In the heart of Kansas wheat country there is a cotton boom going on. And in some towns, the iconic presence of the grain elevator is being overshadowed by newcoming cotton gins or warehouses.

Stevens County farmer Jerry Stuckey is a prime example of what’s happening. Four years ago he planted 40 acres of cotton.

“I irrigated mine,” he said. “Tom Lahey put in 40 acres, too. But his was dryland.”

Today, Lahey and Stuckey are getting ready to harvest hundreds of acres of cotton.

“Out in this part of the country, we were the first to try cotton,” Stuckey said. He also runs the Northwest Cotton Growers Co-op’s cotton gin in Moscow, which is in the state’s far southwest.

By January 2005, the two-year-old gin will double its capacity. “We’ll be state of the art,” Stuckey said.

In Kansas, cotton is becoming a major crop. In 1995, the statewide harvest totaled 4,500 bales; last year’s harvest netted 111,500 bales.

“In 2004, we planted right at 120,000 acres in cotton,” said Stu Duncan, a crops and soils specialist with K-State Research and Extension. “Back in 1996, which is sort when this whole thing started, we had around 2,000 acres in cotton.”

The increase, experts say, is tied to:

• Cotton requires less water than corn, reducing the drain on the groundwater supplies and offsetting irrigation’s ever-increasing fuel costs.

“Cotton takes anywhere from a third to a half less water than corn,” said Bill McManus, operations manager at the High Plains Cotton Gin under construction near Pratt. “That makes a huge difference.”

Also, cotton needs less fertilizer.

• For now at least, cotton pays more than wheat, corn or sorghum.

“We have customers who netted three times more off their dryland cotton last year than they did off their dryland wheat,” McManus said.

• Cotton is more drought-tolerant.

“We had people who made 300-pound (per acre) dryland cotton last year when everything around them burned up and ended up being cut for silage,” McManus said, adding, “Three-hundred-pound cotton will cover your costs. Silage won’t.”

Today, most of the cotton grown in Kansas is processed at gins in Moscow, Winfield, Anthony, and Blackwell, Okla. The gin near Pratt will be the fourth in-state gin.

The growth also is behind a $5 million, 330,000-square-foot warehouse being built in Liberal.

“All this is good for our economy,” said Moscow mayor Neal Gillespie, who’s also director of economic development for Stevens County. “The gin has it’s full-time positions, and when they’re ginning they employ lots of part-time people. It’s created a lot of truck-driving jobs and, of course, the farmers are benefiting.”

But not all the news is good. Hail wiped out much of this year’s crop in southwest Kansas, and harvesting cotton requires a major investment in equipment.

So far, cotton production in Kansas is limited to the counties in the lower one-third of the state.

“Cotton is not an easy crop to raise,” said Stuart Briggeman, who farms near Pratt. “It take a lot of management, and that, I think, scares some people off — you really have to control the bugs and the weeds. Until you get into it, it’s something new and different.”

Still, Briggeman said he’s a cotton booster.

“It gives us an alternative crop that works, that generates a bottom line,” he said. “On my farm, I haven’t found anything that can compete with it, dryland. And, yes, I’ve had years when it’s been break-even but at least I had something to harvest. Here recently, I’ve years in dryland corn and milo when there wasn’t anything to harvest.”