Globally, the 1920s and 30s saw increased attention to the potential of agricultural education as a tool of political intervention. This paper examines how debates about this potential played out in the context of French mandate Syria and Lebanon. As international organizations such as the International Institute of Agriculture (IIA), the Commission Internationale d’Agriculture (CIA), and the International Labor Organization (ILO) deliberated over who this education was for and what kind of farmer it aimed to produce, technocrats in Syria and Lebanon insisted on the role it could play in creating links between village farmers and a national state space. Their ambitions clashed with those of French mandate officials who saw agricultural education policies as a means not only to increase dependency on French educational infrastructure, but also to exert influence in the countryside. Meanwhile, other foreign actors looked to this training, whether packaged as “technical assistance” for elites or “rural development” for village communities, as a pretext for spreading their influence under the mandate, prefiguring post-World War II development initiatives. Privileging different concepts of what constituted expertise, they each sought to use "scientific" agricultural infrastructure to forge connections between urban and rural areas. For mandate officials, control over infrastructure building under the mandate also provided an opportunity to reinforce claims to authority and hierarchies of knowledge between the metropole and the mandate and reinscribe them institutionally. Scholarship on education in the Middle East has tended to focus on urban institutions. This paper aims to add to this body of work by looking at the role played by diverse infrastructures of learning that targeted cultivators primarily in rural areas. Using reports, correspondence, and journal articles in Arabic, French, and English to explore these competing projects, it argues that internationally shared discourses about the importance of "scientific" or “modern” agricultural training were thus deployed by different actors to elaborate conflicting visions for educational infrastructure and regional economic development. These projects ranged from nationalist technocrats’ championing of multiple levels and purposes for agricultural training to mandate officials’ prioritization of only elementary agricultural education to the summer camp/workshop approach of the U.S.-based Near East Foundation’s initiatives with their base at the American University of Beirut. As local technocrats advocated using these infrastructures to expand national state space into rural areas through the intervention of nationalist, urban agronomists, French officials touted imperial tutelage and the NEF/AUB initiative championed “philanthropic” aid.