Fun Facts

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

One bale of cotton can make 1,256 pillowcases.

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

Grains can be categorized into food grains (for people) and feed grains (for cattle). Cattle eat feed grains like field corn and grain sorghum. An average of 4 ½ pounds of grain is used to produce a...

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.

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.  

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.

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

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

In 2018, farmers in Kansas planted 165,000 acres of cotton, which produced about 335,000 bales!

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

Did you know Kansas farmers grow about 330 million bushels of wheat each year? That’s enough to make 23 billion loaves of bread!

A finished bale of cotton weighs about 480 pounds.

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

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

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

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 300 licensed dairy herds in Kansas with about 143,000 cows total. In 2015 cows produced about 365 million gallons of milk, making Kansas the 16th largest milk producing state.

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

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