A group of Indonesian farmers traveled 9,000 miles to find food for their chickens.
That’s how good Minnesota soybeans are.
“Our soybeans from the north are very clean, low disease, low foreign material and dry, and the quality of the protein may be better than the quality of the protein from higher-protein soybeans,” Seth Naeve, a University of Minnesota soybean expert, told the prospective buyers. “It’s a different perspective than crude protein content, but we’re trying to focus on what the animal wants.”
Soybean farmers are in dire straits this year as China refuses to buy U.S. soy in retaliation for President Donald Trump’s tariffs, causing prices to tank and harvests to sit unsold. But farmers aren’t just waiting around for a federal bailout; they’re looking for alternative buyers.
“We’ve got to beat the bushes and utilize these trade teams and show them what a great product the U.S. has,” said Joel Schreurs, a farmer in Tyler and board member of the Minnesota Soybean Research & Promotion Council. “It’s plentiful, and it’s relatively cheap at this point in time. Now’s the time to buy, if you’re a foreign entity.”
Last week’s tour group, which also included soybean buyers from Vietnam and Thailand, is part of a broader and long-running effort to build export markets for U.S. soybeans. Schreurs, who also serves on the U.S. Soybean Export Council, said he’s hosted probably 20 trade teams in almost as many years at his farm, including the group from Southeast Asia.
“We’re working all over the world to develop new markets,” he said.
Prospective soybean buyers tour a test plot ready for harvest near the University of Minnesota’s St. Paul campus Sept. 29. (Brooks Johnson/The Minnesota Star Tribune)
There are about 26,000 soybean farmers in Minnesota, and more than half of the state’s soybean crop ends up as international exports, largely to feed livestock, according to the Minnesota Soybean Growers Association.