Turkey’s application to enter the EU has required the country to learn new things about itself. It is required to learn them in specific frameworks, using specific concepts and methodologies, and these are subsumed in EU entry negotiations under the rubric of statistics. Having collected these statistics, it is required to share them with its population and the EU, at specific timed intervals. And—crucially—it continually reforms its institutions and practices in light of the new statistical knowledge. This paper argues that the relationship between statistics and social forms is not solely one of “description.” To the extent that statistics do not merely study or represent the objects they are purported to be about, but are intimately involved in intervening in/on those objects (e.g. social, economic, or ecological processes) and in fact in remaking them through ‘reform’ and/or ‘development,’ they have a performative nature. In this sense statistics are less a methodology and more a technology, a technology of governance. The paper draws on fieldwork in Turkey with statisticians, technicians and agricultural experts working on the design and implementation of EU-inspired reforms to develop new apparatuses for the collection of data on agriculture in the country. What happens when a country changes the way it collects and uses statistics, as Turkey currently is? What objects are created through this statistical knowledge, how are they created, and to what purposes? How are such objects affected by the histories of the knowledges in relation to which they emerge? In other words, how ought we understand the ‘historicity’ of these objects, and how it relates to other contexts’ norms and histories. How do these changes in the area of statistics relate to issues of commensurability? This paper sets out from the proposition that through the study of changes in Turkey’s collection and use of agricultural statistics we are in a position to examine crucial processes through which different collectivities—with varied historical and political genealogies—are made commensurable.