Racing out of the Rocky Mountains near Leadville, Colorado, the Arkansas River begins. Flattening remarkably out onto the prairie, it becomes a classic Great Plains waterway with wide, shallow banks and its power measured by the season. Sowing through the grasslands of Colorado, Oklahoma, Kansas, and eventually into Arkansas, the river has a long tenure of vegetable crop production in settler culture. The Arkansas Valley of southeastern Colorado is famed for its cantaloupe and melons, even housing many family owned vegetable seed companies. Population growth-related pressures have strained, in recent years, water and land resources in the region, leading to a decline in small-scale family farms and diminished seed production from historical levels. The majority of vegetable crops are irrigated via gravity-flow furrows. Excessive salt buildup, increasing selenium concentrations, and general poor water quality of the Arkansas offer potential for improved irrigation and water management practices for future production. In addition to a resilient remnant of vegetable farms, this region of Colorado contains the highest concentration of CRP (Conservation Reserve Program) lands in the United States. This land conservation program enrolls land back into native grasslands, with Highway 287 being an arbitrary cutoff of returned prairie and cattle ranches to the east, and irrigated commodity crops to the west.