Shaw Aerial Spraying Airport

While no official reason is publicly documented, the closure is presumed to be due to economic or personal factors related to the owner and the associated business, 'Shaw Aerial Spraying'. The closure of small, privately-owned, special-purpose airfields like this is commonly tied to the owner's retirement, the sale of the land for other purposes (in this case, agriculture), or the cessation of the business it was built to support.

The airport is permanently closed and has been fully reclaimed for agricultural use. Satellite imagery of the coordinates shows that the land where the runway once existed is now a cultivated farm field. The faint, linear outline of the former north-south runway is still visible in the soil and crop patterns, but there are no remaining airport facilities such as hangars, lighting, or markings. The site is indistinguishable from the surrounding farmland from the ground.

Shaw Aerial Spraying Airport was a private-use airfield that served as the operational base for an agricultural aviation business. Its sole purpose was to support the local farming community in and around Oberlin and Decatur County, Kansas. Operations consisted of agricultural aircraft (crop dusters) taking off and landing to load and dispense fertilizers, pesticides, and other treatments onto nearby fields. The facility consisted of a single, unpaved north-south turf runway, estimated to be approximately 2,600 feet long. It was a vital piece of infrastructure for the specific agricultural business it served from at least the 1970s until its closure in the mid-1990s.

There are no known plans or prospects for reopening the Shaw Aerial Spraying Airport. The land is privately owned and has been completely converted back to agricultural production for several decades, making any future return to aviation use extremely unlikely.