In 1947, Paul de Lesseps, the son of the French developer behind the Suez Canal, was sentenced to prison time for a sensational allegation: that he had offered an agricultural estate in Turkey to the Nazis for use as an airbase in the Eastern Mediterranean. Among the bizarre details of the story was the very notion that he held any claim to the land in the first place; it had only briefly fallen under French rule during the short-lived occupation of Cilicia decades earlier. But in fact, the fallen aristocrat was simply trying to recover losses of a business venture that had begun during the late Ottoman period, when the Committee of Union and Progress granted him a decades-long lease for the estate in the Çukurova lowlands. Before that, the land had belonged to an even more prestigious owner: the recently deposed Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II himself. The circumstances by which Abdulhamid and his successors came into possession of this estate can only be understood within the context of an environmental imaginary linking cultivation and progress that prevailed during the late 19th century, sometimes sparking state intervention in the countryside of places like Çukurova. This paper situates the history of the Çukurova Imperial Farm from the late Ottoman period onward within the larger context of the empire’s environmental transformation. The uncultivated lowlands in the Province of Adana emerged as a center of capitalist development and cotton export during the latter half of the 19th century. Yet in contrast with most of the large farms in the region during that period, the Çukurova Imperial Farm was not created with a solely market-driven mentality. Rather, it was the prospect of the very transformation of the land itself--and by extension the people--that initially inspired the creation of this large government estate that nearly became a French colonial plantation. In this paper, I examine the history of the Çukurova Imperial Farm as a vessel for the environmental imaginaries of state and commercial actors over many decades, and I attempt to identify what if any tangible relationship these imaginaries had with what played out on its fertile, swampy ground.