In the early 1960s, Tunisia was desperately short of capital and faced a constant need for food amidst post-Independence agricultural disorganization. Faced with the socio-technical challenge of increasing agricultural productivity, it opted for a Green Revolution in agriculture – a technological package which used high-productivity wheats to increase yields. Those yield increases relied, however, on a capital-intense input package: selected seeds, perfectly timed irrigation, herbicides, carefully syncopated fertilizer applications. The technology was also capital-intense rather than labor-intense, leading to a continuing rural exodus as the Tunisian population continued to concentrate in slums and peripheral bidonvilles. This paper looks at the longue duree patterns of Tunisian agricultural development in the cereal sector. Far from a rupture with the colonial model. I trace a fundamental continuity between colonial-era farms and their large Tunisian doppelgangers, and the post-Independence move to modernized, capital-intense and labor-light cereal production systems. By examining the process of colonial land purchases and the patterns of colonial dry-farming, and the resultant flow of populations both to peripheral hillsides and to cities, I trace the first step in the move to capital-intense speculative agriculture in the Tunisian countryside. Such policies, which concentrated the Tunisian population in the cities or in the least-fertile lands in the northern cereal zones, prepared the way for the Green Revolution. The Green Revolution, with its emphasis on mechanization and extensive agriculture, essentially mimicked and broadened the colonial model, rehearsing it throughout the Tunisian cereal belt, and leading to another wave of rural-urban migration, whether to Tunisia’s cities or the metropolises of Libya and France. In the process, by concentrating large swathes of the population in regions of the country where there was an absolute lack of jobs, the country set the stage for the unrest which now recurrently sweeps the country, and especially poor slums such as D’Ettadhamen and Douar Hicher, in Tunis. Such unrest can be traced back to the country-wide dislocations which both colonial and post-colonial capitalist agriculture set in motion through the country’s North. This study relies on analyzing both USAID documents from the 1960s-1980s on the Cereal implementation project as well as domestic Tunisian studies which the Ministry of Agriculture carried out on the effects of the Green Revolution. It also analyzes cost-of-production data from the same Ministry. It relies on the secondary literature as a synthetic background to historically situate colonial dry-farming.