Between 2008 and 2010, Paraguay undertook an experiment in government that would dramatically increase environmental regulation on the booming, and highly destructive, agrarian frontier. Both the promise and threat of regulatory activity was highly overblown: in fact very little was ever done beyond measuring the placement of certain crops meant to act as pesticide barriers. But the measurement of plants nonetheless escalated political tensions, eventually contributing to the overthrow and replacement of the government. This paper, based on an ethnography of those regulatory practices, explores how seemingly mundane acts of measurement come to be seen as potentially dramatic realignments of possible futures, and offers a way to reimagine state action in the face of environmental destruction.