{"id":230197,"date":"2025-10-17T00:00:05","date_gmt":"2025-10-17T00:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/230197\/"},"modified":"2025-10-17T00:00:05","modified_gmt":"2025-10-17T00:00:05","slug":"us-farmers-are-struggling-to-sell-soybeans-heres-how-to-think-about-the-trade-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/230197\/","title":{"rendered":"US farmers are struggling to sell soybeans. Here\u2019s how to think about the trade war."},"content":{"rendered":"

Americans have a weird relationship with soy, one of the most important and widely cultivated<\/a> crops in the world.<\/p>\n

Most of us associate the protein-packed, butter-yellow orbs known as soybeans with niche vegetarian products like tofu, soy milk, and veggie burgers (hence the anti-vegan epithet<\/a> \u201csoy boy\u201d). In reality, though, pretty much everyone is eating soy all the time, and if you\u2019re not a vegetarian, chances are you\u2019re consuming more soy than those who avoid meat, not less.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s because soy is the invisible backbone supporting modern, meat-heavy diets. The overwhelming majority of soy on Earth \u2014 about 77 percent<\/a> \u2014 is grown to feed not humans but the billions of chickens, pigs, and cows raised to feed us, supplying the chief protein source in livestock diets.<\/p>\n

Humanity\u2019s prodigious appetite for meat explains why the US produces so much soy. Although for most of agricultural history it was exclusively an East Asian crop, grown to make foods like miso, soy sauce, and tofu, today, almost all soybean cultivation is concentrated in the Americas<\/a>. As recent trade war headlines<\/a> reminded us, the US is, after Brazil, the world\u2019s second leading soy producer, and soybeans are our top agricultural export. The humble bean has become, over the last century, as much an ambassador for American abundance as corn syrup and chicken nuggets.<\/p>\n

Because it is demanded everywhere but production is geographically clustered, the soybean has attained curious geopolitical significance as the single most<\/a> traded<\/a> global agricultural commodity. China, long ago the world\u2019s leading soybean grower<\/a>, is now the world\u2019s top importer, buying most of its soy from Brazil and the US, primarily to feed its factory-farmed pigs, chickens, and fish. In fact, in most years, China buys most of all US soy exports. Brazil, meanwhile, has, in recent decades, become an agricultural superpower partly on the back of its soy sales to China<\/a>. Seeking to limit its dependence on imports, China is even striving<\/a> to develop livestock feeds lower in soy content.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a><\/p>\n

A worker sorts imported soybeans in Binzhou, China. NurPhoto\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

When delicate diplomatic relationships like these become strained \u2014 like, say, when the head of a major soy-producing country starts a trade war<\/a> for no reason \u2014 export-dependent industries suffer. That\u2019s the position that US soybean farmers now find themselves in. Beijing placed steep tariffs<\/a> on American soybeans this year in retaliation for President Donald Trump\u2019s aggressive tariffs, vaporizing US soy sales to China. The total value of American soy exports from the first half of this year are down nearly a quarter from 2024, and, according to the most recent US Department of Agriculture data<\/a>, Chinese traders have placed zero orders for US soy from the current harvest year, which started September 1. (By this time last year, they\u2019d already ordered<\/a> millions of tons.)<\/p>\n

American soy producers, watching China buy record levels of soy<\/a> from Brazil and Argentina<\/a> while boycotting the US, are understandably irate. Just as predictably, the White House has signaled<\/a> it will throw money at farmers to make up for their losses, just as it did<\/a> during Trump\u2019s first trade war in 2018.<\/p>\n

For all that, though, there may be less to this dust-up than meets the eye. Soy exports are not actually economically important to the US \u2014 all of agriculture makes up less than 1 percent<\/a> of our economy \u2014 though they do matter to local economies in farm states. And while Trump\u2019s trade war is pointless and destructive to the country as a whole<\/a>, the reason farmers in particular are likely to be bailed out \u2014 with tariff revenue extracted from all Americans \u2014 is political, not economic. Traditionally, we subsidize agriculture because growing food is really important \u2014 we do need to eat \u2014 but there\u2019s no reason (other than the electoral influence of Iowa farmers) to view the export of feed for China\u2019s pigs<\/a> as a national priority worth spending perhaps $10 billion<\/a>.<\/p>\n

We should all care less about the fortunes of the soybean industry. It is, as a few experts told me, likely going to be fine. Rather, the way to understand soy is as a miraculous and precious technology that, if used more wisely than we use it now, could sustainably feed a world of 8 billion and counting. The trade war is mostly a sideshow, but it could, on the margin, move us even farther from that goal.<\/p>\n

