Over the past two centuries, the Çukurova region of Southern Anatolia has grown to be one of the densest areas of agriculture and manufacturing in the Eastern Mediterranean. Much of that is the result of global capitalism, constant migration, and the various transformations that led to the ascendance of commercial cotton cultivation from the early 19th century onward. As the work of Meltem Toksöz has shown, the combination of a complex system of credit and bountiful, fertile soil made Çukurova the leading cotton producing region of the Ottoman Empire by the time of the First World War. By the 1950s, the early 19th-century ecology dominated by pastoralism was barely recognizable in the countryside of the Çukurova region. But one constant throughout the period was cotton—not just the species—but the precise cultivar that people chose to plant nearly every spring. This paper reconstructs a fascinating story within the narrative of Çukurova cotton’s meteoric rise. It tells the tale of the local cultivar, referred to simply as yerli, and its endurance as the mainstay of commercial agriculture into the 1940s despite over a century of efforts to replace it with various cultivars of foreign provenance. While major players in the world cotton industry in Britain, France, Egypt, and the United States deemed yerli undesirable, local cultivators, who were anything but cut off from global markets, happily persisted in planting the native strain. How did Çukurova cotton hold out so well in a period during which agrarian ecologies were being utterly overthrown by capitalism and industrialization? The answer to this question lies not only in the biology of the cultivar itself and its relationship with Çukurova’s soil but also in the history of political ecology, sustainability, labor, and technology in the late Ottoman Mediterranean. This paper examines different facets of the political and social history of Çukurova from the Ottoman period to present through the lens of the region’s intransigent seed. All in all, it tells the story of a particular ecological continuity in the midst of profound agrarian change—a biological legacy of the Ottoman period in the early Republic of Turkey and a kernel of local resistance in the face of an increasingly globalized economy.