The Kansas Department of Agriculture is a department of the government of Kansas under the Governor of Kansas. It is responsible for providing services and expertise that promote and protect Kansas' food supply and natural resources while stimulating economic growth. The head of the Department is the Secretary of Agriculture, who is appointed by the Governor, with the approval of the Kansas Senate. The current Secretary of Agriculture is Mike Beam, who was appointed by Governor Laura Kelly in 2019. Former Secretaries of Agriculture have included Jackie McClaskey, Sam Brownback, Foster Dwight Coburn, Alfred Gray, Adrian Polansky, and Joshua Svaty. History Initially, the Kansas State Agricultural Society began organization is 1855 and held the first public meeting in 1857, while Kansas was a territory. The Kansas Legislature officially adopted the Kansas State Agricultural Society as a state entity in 1862. The Kansas Board of Agriculture was created in 1872, building upon the work of the Kansas State Agricultural Society, which had served as a model for departments of agriculture nationwide. The agency became the Kansas Department of Agriculture in 1995. The Department traces its history back to the 1850s when a group of farmers in Kansas Territory created agriculture "societies." Records of the earliest society, established in 1857, are sparse because they were burned when a confederate named William Quantrill raided and burned Lawrence, Kansas. On March 5, 1862, the Kansas Legislature created the Kansas State Agricultural Society, with Floyd Perry Baker temporarily presiding, by statute to organize agricultural work statewide. In 1872, the Kansas Legislature created the State Board of Agriculture from the structure of the Agriculture Society. It became the grandfather of agricultural departments in all fifty states. The board's early years were spent organizing a state fair and acting as an immigration agency to attract needed settlers to homestead in Kansas. Gradually, the state lost its image as a part of the "Great American Desert". Farms and towns sprang up on the fertile plains of the future wheat state. The Board of Agriculture through an annual report and various publications about Kansas served as a source of information and new techniques in farming. Through the grasshopper invasion, droughts, blizzards, and through the invention of barbed wire, the development of combines and advances undreamed in 1872, the Kansas Board of Agriculture has served the producers and consumers of Kansas agricultural products. In 1994, the Board was renamed the