The industrializing nations in the nineteenth century witnessed the expansion of the dominion of new knowledge which was formally produced within institutional sites such as universities, laboratories, academic societies, colleges, museums and many more. These institutional forms were instrumental in the production and dissemination of this knowledge. This new knowledge form not only generated new technologies for modern industries, but informed conventional forms of agricultural practices, transforming it from subsistence forms of agricultural production into cash cropping, shifting from the use of organic manure to synthetic fertilizers and from mass selection to plant breeding. The scientific development of agriculture and the dissemination of new agricultural practices paved the way for the institutionalization of agricultural education. The history of this process in the colonies was inflected by colonial rule, as the ignorance of local agricultural practices conflicted with colonial interests of the maximization of profit through agriculture. The present paper commences with an overview of scientific agriculture and agricultural education in the western world, followed by relationship of colonial state with Indian agriculture and its imperative for introducing scientific agriculture in India.