At the risk of sounding like Michael "Belgian Endive" Dukakis, I'll ask the question anyway: Can Kansas farmers grow things in quantity other than wheat?

I don't mean Belgian endive, that peculiar salad ingredient presidential candidate Dukakis, campaigning in 1987, suggested Iowa farmers grow.

He obviously had no grasp of the cultural requirements of Belgian endive or of the labor involved in getting it from ground to his plate in the Massachusetts governor's mansion. The two-step process, I'm told, involves pulling the mature plant, whacking off the top part, trimming the roots, putting these in a bucket, filling it with sand and harvesting the shoots that grow from the roots.

The crop seems more in tune with a home garden, although if I went to all that fuss, I'd want Belgian endive to taste like a Hershey's bar.

As one who thinks of himself as a home gardener, I ask the wheat question having just returned from my morning survey of the garden. Lettuce, beets, beans, carrots, tomatoes, onions, berry bushes, fruit trees and, in particular, the potatoes all display unusual vigor, making me wonder what I did right for a change.

Across the road, in soil probably not much different than mine, is wheat. Just wheat. Some years, it's milo. Just milo. A few times, it's been sunflowers. Just sunflowers.

It is an unirrigated field, so water-loving plants such as tomatoes probably wouldn't fare well, but not far away is a field under pivot that produces corn. Could that same ground yield some Brandywines or Better Boys?

Back to the dryland field across the road: Would potatoes thrive over there as they do this year, for some reason, in my garden? Mine haven't been watered artificially at all. Neither, come to think of it, have the beans, and so far, they look just fine. I've grown soybeans and green beans and know the requirements are the same. Why can't fields of soybeans also yield fields of Kentucky Wonder bush beans?

The answer, at least on paper, is they could. My neighboring field also could sprout potatoes. The problem is scale.

When I planted my 250-foot row of spuds, my equipment comprised a hoe, a paper sack of seed potatoes and my hand. At harvest, I'll use a spade and a wheel barrow.

The 50 feet of bush beans went in the same way. When they're the proper size to pick, I'll use an upturned bucket to sit on and another to put the beans in.

A 250-foot row of potatoes is different than 250 acres of potatoes, and 50 feet of green beans is not the same as 50 acres of beans, particularly when your planting and harvesting machines are hand tools.

The point I'm slow to get to is we seem to have the potential to grow more than we do. This region once produced a cornucopia of vegetables and fruits, but that was way back yonder when farms were less mechanized and a day's wage was $2.

As the cost of transportation rises with each upward lurch in fuel prices, some enterprising local farmers might toe the waters of alternative crops and invest in the proper equipment to put more than just a few potatoes, green beans and salmonella-free vine-ripened tomatoes in the produce bins of local grocery stores.

The days of fresh grapes from Chile are coming to a screeching halt. We can grow our own grapes. We can grow a variety of other food, too, all of it nearly within walking distance of our plates. We used to do that here. We can do it again.

And we can leave the endive in Belgium, where it belongs.

nGordon D. Fiedler Jr. can be reached at 822-1407 or by e-mail at sgfiedler@salina.com.