Farm Director KC Sheperd talked with United States Soybean Chairman Steve Reinhard about the status and outlook of this year’s soybean crop.
Farming in North Central Ohio, Reinhard said that his crop looks good despite moderate drought conditions in his area. He is beginning to see signs of stress in the plants that grow on hillsides but is looking forward to his rain chances early next week ahead of warming temperatures.
About the nationwide crop, he said, “In Indianapolis, parts of Illinois, and Iowa, stuff can look pretty decent, but I know our friends in the Dakotas have had excess water all spring and summer. But when we talk to our friends in Georgia and the Carolinas, they have been pretty dry in that region.”
Compared to last year’s crop, Reinhard expects this year to be average. “The good places seem to be really good, and the bad ones are, maybe a little bit worse than normal,” he said. “But the thing about soybeans is that we really need to get into August and September. We can really make a good crop if we get some rains late into the summer. We aren’t ready to write the crop off by any means, and I think we still have great potential out there.”
Soybean Innovations:
United Soybean producers are always coming up with innovative, new ways to utilize their crop. Reinhard bragged about the latest, “The new soybean firefighting foam is made with soybean flour. It is developed by Cross Plains Solutions, who is a partner with the United Soybean Board and a lot of our qualified state soybean boards. It is GreenScreen Certified. We get rid of the forever chemicals. They are the ones that contaminate our ground water and soil and never decompose and can cause health issues.”
Reinhard said that it has worked out that it joins the other family of meal-based products that they crush soybeans for like low carb food products, biofuels, and livestock feeds.
He described the soybean firefighting foam as a win-win-win, “Farmers benefit from the sale of their soybeans. Fire Fighters benefit from having a safer product to use, and our environment benefits.”
Having recently completed a portfolio of investments at the July Board Meeting, Reinhard detailed that United Soybeans has around $170 billion in investments which he said will help drive demand for U.S. soybeans, further the resilience of crops, and bring value back to U.S. soybean farmers in several different areas including innovation and technology.
“We are going to be able to expand high oleic soybean maturity groups from a zero to a seven, so more farmers have access to that premium,” he said. “On the demand side, we want to increase soybean oil used for aviation fuel. That’s going to be a 27-billion-gallon market.”
Additionally, U.S. Soybeans is pursuing marine and rail applications. “All six class one railroads are committed to scaling up that biofuel use in fiscal year ’25,” he said. “We are looking at animal agriculture being our biggest consumer, especially poultry and swine. Dairy is now becoming a bigger user of high oleic soybean meal as well. That has boded well for their production and their markets. We continue to look at how we can build soil health with different types of biologicals and chemical treatments that we can use to help with the process.
“A big thing is that we continue to look at infrastructure and connectivity. How can we get more of our rural areas connected to broadband, and infrastructure, when we talk about rail, river, and roads, to be sure we keep an advantage over other grain-producing regions around the world in order to move our products forward.”
