9 Things Kansas Does Better That Oklahomans Won’t Admit
Less than 4% of North America’s original tallgrass prairie is still standing, according to the National Park Service. Most of what survived is rolling across the Kansas Flint Hills.
Oklahoma has nothing like it, and that’s not the only area Kansas comes out ahead.
These are the things Kansas does better that Oklahomans won’t admit.
1. Air Capital of the World
Wichita has earned the nickname “Air Capital of the World,” and Kansas manufacturers back it up by building roughly one-third of every general aviation plane made in the United States.
Kansas exports $2.3 billion in aerospace products a year, nearly 20% of everything the state sells abroad, and the industry adds about $7 billion to the state’s economy.
Oklahoma has nothing like it.
2. Wind, Not Coal
Kansas now runs on wind before it runs on anything else, with the U.S. Energy Information Administration listing wind as the state’s primary source of electricity as of 2024.
Coal and natural gas both rank below it.
Turbines lead, not coal.
3. Bushel Ahead
Kansas farmers have led the nation in wheat for decades, and last year’s harvest kept that streak going with more bushels than any other state produced, Oklahoma included.
Oklahoma grows wheat too, just nowhere near this much of it.
The gap isn’t close.
What a Kansas Wheat Harvest Bakes
Kansas wheat doesn’t stay in Kansas. Much of it leaves the state as flour long before it reaches a shelf.
One bushel makes about 70 one-pound loaves of white bread, according to the Kansas Wheat trade group.
A single year’s Kansas harvest adds up to billions of loaves, far more bread than Oklahoma’s much smaller wheat crop could ever supply.
4. Last Tallgrass Frontier
The Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve protects almost 11,000 acres of the Kansas Flint Hills, land Congress set aside as a preserve in 1996.
Bison came back in 2009.
Kansas brought the animals home after roughly 150 years away, in a stretch of prairie Oklahoma’s plains never kept in this shape.
5. Space Race, Side by Side
Kansas’s Cosmosphere, in Hutchinson, holds one of the only collections anywhere that lets a visitor compare the American and Soviet space programs side by side, artifact for artifact.
Actual flown spacecraft sit under one roof in the middle of Kansas wheat country.
Oklahoma has nothing comparable.
6. Where Basketball Was Born
James Naismith invented basketball in 1891, and the University of Kansas hired him a few years later.
He chaired the physical education department and coached the Kansas basketball team until 1908, according to Britannica.
Kansas coached the game’s inventor.
Oklahoma’s basketball tradition runs deep, but it doesn’t reach back to the sport’s inventor.
7. Center of the Country
Lebanon, Kansas sits at the geographic center of the lower 48 states, a spot marked by a small stone monument and chapel just outside town.
Nobody argues about it.
Kansas simply sits in the middle of the map, and Oklahoma sits south of the middle.
8. Fair Since 1913
Kansas made its state fair official in 1913, anchoring it permanently in Hutchinson.
Reno County voters had just approved a $50,000 bond for the fairgrounds, according to the Kansas Historical Society.
The fair’s roots go back even further, to a county fair started in 1875.
A century strong.
9. One Ball, Seventy Years
Cawker City keeps something Oklahoma has never bothered to grow: A ball of twine that’s been rolling since Christmas Eve, 1953.
Nobody’s stopped it since.
Farmer Frank Stoeber started it by winding up loose twine off his barn floor, and strangers have kept adding to it every summer since.
It now weighs about 14 tons and holds more than 1,600 miles of twine.
A rival ball in Minnesota was built by one man working alone, but anyone driving through Cawker City can still add a piece to this one.
Psst! How much do you know about Oklahoma’s history? Take our quiz and see how many you can get right.
Quiz
Oklahoma Trivia Test
Answer these before you finish reading. We bet you can’t get them all right. Prove us wrong?
What made Oklahoma’s State Capitol grounds unlike almost every other state capitol in the country for decades?
Rocks From an Ancient Sea
Western Kansas holds Monument Rocks, a stretch of chalk pillars the National Park Service recognized as a National Natural Landmark in 1968.
The chalk comes from sediment that settled at the bottom of an inland sea covering the region roughly 80 million years ago.
That sea covered Kansas in the late Cretaceous Period, according to the University of Kansas's geological survey.
The sea left its mark.
Fossil hunters have pulled marine reptile bones out of that same chalk for well over a century, long after the sea itself disappeared.
Kansas turned an ancient seafloor into a landmark, and Oklahoma's plains never had a sea to leave one behind.
9 Things Nobody Warns You About Before Moving to Oklahoma
Oklahoma has a way of surprising people right after they cross the state line.
Low taxes and cheap housing get all the attention, but newcomers usually find out the hard way what those savings don't cover.
9 Things Nobody Warns You About Before Moving to Oklahoma
9 Arguments Texas and Oklahoma Will Never Settle
Not every neighborly rivalry runs through Kansas.
Oklahoma and Texas have spent decades arguing over everything from fast food to football, and neither side is backing down anytime soon.
