Highlighting value, uses of ag products part of National Agriculture Week

PIERRE, S.D. – You are steeped in agriculture. You might not know it, but you are. It doesn’t matter if you live in Sioux Falls, Brookings, Yankton, Aberdeen, Mitchell or Rapid City, South Dakota. You’re neck-deep in agriculture.

You might work in a hospital. Maybe the Post Office. You could be an IT person, maybe work all day on a computer in an office. Heck, you might be a radio announcer. It doesn’t matter. You depend on South Dakota’s top agriculture products each and every day. You DO eat, right?

It may come as a shock (but probably not) that South Dakota is rural. We’re a “farm/ranch” state, and doggone proud of it. That farm you drive by every day? That ranch you read about? They fuel this state.

Do you know the 10 biggest South Dakota agricultural products?

And perhaps the first question you have is, how do you define “Agricultural Products”? Well, for our purposes here, the ag products are based on cash receipts.

Agriculture is South Dakota’s leading industry. On average, around 3 million acres of several kinds of wheat are planted in the Mount Rushmore State each year – hard red winter, hard red spring and durum. Other notable South Dakota ag products are soybeans, sunflowers, beef, pork, oats, barley, rye, flaxseed, sorghum and alfalfa.

What’s Growing in South Dakota?

• Cattle and Calves – $2.63 billion: A steer typically weighs about 1,000 pounds and yields about 450 pounds of edible meat.
• Corn – $2.37 billion: Field corn is different from the corn we eat. Hard and dry, it’s used to feed livestock and make ethanol.
• Soybeans – $1.84 billion: Soybeans are an important ingredient in crayons. In fact, just 1 acre of soybeans can make 82,368 crayons.
• Wheat – $549 million: A bushel of wheat yields 42 one-and-a-half pound loaves of white bread or 90 one-pound loaves of whole-wheat bread.
• Sheep / Wool – South Dakota ranks sixth nationally in sheep and wool production.  The total value of wool produced in South Dakota was 2.41 million dollars in 2021.
• Hogs – $452 million: Pork is the most widely eaten meat. It represents about 42 percent of all the meat eaten in the world.
• Dairy Products – $435 million: A dairy cow produces about 6.3 gallons of milk each day and 350,000 glasses of milk in a lifetime.
• Bees – $18.6 million: There were 185,000 honey-producing colonies in South Dakota in 2022, down from a high of about 290,000 in 2015. The average yield in the state last year was 39 pounds of honey per colony, down 10 pounds from 2021. The total value of honey produced in South Dakota in 2022 was $18.6 million, down 37% from 2021.
• Sunflower – $216 million: Light in taste and noted for its health benefits, sunflower oil supplies more vitamin E than any other vegetable oil.
• Hay – $170 million: Sheep and goats refuse to eat trampled hay, but cows and horses will gobble it up.
• Turkeys – $147 million: About 675 million pounds of turkey are consumed during Thanksgiving every year in the United States.
• Chicken Eggs – $73.6 million: U.S. poultry farms provide about 10 percent of the world’s egg supply, or 75 billion eggs each year.