shaping these pragmatic imaginaries and calls for a more context-sensitive, epistemically critical approach to researching future agrarian imaginaries, moving beyond paradigm-thinking.