Fun Facts

Gluten is what helps bread expand while the dough rises, and hold its shape while baking and after it cools. It’s also what makes bread chewy.

Sows give birth (called farrowing) to an average of eight to twelve piglets at a time and will raise six to eight litters of piglets in their lifetime.

Pork tenderloin is as lean as a skinless chicken breast.

There are four main types of sorghum: grain, forage, biomass and sweet. Their most popular uses are: for food (grain sorghum), as livestock feed (forage sorghum), to produce bioenergy (biomass...

The cotton gin first came to Kansas in 1854 when a Polish immigrant wanted to gin local cotton near Valley Falls.

About two-thirds of the Kansas corn crop is used in-state as livestock feed or in food production. 

More than 87 percent of land in Kansas is farmland.

The average Kansas dairy cow produces about 7 gallons of milk each day. That’s more than 2,544 gallons of milk over the course of a typical year.

Did you know the corn humans eat is different from the corn that cattle eat? Most of the corn people eat is sweet  corn. Cattle and other livestock eat field corn.

The journey from the time a calf is conceived to the time beef is consumed takes 24-30 months and thousands of miles—from ranches, farms, feed yards and packing plants to grocery stores and...

The majority of oil used for cooking in our country is U.S.-grown 100% soybean oil!

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. 

From farm to processor to distribution and retail, dairy creates jobs that support the economic well-being of Kansans. The dairy industry contributes $592 million annually to the Kansas economy and...

Mexico and Japan are our top international corn buyers. They buy 50 percent of U.S. corn exports.

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!

Gluten-free grains have no caloric advantage over grains containing gluten like wheat, barley and rye. All carbohydrates have four calories per gram. Gluten-free foods are often higher in fat and...

One Kansas farmer raises enough food to feed about 155 people!

Farmers in Kansas grow more than 650 million bushels of corn each year. 

It takes five to six months for a pig to reach market weight (about 265 pounds). One market hog provides about 160 pounds of pork for the grocery store’s meat case.

In pre-refrigeration days, hogs were harvested in the fall and cured for six to seven months, just in time for Easter dinner. That’s how ham came to be the traditional Easter favorite.

Did you know cotton is becoming a big crop in Kansas? Last year, farmers here produced over 164 million pounds of cotton!