This paper focuses on contemporary back-to-landers in Turkey, secular and educated middle-class urbanites who ethically re-invent themselves as farmers of ecological food. In this fast-developing country undergoing massive urbanization and increasing political authoritarianism and economic precarity, back-to-landers express growing skepticism towards conventional forms of political participation and the upward mobility expected of their class positions. Concerned with agroecological futures, they cohere around an emergent movement seeking to generate sustainable production and consumption as well as alternative food networks that cut across the countryside and the city. The research is based on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted in western Turkey in urban and rural settings between 2018 to 2021 for a total of eighteen months. It attends to spaces such as consumer and producer cooperatives, meetings of organized groups, agricultural fields, open-air markets, and people’s homes and kitchens, and engages with different actors back-to-landers regularly interact with, including local villagers, urban food activists, and ecological living enthusiasts. Combining participant observation, detailed life histories, visual ethnography of social media accounts, and discourse analysis of texts circulating in these networks, this paper focuses on the conceptual implications of imagining unrealized scenarios within this emerging agroecological movement. Many efforts to turn to ecological living, to farm, to work with others, and to organize in collectives end up in failure and disappointment. A variety of unsurmountable challenges, including personal circumstances, interpersonal conflicts, logistical difficulties, economic hardships, and political suppression, result in an affective register whereby back-to-landers and food activists envision situations that they know will not materialize, but still engage in the work of imagining what could have been. Oftentimes, comparisons to other countries, especially Europe and the west, dominate these narratives. Juxtapositions of the here and the there, often designations without a referent, give rise to a subjective mode that is emblematic of Turkey’s contemporary condition where it is becoming increasingly difficult to bridge the gap between ideal and reality in organizing for radical socio-political change. Drawing from a recently growing anthropological body of work that conceptualizes the subjunctive (Whyte 2005, Kyriakides 2918, Hardin 2021), particularly in relation to environmental politics (Ahmann 2019), this paper investigates how people navigate feelings of possibility and impossibility and deal with the fragility of their actions, ultimately arguing that the subjunctive mood emerges as a site for enacting alternative possibilities and enables people to sustain hope and keep on going against all odds.