In the aftermath of WWI, the “development” of Syria’s agriculture, which was the base of its economy, was at the heart of French officials’ justification for why the expensive military occupation necessary to impose the mandate’s colonial administration would be worth it. While, in the face of Syrian farmers’ disinterest, official visions of a countryside replete with the latest French agricultural equipment quickly faded, other strategies intended to ensure profits from agriculture proceeded apace—most notably, establishing a fixed tax on harvest yields and reorganizing the Ottoman-era agricultural bank to make its operations more amenable to inflows of French capital. As the 1920s and 1930s progressed, crisis developed. Farmers complained of the increasingly massive debts created by the application of these policies as unpaid taxes and agricultural bank loans piled up. Deserted villages dotted the arid regions along the desert’s edge where cultivation had thrived in the late Ottoman period. In contrast to historiographical narratives that characterize French agricultural ambitions in Syria as failed because of drought or the global economic crisis of the early 1930s, this paper argues that Syria’s agricultural sector and the economy that depended on it were in trouble much earlier. Furthermore, it contends that this situation stemmed from French officials’ fundamental misunderstanding of the region’s ecological limits and the local administrative practices that had developed to address them. Only in the late 1930s did French officials finally begin to acknowledge that maybe there was a logic behind these practices. Drawing on archival documents and periodicals in Arabic and French, this paper demonstrates that it was the intersection of these mandate policies with the region’s ecological limits that was the primary driver of this critical state of affairs in the region’s agricultural sector—a “discovery” only made by French officials in the mandate’s final years.