Without China trade, what’s next for Upper Midwest soybean farmers?

By Tadeo Ruiz Sandoval

It’s been raining for hours in Ransom County, North Dakota. The weather reminds Mike Langseth why he has grown a bumper crop of soybeans.

At the edge of his field, he stood in awe of his labor and the effect of a wet growing season.

“I’m proud if you look to the right (of the field) because if you look to the left, there’s weeds over there that I should have killed, and so I’m not so proud of that,” Langseth chuckled.

He joins the ranks of farmers who, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, are expected to have record corn and soybean yields this year.

Last year, the U.S. exported more than 52 million metric tons of soybeans per the USDA. Most of that crop headed to China, the biggest buyer.

So far, China hasn’t placed a single order of U.S. soybeans for the upcoming market year. And the absence has sent farmers across the Upper Midwest scrambling for what to do with the crops.

China has gradually pivoted away from U.S. soybean purchases since 2018, the last time China was embroiled in a trade war with the U.S.

Langseth remembers that year all too well.

“It was hard to pencil in a profit,” he said. “It was hard to see how we were going to be able to continue operating because you look at the numbers, and it was a loss, and it was going to be one until China came back to buying at least some soybeans.”

China turned to Brazil to get their soybean fix. Edward Usset, a grain market economist for the University of Minnesota, says China wants to detach from the U.S. market completely.

“They have made it clear that they’re going to do everything they can to buy their soybeans from South America,” Usset said.

China buys over half of all exported American soybeans. No other single country could come close to filling the gap.

“So if soybean exports are that important to the demand side of the equation, and China is the most important factor in that export demand…their decision to go to South America is going to have a big impact on prices here,” Usset said.

For those who are still working with commodity crops, the options are limited.

The storage option

Caylor Rosenau is a farmer from Carrington and part of the North Dakota Soybean Growers Association, where lately, farmers have been talking about what to do with their beans.

One option is to store them and wait for a buyer, which carries its own set of issues.

“I’ve talked to many neighbors now,” Rosenau said. “And they’ve said, ‘you know, if our bins get filled up with [soy]beans and corn, we can’t store both of them.’”

Farmers only have so much limited space to store their grains and with corn harvests happening after soybeans, producers may have to choose which crop to keep.

“What guys will have to realize is if all of our farmers in the area store their soybeans, what that’s really going to affect is corn, the next crop that we won’t have any storage for,” Rosenau said.

On top of that, if farmers stored soybeans until spring, they’d have to compete with Brazilian producers who export in February.

To avoid this scenario, Rosenau says farmers in his area have turned to domestic soybean processors.

Crushers and seeds

Since the earlier trade war, private companies invested in domestic crush plants. They buy the beans from farmers, process them into oil and meal and then sell to other countries directly.

U.S. crushing capacity grew by 14 percent since 2023 according to the American Soybean Association due to new plants being built across the country. North Dakota opened two crushers just last year.

“When both crush plants got online, we instantly saw a better basis, better price for our soybeans out of these crush plants,” Rosenau said.

But farmer Mike Langseth says that option only goes so far. Eventually, those markets will max out.

“Even if you build the crushers, they’ve got to have a plan for what they’re going to do with the products when they get done,” Langseth said. “They’ve still got to find a home for the soybean meal, the soybean oil that they’re producing.”

To keep earning, Langseth switched from growing soybeans as a commodity crop to the seed market and struck a deal with a major soybean seed retailer.

“The premium paid well, even in those sort of medium years where it was decent prices for soybeans,” Langseth said. “Having that extra, say, dollar a bushel, was nice. It made it easier to make upgrades around the farm, do that sort of thing.”

He had a guaranteed buyer this time and storage already established.

“I was just insulated from the impact as China quietly didn’t buy any soybeans from the U.S.”

Perhaps there’s another way though, he said, if other countries purchase from the U.S.

“The beans are going to move,” Langseth said. “It’s just going to move less efficiently.”

However, at the end of the day, he says increasing grain storage and expanding crush capacity are all just temporary solutions. Rosenau concurs.

“It‘s a great band aid,” Rosenau said. “But it’s still not fixing the main problem that we still need half of our beans to be exported out of North Dakota.”