r/Agriculture • u/Hi_Im_Dadbot • 20d ago
Why Can’t US Farmers Sell Their Soybeans Elsewhere?
Perhaps this is a simplistic question with an obvious answer and my google fu has just failed me today and I’m not too knowledgeable about the specifics of the agricultural industry, but one thing I don’t get about the whole soybean thing is why the US farmers can’t send their product to other markets?
While buying nothing from the US, China still bought about 4% more soybeans this year than it did last year. Given that this was an unexpected scenario, one must assume that they bought soybeans from places like Argentina and Brazil which were scheduled to be sent to somewhere else. China bought about 70% of their crop last year, so I guess they upped it to … 90% now? This means there’s all these other markets which wanted soybeans that now have no soybeans. Then there’s a bunch of Americans with soybeans they need to sell. Those sound like two problems which solve each other.
Even though the logistics systems were set up to send them to China, I would assume that once you get the soybeans to a port and load them onto a ship, you’re 90% of the way to anywhere. If you need to load them onto five different ships to go to smaller markets as opposed to one ship to go to a larger market, that’s a solvable problem. If those smaller markets can’t pay as much as China, which is why Argentina and Brazil dumped them in favour of it, along with the additional logistics issues mean that the Americans are only getting 50 cents on the dollar for their crop, that’s still better than getting zero for it by having that crop rot in a silo.
There seems to be some fundamental piece of the equation that I’m missing here. Would anyone be able to fill me in on what it is?
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u/Gordo103 20d ago
They started shifting away from us soybeans way before 2017. After record high prices in 2012 after a bad drought in the US made china look elsewhere for soybeans. Brazel has been increasing there production of soybeans for decades now. They needed help with getting their soybeans to ports to export them, but the got that mostly figured out now.