Nineteenth-century Egypt was marked by a vibrant agricultural landscape. In addition to its booming cotton production, central and southern Egyptian cultivators produced sizable quantities of sugarcane. The bulk of this sugarcane was cultivated on khedivial estates known as the Daira Sanieh. The Daira Sanieh expanded dramatically during the 1860s and 1870s and hosted a vast network of irrigation canals, agricultural railways, a river transport system, and a series of sugar mills. In 1878, a European commission assumed control of these estates faced with the impending bankruptcy of the Egyptian state. In the decades that followed, the policies and practices of this commission shaped the experiences of the colonial state for Egyptian cultivators in large swaths of central and southern Egypt. Reading the archives of the Daira Sanieh (housed at the Egyptian National Archives), this paper explores the organization and practice of agricultural geography on the Daira Sanieh during the colonial era pursuing the following questions: First, how did the colonial administration commodify and manage the Daira Sanieh’s agricultural environment? Second, how did Egyptian cultivators engage these practices of the colonial state through struggles over soil, fertilizer, irrigation water, and plant life? Thirdly, how does the history of the Daira Sanieh nuance an historical interpretation of the colonial state in Egypt by exploring the interstices of colonial rule, the physical environment, and the experience of agriculture? Explorations of colonial Egypt often homogenize Egypt’s agricultural geography and marshal this simplified geography to support an under-theorized interpretation of the objectives, experiences, and embodiments of the colonial state in Egypt. This paper engages a specific and distinct incarnation of Egypt’s agricultural geography to critically examine the encounters of Egyptian cultivators with the micro-environments that framed their quotidian experiences of cultivation, labor, and production.