In early colonial Calcutta, the Srirampur missionaries actively participated in educational initiatives like the Calcutta School Book Society (CSBS) and Calcutta School Society (CSS). Many members of the Agricultural and Horticultural Society of India, both Bengali and British, were also members of these educational “improvement” societies. Yet despite overlapping interests in agriculture, these education projects largely neglected the plant sciences, focusing instead on training a Bengali elite. This curriculum helped to perpetuate a social divide, positioning agriculture and horticulture as lesser disciplines, associated with lower castes and classes. Other sciences, like natural history, geography, physics, and even chemistry, were very important subjects in the textbooks that these societies produced. But agriculture, horticulture, and even botany were notably excluded, reflecting a colonial inclination to prioritize abstract concepts, and reiterating the knowledge of plants as something “practical.” Bhadralok elites involved in these organizations shaped the curricula, which melded scientific and moral disciplines in educating a new elite. This portrait of early educational initiatives in Calcutta underscores a complex interaction of moral, economic, and cultural factors that shaped perceptions of agriculture within the emerging colonial education system.