Altogether, Kansas has some 50 million acres of farmland and pasture, or about ninety-five per cent of the land area of the state. The leading crops include oats, barley, alfalfa, flax, soybeans, potatoes, and sugar beets, besides apples and other fruits. Farms are fewer but much larger (averaging 494 acres against the 160 that was the settlers' standard), and production has increased. Less than 150,000 persons are employed on the land, fewer than at any time since 1909. Machinery has taken over agriculture, and the whole of Kansas, too. Agriculture is now only the second most important earner. In a recent ten-year survey of personal income by the Kansas Industrial Development Commission, manufacturing payrolls come first—by nearly a billion dollars in the decade.
This fast-growing industrial empire includes more than 2,500 plants turning out a bewildering variety of things, ranging from jet bombers to paper cups. One-third of the more than 100,000 workers build airplanes and aircraft parts, both civilian and military. Among other products are cars, candy, plastics, rocket components, tugboats, storm and shower doors, and pipe organs.
Wheat ripening for harvest in Smith County. Thanks to new scientific methods of agriculture and soil conservation, farmers no longer dread the dust storms that desolated these prairies in the 1930's.
Oil rigs, topping 47,000 Kansas oil wells, rake the wide-open skyline of the south-central part of the state. Great Bend, on the Arkansas River, is known as the "oil capital in the heart of the wheat belt," and its Tenth Street has been called the oil artery of Kansas because so many petroleum firms are located there.
Ulysses, a small town in southwestern Kansas, is a natural gas center. These stripping plants serve the Hugoton gas field. Kansas ranks sixth in the nation in the production of natural gas. This region is also noted for onions and cantaloupe and honeydew melons, grown on irrigated land.
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