Shifting the technical conditions of farming has been a focus of development for centuries, and directly influences the labor process on-farm, dictating how farmers work, the underlying reason for that work, and their social and ecological relations (Kloppenburg 2014; Little and Watts 1999; Long et al. 1986). With the rise of the industrial agricultural model and its accompanying geopolitical relations, Malawi has focused public and private resources on ‘modernizing’ its agricultural sector. In this dissertation, I examine how agricultural practice has structured rural livelihoods in Malawi and their outcomes by contrasting how grassroots agroecological interventions influenced smallholder farmers’ participation in informal agricultural wage employment, called ganyu. Agroecology derives principles and practices from ecological science and indigenous, local smallholder farmers’ knowledge to mimic functional biodiversity’s role in natural ecosystems and other ecosystem functions (e.g. soil, water, and nutrient cycling. This project also addresses gaps in agroecological research by exploring how the approach’s labor-intensive practices affect labor productivity, working conditions, and class dynamics of smallholder agriculture. I engage with a variety of theoretical perspectives, from critical agrarian studies, political ecology, and development economics, with the aim to contribute to a range of conversations about the future of farming in Sub-Saharan Africa. I find that the dominant approach to improving agricultural productivity, industrial intensification, increased ganyu dependency and chronic food insecurity among poor smallholder farmers. Agroecology’s production relations interrupted this process of depeasantization by healing the metabolic rift in agricultural practice. The rift in nutrient cycling, which farmers experienced as consistently low yields whenever fertilizer was not applied, stemmed from both their technical approach to farming (monoculture, synthetic fertilizer or no/low input of manure), and the removal of their labor from the land. I argue that, in contexts of depeasantization, agroecology’s potential to heal the metabolic rift is thus rooted as much in its direct practice- as a form of sustainable agriculture- as in its specific production relations that support repeasantization. Repeasantization also changed the daily experience of work, to produce an affect that encouraged environmental care, as human labor combined productively with that of nature’s. In addition, agroecology also interrupted the deproletarianization, expressed as low wages and low negotiation power, that depeasantization reinforced. Classes remained differentiated according to labor relations, but as agroecology reduced reliance on several commodity relations that had reinforced these labor relations, fewer households belonged to the ganyu workforce, and the market power of those households that remained ganyu workers increased. This research thus concludes that agroecology has the potential to shift labor dynamics in a way that is transformative for farming livelihoods and the agroecosystems that sustain them.