Little is known about the persistence or existence of agrobiodiversity in the American Mountain South, despite scientific recognition of the importance of constructing biodiversity inventories in marginal mountainous landscapes worldwide. After decades of research focusing on the utilitarian basis of agrobiodiversity persistence, recent studies in ethnoecology and other closely related disciplines have shifted to the investigation of cultural salience as an important primary causal factor in the agricultural decision making of local farmers to continue to main folk crop varieties. Both evaluation of agrobiodiversity inventories and analysis of farmer decision making are central to the promotion and conservation of in situ and in vivo seed saving and agrarian lifeways. This research, through a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, evaluates agrobiodiversity levels, agricultural decision making in the maintenance of folk crop varieties, and conservation practice and theory in the southern Appalachian and Ozark mountains. In fourteen months of fieldwork, oral history interviews and socioeconomic surveys were conducted with 60 growers and various conservation initiatives were studied and collaborated with. Particular attention was placed on the role of culture in promoting agrobiodiversity persistence. The results of this research indicate that the American Mountain South is home to some of the highest agrobiodiversity levels in North America and that Mountain South growers are maintaining diverse folk crop varieties for reasons that can be largely understood as cultural in nature. The importance of agrobiodiversity to distinctive regional foodways, the performance of cultural identity, and everyday occurrences and resistances in the face of modernity provide culturally salient motivations for gardeners and farmers to maintain regional agrobiodiversity. Various conservation initiatives in the Mountain South are, to different degrees, geared toward the promotion of cultural themes to complement genetic conservation. This research suggests that a continued and expanded conservation focus on cultural salience will have the greatest degree of success in supporting local in vivo seed saving.