Various programs were introduced by American missionaries in Eastern Anatolia and Syria to foster agricultural development, modernization, and scientific progress. Many of these programs were done with conscious attention to the issues of ethnic self-determination and population pressures. This paper will show how projects of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions attempted to shape both specific agricultural practices and the socio-political relations between provincial farming communities and regional and imperial actors. For example, a certain Mr. Knapp, Harvard '87, who had arrived in 1899 with his wife and three children to the Harpoot Mission with the express charge of helping Armenian orphans in the wake of the 1894-96 Hamidian massacres, by 1905 was aiming to open a farm for orphan boys, to be overseen by an Armenian graduate of the Amherst Agricultural School in Massachusetts. There had been talk among the missionaries of the problem of losing the best Armenian students to permanent migration to the United States, and various projects were envisioned to bring some back to aid the mission in the homeland. The Amherst Agricultural School hoped to be a national and international leader in scientific agriculture, and it made sense for the missionaries from Massachusetts to try agricultural projects in their field missions. In the face of Ottoman pressures against the missionaries and the Armenian communities they were intimately involved with, possession of the land, including farming rights, became areas of political contestation. Research for this paper will examine the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions archives for reports about farming in Eastern Anatolia and specific attempts to implement scientific agriculture to examine the motivations and experiences of those involved, the local results, and interactions with regional and state actors in this arena. Although American missionary activities were ended by the Turkish War of Independence, American interest in agricultural projects in Anatolia has continued through the Republican period.