Every so often, a very confused post goes viral online, blaming vegans for the global soybean industry\u2019s razing of tropical rainforests<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This may shock you, but these claims are not, in fact, true. Only about 13 percent of the world\u2019s soy output is processed into soybean oil that humans eat \u2014 found in ubiquitous packaged foods like crackers, cookies, and salad dressings \u2014 and less than 6 percent<\/a> is used for the foods you might associate with the vegan aisle.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s not just that more soy goes to animal products than into food for people. It\u2019s that soy is used disproportionately and inefficiently to make animal products. We waste more land and more calories<\/a> feeding soy to farmed animals than we would if we ate the crops directly.<\/p>\n

That means that surging global meat consumption over the last few decades has accelerated the clearing of some of the planet\u2019s most ecologically important land, like the Amazon rainforest<\/a> and the Brazilian Cerrado<\/a>, to farm livestock and their feed crops, including soy.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a><\/p>\n

Our World in Data<\/p>\n

But here is the thing: As long as people are eating animals, the animals need to eat something. And soy has emerged, alongside corn, as one of the crops of choice because it\u2019s essentially the most productive, most land-efficient \u2014 and therefore least environmentally destructive \u2014 protein source in the world.<\/p>\n

\u201cDon\u2019t blame the soy,\u201d Timothy Searchinger, a senior research scholar at Princeton University and a leading expert on the planetary impacts of agriculture, told me. \u201cIf it weren\u2019t soy and we were increasing meat [consumption] and we had to feed meat with lentils, we\u2019d need three times as much land to feed the meat with the lentils, and we\u2019d all be cursing lentils.\u201d<\/p>\n

In other words, soy is the least bad option for feeding livestock, but livestock aren\u2019t a good use of the soy. And the demand for animal feed is now rising alongside another major global user of soybeans, one that also squanders land that could otherwise be spared to maintain wild, biodiverse, carbon-storing ecosystems. That use is biofuels, or liquid fuels refined from agricultural crops that power cars, trucks, planes, and other machinery. Once embraced as a renewable alternative to fossil fuels, biofuels like corn ethanol and soy biodiesel are now<\/a> believed<\/a> by many climate experts to be just as bad, or even worse, in their carbon emissions than their petroleum counterparts when their land use is taken into account.<\/p>\n

But biofuels remain stubbornly entrenched in the US energy mix, through policies like the federal Renewable Fuel Standard<\/a>, with the backing of politically powerful commodity crop industries (which are quite open<\/a> about the fact that the whole point of biofuels policy is to guarantee them a market). Over the last 20 years, an ever-increasing share of US soybean oil has been siphoned to biofuels, from around 15 percent<\/a> in 2010 to a projected more than half<\/a> in the 2025-2026 harvest year.<\/p>\n

All the while, this diversion of US cropland to grow fuel is pushing actual food production into new frontiers, driving<\/a> the destruction of irreplaceable forestland elsewhere in the world \u2014 a predictable market outcome known as indirect land-use change. Soybean oil used in packaged supermarket foods is highly substitutable for other vegetable oils, like canola, sunflower, and palm, Richard Sexton, an agricultural economist at University of California, Davis, explained. And so, as more US soybean oil is funneled into fuel tanks, the rich rainforests of Southeast Asia \u2014 among the most important carbon reservoirs on Earth and home to our critically endangered great ape cousins, orangutans \u2014 are mowed down to grow oil palm.<\/p>\n

As Sexton put it: \u201cWe are deforesting Indonesia and Malaysia due to our biofuel policies.\u201d<\/p>\n

What will the trade war mean for the future of soy? <\/p>\n

Whether we\u2019re feeding it to pigs and chickens or trucks and tractors, the principle is the same: Humans use too much soy, a magnificently productive crop, for perilously unproductive purposes.<\/p>\n

But that doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s a good thing that American farmers are now struggling to sell their soybeans. Because soy is a global market, any soybeans that China doesn\u2019t buy from the US, it can source from South America. And South American soy is worse for the planet than US soy, because it\u2019s a region where significant land clearing for agriculture is still taking place. \u201cIf you are going to shift production from the US to Latin America, you end up having higher carbon costs, as well as biodiversity costs,\u201d Searchinger said.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not clear, though, whether the trade war will meaningfully shift production from the US to South America. For that to happen, South American soybean prices would need to be high enough to entice farmers to expand production more than they otherwise would have. There\u2019s a bit of evidence to support that \u2014 US soy prices have been depressed this year<\/a> due to lack of Chinese demand, while export prices in Brazil have been elevated \u2014 but the counterfactual is unclear, nor is it clear how long these price effects will persist.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a><\/p>\n

