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Presentation short abstract

This paper presents early ethnographic results on ecological conversion in Walloon family farming. Focusing on inherited farms, it shows how heritage, debt, gender and intergenerational relations shape change, framing conversion as a relational and affective process rather than a technical shift.

Presentation long abstract

This paper presents preliminary results from the AGRICONVERT project, an ethnographic research conducted in the Walloon Region (Belgium) that explores the socio-economic and relational drivers and obstacles to ecological conversion in agriculture. While much of the political ecology literature on agroecological transitions has focused on alternative farming projects, newcomers and grassroots movements, AGRICONVERT shifts attention toward farmers from multigenerational family farms—often distant from the imaginaries of “alternative” or activist agroecology.

Drawing on fieldwork with male and female farmers who have inherited conventional farming models, this paper examines how ecological transitions are experienced, negotiated, or resisted within the everyday realities of family farming, where heritage, indebtedness, gender relations and intergenerational dynamics deeply shape possibilities for change. Preliminary findings suggest that ecological conversion in these contexts cannot be understood solely as a technical or ideological shift but rather as a relational and affective process, embedded in couples’ negotiations, parent–child tensions, and the emotional economies of inheritance and continuity.

By engaging with these lived experiences of “ordinary” farmers—neither agribusiness investors nor small-scale pioneers—this contribution aims to de-romanticise agroecology and to highlight the ambivalence of sustainability transitions when they unfold within inherited, gendered and economically constrained family structures. Echoing feminist approaches that view critique as generative (Gibson-Graham, 2011), we propose to read these tensions not as failures but as productive frictions that reveal the complexity of building viable agroecological futures from within the social worlds of conventional agriculture.