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Paper short abstract

This article critiques metric-driven visions of agricultural transition (such as EU Farm to Fork and Denmark’s Grøn Trepart), showing how they sideline unquantifiable values -care, memory, responsibility, place-based skills-and proposes a framework that centres "the unmeasurable" as vital to change.

Paper long abstract

Visions of agriculture’s future are increasingly shaped by what can be measured: emissions, yields, biodiversity metrics, carbon sequestration. Strategies like the EU’s Farm to Fork and Denmark’s Grøn Trepart propose bold transformations of food and land use systems, but do so through frameworks structured primarily by metrics – relying on particular assumptions about what matters, what is possible, and what counts.

In this article, we examine how Farm to Fork and Grøn Trepart translate dominant indicator families of European agri-environmental performance architectures into visions of agricultural futures and the transitions leading to them. We show how these visions systematically marginalise what cannot be easily quantified, such as care relations, cultural memory, intergenerational responsibility, place-based skills and belonging. Because they resist quantification, these unmeasurable dimensions are absent from institutional decision-making and resource allocation.

The article identifies dominant narratives and value systems shaping contemporary understandings of agriculture. It shows how these frameworks, despite occasional references to the value of nature or rural cohesion, organise transformation primarily through quantified targets, performance indicators, and costed instruments, leaving little room for alternative imaginaries grounded in ecological embeddedness, rural livelihoods, and socio-cultural resilience.

Rather than advocating for improved indicators alone, we begin developing a framework for broader recognition of the unmeasurable as a legitimate basis for imagining agricultural futures. By foregrounding less-measurable values, such as those expressed in the Nyéléni Global Forum for Food Sovereignty, we highlight alternative, relational and place-based visions that elude capture by metrics, yet are essential to any just and sustainable transition.