Fun Facts

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

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

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.

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.

About four percent of the land in Kansas is part of conservation or wetland reserve programs.

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

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.

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

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

The United States grows more soybeans than any other country and six out of every ten rows of soybeans are exported to other countries.

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.

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

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 about 60-80 pods on a mature soybean plant. Each pod contains three small soybeans.

Beef from cows and steers are used in two different ways. Cow meat is used primarily as ground beef for hamburgers and the majority of steer meat is used as steaks.

Kansas grows winter wheat that is planted and sprouts in the fall, becomes dormant in the winter, grows again in the spring and is harvested in early summer.

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

A finished bale of cotton weighs about 480 pounds.

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

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