Starting in the early 2000s, the Turkish governments has passed a new series of neoliberal agriculture reforms. Among these, the 2006 seed law, implemented with a 2018 decree, captured the attention of scholars, activists, and civil servants. This seed reform effectively prohibited the market sale of traditional seed varieties that had not been certified, withheld agriculture support to farmers who cultivated using non-registered seeds, and limited the seed certification process to commercial seed breeders. In the wake of the seed law, many initiatives, activist networks, and spaces have flourished to create alternative material and discursive spaces for the cultivation, exchange, and preservation of traditional landraces, often referred to as “local seeds,” or “ancestral seeds.” From seed-exchange festivals to community seed banks, small-scale producers’ markets, and agriculture cooperatives support, multiple institutional actors have effectively reframed the cultural salience of agricultural seeds in the backdrop of a perceived crisis of conventional high-input agricultural markets and technologies. At the same time, the preservation of non-registered seeds, and their valorization as cultural objects of heritage and place-making, remains entangled in existing structures of agriculture production, markets, and seed-breeding and are, I argue, inseparable from them. Based on participant observation and interviews with seed breeders, scientists, activists, cultivators, and municipal bureaucrats in the Aegean region, this paper seeks to analyze the divergent and overlapping discourses and practices that have created the category of the local seed in the contemporary moment. As an exploratory paper framing research that is in process, the focus of this analysis is the construction of value and valuation processes, and open-ended question of where a seed begins and where it ends. The paper also seeks to connect to the flourishing critical scholarship of agricultural practices, markets, futures, and politics in Turkey and beyond, including work on seeds, heritage, migration, and displacement, to analyze claims of resistance and the imagination of “alternative” world expressed through different actors’ practices and discourses of seed-saving and exchange.