While huge expectations have been expressed as to the outcomes of new wave of large scale agricultural investment in rural Africa, it is being increasingly acknowledged that the expected flood of investment has so far only been a trickle. This paper investigates how a large-scale agricultural investment fails to deliver proposed outcomes, drawing on a case study of a public-private partnership between the Government of Tanzania and a Swedish investor. I investigate discursive practices of simplification in the Bagamoyo project design and underpinning narratives and show how the implementation process is impacted by factors which were disregarded, producing repeated delays to the extent that the investments fails to materialise. While links between simplification and development failure have been subject to much scrutiny, little attention has been paid to delay as a consequence of problematic simplifications in project design, nor has delay been linked with development failure. In this paper, I show that delay should not be treated as something unexpected, inevitable and innocent. Moreover, I show that stalled or failed investments can have far-reaching impacts, for a range of actors, and are worth more attention in academia and policy debates.