This paper looks at US agrarian reform theory as it influenced land settlement projects in Transjordan and Iraq from the 1930s into the 1950s, focusing on the production of the "independent" farmer as a "family" farmer. Rather than accept the conceptual interchangeability of these terms, the paper considers the work that was done through their very conflation, exploring how "dependent" male peasants, nomads, and refugees were transformed into "independent" farmers not only by granting them individual titles to land but also, and just as importantly, by producing their authority over often newly defined "families." As a key aspect of producing independent family farms, development experts launched home economics interventions into the lives of rural women with the aim of making nuclear families responsible for their own subsistence and thereby keeping their members from migrating to urban areas. An early instance of this work was carried out by the Near East Foundation in Transjordan during the 1930s; similar projects were implemented in Iraq after World War II. While some postwar international development organizations, such as FAO, would argue for "model villages" as the basis for rural development projects, US Point Four experts continued to push for settlement models of isolated family farms, despite the widely known ecological and social failures of the first settlements based on such models. The paper will use this controversy as a lens for exploring the persistence of certain familial imaginaries to US Cold War modernization and agrarian reform theory, bringing family and gender studies into conversation with critical scholarship on environmental and development history, a conversation that for these decades is almost nonexistent.