Fun Facts

Did you know Kansas has an official state soil? It's called Harney silt loam and it covers about 4 million acres of land in our state. 

Pig farmers have reduced greenhouse gas emissions on pig farms by 35% per pound of pork by changing how crops are raised, how pigs are fed, and how nutrients are recycled.

Drink local with milk! It takes about 48 hours for milk to travel from dairy farms to the grocery store.

Did you know there are 15,000 soybean farms in Kansas? In 2016, Kansas farmers harvested more than 4 million acres of soybeans.

All the wheat grown in Kansas in a single year would fit in a train stretching from western Kansas to the Atlantic Ocean.

One dairy cow can produce more than 3,000 gallons of milk in a year. There are about 160,000 dairy cows in Kansas. That's a lot of milk!

Did you know corn tortillas can differ in color based on the type of corn used? Some are white and others are yellow.

Enriched white bread and other enriched grain products are a good source of iron and B vitamins (thiamin, riboflavin, niacin and folic acid), as well as complex carbohydrates.

More than 87 percent of land in Kansas is farmland.

One bale of cotton can make 4,312 mid-calf socks.

98 percent of all corn farms are family-run farms.

Corn is produced on every continent of the world with the exception of Antarctica. 

The top five agiculture commodities in Kansas are cattle, corn, wheat, soybeans and sorghum.

Did you know some of the fertilizer farmers add to the soil comes from the air we breathe? Companies can convert nitrogen in the air into nitrogen to nourish the ground.

One bushel of corn fed to livestock produces 5.6 pounds of retail beef, 13 pounds of retail pork, 19.6 pounds of chicken or 28 pounds of catfish.

One bushel of corn makes 2.8 gallons of ethanol.

Sorghum can be used to make environmentally-friendly packing peanuts, fencing materials, floral arrangements, brooms and more!

Kansas is known for its sunflowers. They provide food for insects, birds and cattle, and make great cooking oil, biofuel and a delicious snack for people!

A common ingredient in fertilizer is phosphate, which comes from ancient sea life. Phosphate is one of many natural ingredients used to keep soil — and plants! — healthy.

One 60-pound bushel of wheat provides about 42 pounds of white flour, enough for about 70, one-pound loaves of white bread.

Cotton bolls, which are the puffs of white produced by cotton plants, are technically fruit.