Fun Facts

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

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.

Within an hour of birth calves are up and ready to nurse. A baby calf will drink a gallon of milk a day.

Cattle are great recyclers. They convert natural resources that would otherwise be wasted into beef, an edible protein containing 10 essential nutrients such as zinc, iron and B vitamins.  

Grain sorghum is one of the oldest known grains. Its origins can be traced back to ancient Africa and India.

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. 

One bushel of corn makes 2.8 gallons of ethanol.

Output from Kansas agriculture has a direct economic impact of $22.5 billion per year.

One acre of soybeans can make 82,368 crayons!

In addition to meat, pigs provide us with lots of other products, including valves for human heart surgery, suede for shoes and clothing, and gelatin for many food and non-food uses.

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

Soybean oil is a great source of omega-3 fatty acids and vitamin E.

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

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.

Did you know that in Kansas cows outnumber people 2-to1? There are almost 3 million people and more than 6 million cattle!

In Kansas alone, pig farmers raised over 3.2 million pigs in 2015, producing over 600 million pounds of pork!

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.

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...

There are 7 different breeds of dairy cattle. Farmers choose their breeds based on milk production, size and even personality.

More than 87 percent of land in Kansas is farmland.

Energy experts estimate global ethanol production and use reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 110 million metric tons per year. That’s equivalent to taking more than 20 million vehicles off the road.