LAUSR

As sustainable agriculture turns in fashion, it becomes a contested territory between social movements and institutionality. In this article I analyze how three popular imaginaries around farming are entangled in the institutionalization of farming training programs, as spaces where sustainable agriculture is taught and enacted. These imaginaries relate to the lack of farmers, the responsibilization of farming heroes, and the social value of sustainable agriculture. Using a case study approach, I show how initiatives are molded by imaginaries that (re)construct and (re)define them as they get inserted into formal structures of funding, regulation, and dissemination. The inherited imaginaries are adopted—and adapted—by organizations both unconsciously and strategically. I also untangle how a politics of imaginaries unfolds as the popular social imaginaries about farming are contested and negotiated on the ground by staff members and apprentices.