Soybean feed at a pig farm in Yiyang county in China\u2019s central Henan province. AFP\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think it\u2019s a stretch to say that these types of tariffs could incentivize more planting and land use change in\u201d South America, Sexton said. At the same time, he noted, the trade war\u2019s impacts will probably be transitory and unlikely to change the fundamental nature of the world soy market. South America only has so much soy to sell, so if Brazil and Argentina sell more of its supply to China, then the US will simply sell more to countries that South America leaves behind. And all the soybeans that farms can\u2019t sell now, he said, will be sold eventually; they\u2019re shelf-stable and will sit in storage until a buyer appears.<\/p>\n

US soy growers worry that they\u2019ll have to sell their beans for a \u201cdeeply discounted price,\u201d Virginia Houston, director of government affairs at the American Soybean Association, told me. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of anxiety in farm country right now.\u201d<\/p>\n

But if the trade war with China is, on balance, not having much impact on US soy, then the soy industry stands to be bailed out for nothing, and the coming farm aid might just represent another wealth transfer from the American people to farmers<\/a>. That is, in fact, what happened under the first Trump administration\u2019s trade war, when bailouts to soy farmers significantly exceeded<\/a> their economic losses. Searchinger suspects the current hype about the industry\u2019s plight from the trade war is \u201ca bit of a scam.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some of the most important global problems of the 21st century, from malnutrition, to climate change, to the large-scale torture of animals raised for food<\/a>, could be mitigated if humans ate more soy directly.<\/p>\n

Significantly higher in protein<\/a> per calorie than other legumes, as well as in other key nutrients like iron and calcium, soy is the best plant-based alternative to many of the nutrients found in meat. It\u2019s practically a superfood (to the extent there is such a thing<\/a>), yet it\u2019s structurally wasted.<\/p>\n

Some people still believe<\/a> consuming soy can be dangerous or \u201cfeminizing\u201d to men, which is wholly untrue<\/a>. If I were being uncharitable, I\u2019d say that viral myths about the health risks of soy look like a suspiciously convenient cultural defense mechanism against having to face up to the problems of high meat consumption. We farm massive amounts of the world\u2019s most ideal protein source, shovel it to farm animals, and tell ourselves there\u2019s something wrong with eating it ourselves.<\/p>\n

Now, I love traditional soy foods like tofu and soy milk, which have been around for centuries. But these are old technologies, and for a country whose soy industry is so dominant on the world stage, the US has had surprisingly little innovation in making soy foods more delicious, easy to cook, and culturally legible (products like Impossible burgers<\/a> and soy curls<\/a> are notable exceptions).<\/p>\n

America should have greater ambitions for the soybean, treating it not just as slop for the world\u2019s abused livestock but as a technological treasure with the potential to reshape global diets for the better. As a policy matter, we should invest massively in research and development to make soy foods sexy and appealing \u2014 not just to vegans, but to mainstream America.<\/p>\n

Agricultural innovation has, after all, already thoroughly transformed soy from an East Asian specialty to an all-American mass commodity. The next transformation will be even more challenging but more worthy of our national pride: turning soy from an industrial feedstock back into human food.<\/p>\n

This story was first featured in the Processing Meat newsletter. Sign up here<\/a>! <\/p>\n

Update, October 16, 1:15 pm: This story has been updated with a comment from the American Soybean Association.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve read 1 article in the last month<\/p>\n

Here at Vox, we’re unwavering in our commitment to covering the issues that matter most to you \u2014 threats to democracy, immigration, reproductive rights, the environment, and the rising polarization across this country.<\/p>\n

Our mission is to provide clear, accessible journalism that empowers you to stay informed and engaged in shaping our world. By becoming a Vox Member, you directly strengthen our ability to deliver in-depth, independent reporting that drives meaningful change.<\/p>\n

We rely on readers like you \u2014 join us.<\/p>\n

\"Swati<\/p>\n

Swati Sharma<\/p>\n

Vox Editor-in-Chief<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Americans have a weird relationship with soy, one of the most important and widely cultivated crops in the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":230198,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[12267,28,1687,690,101,299,29584,111,128474,128475,113216],"class_list":{"0":"post-230197","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-economy","8":"tag-animal-welfare","9":"tag-business","10":"tag-climate","11":"tag-culture","12":"tag-economy","13":"tag-food","14":"tag-future-perfect","15":"tag-politics","16":"tag-processing-meat","17":"tag-the-future-of-meat","18":"tag-world-politics"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=230197"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230197\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/230198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=230197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=230197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=230197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}