Apart from limited efforts in 1937 and 1946, modifications to Iran’s longstanding “arbabi-ra’yati” land tenure and agricultural production system rarely featured in Iranian economic policymaking during the first half of the 20th century. However, this long-standing state neglect would undergo a profound reorientation upon the election of Mohammad Mossadegh’s National Front government in 1951, whose unprecedented intervention into the field of agrarian power relations set the stage for a broader embrace of rural development in Iran over subsequent decades. National Front policy in the agricultural sphere culminated with 1952 legislation establishing democratically elected village councils for the first time in Iranian history, and 1953 legislation to both directly increase the “farmer’s share” of production, as well as redistribute surplus landlord profit into Development Agencies (bongah-ye omran) at district (bakhsh) and county (shahrestan) levels. The paper outlines how the Front’s embrace of such rural reform legislation stemmed partly from immediate budgetary pressure after their nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951, and subsequent international boycott of Iranian oil exports. With the state deprived of this primary source of revenue and foreign exchange, National Front leadership determined that an immediate boost to cash crop production was essential to stabilize a now oil-less economy. Budgetary insecurity alone does not explain this new concern with the countryside, however, with the paper highlighting how the Front also sought to undercut political challenges from the Shah’s proto-land reform efforts of 1949, the left-wing Tudeh Party’s ideological pivot to the peasantry, and the Iranian military establishment’s pernicious embeddedness in the provinces. Employing the record of Majlis debate, press coverage, and memoirs of National Front officials such as Mossadegh’s Minister of Agriculture, Khalil Taleghani, the paper thus argues that the National Front was simultaneously invested in building economic self-sufficiency through their agricultural policies, as well as in engendering a new civic culture and sense of democratic possibility in Iranian society. As a coda, the paper offers a brief evaluation of Mossadegh’s reform program based on recently uncovered archival material from the U.S. Federal Reserve System, whose iconoclastic analysis produced during the period offers compelling evidence of the Iranian ability to maintain an oil-less economy through rural development (in tandem with inflationary monetary policy).