The history of mid-twentieth century Iran can rightfully be cast as a struggle over the control, management and deployment of its natural resources. In the shadow of the struggle over the nationalization of oil, and after the 1953 coup d’état in Iran, this paper explores how new resource frontiers were created in Khuzestan focusing on land and water. Despite being a petro-state, the vast majority of Iran’s population were engaged in some form of agriculture and resided in rural areas prior to the 1979 Revolution. Khuzestan also contains one-third of its ground water resources and vast tracts of agricultural land which are fed by five main rivers and their tributaries. From the 1950s through the 1970s, the Iranian government employed foreign corporations and other public transnational institutions to execute a program of regional rural development in southwestern Iran. This program included building hydroelectric dams, modern irrigation networks, and the modernization of agriculture. The development of water and land resources as a step toward launching Iran into twentieth-century modernity. Khuzestan’s ecology and geology were thus seen as resource frontiers which due to lacking “proper stewardship” had become eroded and devastated. This paper explores the social and political importance of soil and water as natural/national resource in the mid-20th century, as their development instigated a technonatural remaking of Iran. I explore the contradictions of the experts and officials’ approach to nature as both global and unique to particular geographies. These contradictions shaped the experts’ approach to development and the technopolitics of infrastructure and resource extraction in rural Iran, as they came up against human and non-human material limits and frictions in these development plans. Through an analysis of historical archives, this paper investigates how political power was constituted and exercised at the nexus of struggle over natural resources, infrastructures and a material political economy.