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. 

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.

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

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...

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

Cotton can be found in much more than clothes and other fabrics! Cotton by-products can be used to make paper currency, cosmetics and feed for dairy cattle and livestock.

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

Fertilizer contains a lot of helpful nutrients, thanks to Mother Nature! Potash, which is salt from ancient evaporated oceans, is used in fertilizer to feed our soil.

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.

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.

A bushel of soybeans weighs 60 pounds and produces 11 pounds of oil and 48 pounds of soybean meal.

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.

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...

Small engines like lawnmowers and boats can use E10 fuel.

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.

There are more than 29 cuts of beef that meet government guidelines for lean, including tenderloin, T-bone steak and extra lean ground beef.

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

Milk is one of the best sources of calcium. Our bodies absorb 28 percent of the calcium found in milk, but as little as 5 percent of the calcium found in other foods like spinach.

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.

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