Olives are one of the largest crops by area in Jordan, only surpassed by barley. However, many areas that currently cultivate olives formerly cultivated wheat and other cereal crops. The US Food for Peace program (PL480) is at the center of local discussions and media coverage about the decrease in local wheat production, framing the decrease in wheat production as a loss of heritage as a result of neocolonialism. However, this telling of the story often relies on national level statistics about crops and prices and ignores larger changes in society such as the increase in family dependence on wage labor across Jordan in the mid-to-late twentieth century and its effects on agriculture and social reproduction in rural life. To fill this gap, this project asks, how do changes in wheat production (from the start of PL480 in 1954 to today) relate to broader changes in rural areas of Jordan? Today, several interested groups focus on growing and preserving native cultivars of wheat to promote food sovereignty and preserve cultural heritage. In this group, wheat cultivation is not only about producing profits, but it is also about the care and communal effort to preserve heritage. This paper seeks to put this project in historical context to carefully parse out the history of social reproductive changes that occurred alongside and in connection with the changes in wheat production. In this paper, I argue that reading wheat production as social reproductive labor highlights the communal activities associated with harvesting wheat and the role it played in society. In this light, the fall of wheat is not simply a story of declining profits, but also of changing social relations in which wheat became more trouble than it was worth at the individual and community scales, causing national-level declines in production. Furthermore, under this framework, today’s projects such as the cooperative-model of growing wheat in abandoned city plots of Amman create new social relations of production that differ from the traditional rural communal cultivation of wheat inspiring the project. This framework calls attention to wider agricultural change and changing human-environment relationships in rural Jordan over the past few generations. Furthermore, by taking a multi-sited approach that mixes archival and mixed qualitative methods in several locations across Jordan, this project pushes against the methodological nationalism of other studies about wheat and global geopolitics, resisting simplistic nationalist heritage narratives.