ORLANDO, Fla. — Finding and sustaining new uses for soybeans continues to be a major focus for soybean groups at Commodity Classic in 2023.

The three-day event in Orlando began March 9, and optimism about what the future holds for soybeans in the Midwest was on display. After two record-setting years of production and profitability, Brent Swart, Iowa Soybean Association treasurer, said there are plenty of reasons for happy soybean farmers this year.

“We want to keep this thing going,” Swart said. “There is local and domestic demand for our soybeans. In northern Iowa, there’s a new crush plant that came online. There’s another new crush plant in my neck of the woods in northwest Iowa that is going to be completed in the next year or two. Just in Iowa, we are going to be able to increase our soybean crush capacity in the state by around 30%.”

The increase of crush potential is a welcome sight to Iowa Soybean Association President Randy Miller.

“It wasn’t that long ago there were barrels of oil sitting that we had no use for,” he said. “Now we have developed uses for them like biodiesel, renewable diesel and sustainable aviation fuel.”

The development of sustainable aviation fuel may take over as a major player in the soy product market.

“We are hoping to turn that market to where that’s going to be the market and not the soy meal,” Miller said. “That’s just an evolution of time as we spend checkoff dollars to help build demand and find new uses for soybean products.”

Research is a key focus for Illinois producers, according to Brady Holst, chairman of the production committee of the Illinois Soybean Association.

“We want to ramp up our research at universities,” he said. “We’ve always had endowments at universities, but we’ve really been increasing our talks with other researchers around the state and getting them into more projects outside of the endowment, and we are funding more projects. We also want to ramp up our outreach to get that research out to farmers in Illinois so they can start using that.”

Finding out more about the U.S. product will help give unbiased data to producers and legislators who are making decisions ahead of a 2023 Farm Bill.

“We want to be a trusted source for information,” Holst said. “It’s hard to find unbiased opinions because a lot of agronomy work is for a company that wants to sell you something. We are trying to build up this agronomy team that is able to give you opinions on anything without trying to sell you anything.”

The value of U.S. soybeans can be seen in some of the product differences between domestic beans and those grown globally, said Stan Born, chairman of the United States Soybean Export Council. Some of those differences are because of the natural environment in the U.S.

“In other places around the world, they have to terminate the bean before it’s mature so they can dry it,” he said. “It’s about amino acids that make the difference in how quickly an animal puts on (weight). We have a higher energy content in our beans, which helps animals compared to if they are eating a competitive product.”

While there is excitement in the soybean world, there is a sense that things could easily change. Swart said he understands input costs are higher and margins are tightening up, but he said this isn’t anything new to farmers.

“It is what it is, and we can still sell new crop today at a profitable level,” he said. “But with tight supplies and high prices over the last few years, that creates more volatility in the market.”