Kansas is the greatest of all this nation's wheat states. Skyscraper-tall grain elevators tower white across the vast landscape of the farmlands. The five-year average wheat production from 1957 to 1961 was more than 257 million bushels a year. In recent years production has exceeded 215 million bushels, or about one-fifth of all the wheat produced in the country. The vast seas of rippling gold that flood the Kansas prairies in June were originally sown in the 1870's, when German-speaking Mennonites from Russia came as immigrants, bringing with them a hard, drought-resistant winter wheat called Turkey Red—red from its color, and Turkey because it had originally come from that country.
This was just what Kansas farmers needed, for some of their winter wheat normally failed to survive, and corn was far and away their most important crop. But wheat did not outstrip corn in Kansas until the beginning of World War I, when more than 1 2 million acres of fresh land were brought under the plow. After that, wheat was king. Recently sorghums have come into the picture. Now Kansas produces more than 144,000 bushels of sorghum a year, from more than 3.7 million acres.
Vast grain elevators tower like sky-scrapers above the plain at Hutchinson, in south-central Kansas. This town of more than 37,000 people is the biggest primary wheat market in the nation, and it is built on top of a productive salt mine.
Pittsburg (unlike its big namesake in Pennsylvania, it has no final "h") is the center of important strip coal-mining operations in southeastern Kansas. Here a monster power shovel is stripping the earth from nearby coal beds. More than 600,000 tons of coals are mined in Kansas each year.
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