Annual soybean survey helps sell US soybeans to other countries. The organizer behind the survey, Seth Naeve, University of Minnesota, Extension Soybean Agronomist.
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Annual soybean survey helps sell US soybeans to other countries. The organizer behind the survey, Seth Naeve, University of Minnesota, Extension Soybean Agronomist.
What is In the Pod: Soybean Updates?
The NDSU Extension weekly podcast In the Pod: Soybean Updates delivers timely insights and expert advice on soybean production.
Bruce Sundeen:
You're listening to In the Pod, Soybean Updates, a weekly trek into the latest soybean information from NDSU Extension. There are benefits to understanding harvest data from previous soybean seasons, but how and where is that information? Seth Naeve, University of Minnesota, Extension Soybean Agronomist, handles an annual soybean survey. Seth, what's the purpose of your soybean survey?
Seth Naeve:
I conduct an annual survey each year of the quality of The US soybean crop. So this is a benchmark that's used by everybody globally since 1986, and we've been doing this since 02/2006 in my lab. So it's basically evaluating the quality of The US soybean crop relative to the historical. Where does the data come from?
Seth Naeve:
The survey is really a survey of farmers. So farmers send samples to us, and we send out about 3,000 invitations and receive 1,500 or 2,000 responses every year. So farmers are really good about sending samples back to us. They're happy to do it. We send them a little postcard with their results and they're excited to see their own results relative to the state and regional and, US averages.
Bruce Sundeen:
What does the soybean survey say about last year's soybean crop?
Seth Naeve:
Last year, you know, we had a very unusual crop and that we had pretty widespread drought across The US. So it it affected the crop in kind of complex ways. But overall, the average quality of the crop looked pretty good. Sometimes we have a correlation between yields and quality, and this year yields were down just a little bit, but we had good quality overall. Protein was good at 34.0%, and oil was very good at 19.9%. So both of those were up by three tenths of a point over last year. And the oil was very good considering the long term average. So it was a very good oil year, and that makes a lot of folks happy that are looking at the future for soybean as a more important veg oil producer rather than a protein producer.
Bruce Sundeen:
Is there a main focus of the survey?
Seth Naeve:
The report's really focused on an export market. The real primary focus is to help international purchasers make decisions to support them in their decisions to make, hopefully, a purchase of US soybeans.
Bruce Sundeen:
You must have an impressive setup in order to crunch all that data.
Seth Naeve:
Yes. It's quite a machine. We get things it's a plug and play kind of a thing. And the important factor here is that I go to North Asia in early November to present this report to large purchasers in Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, and so we have to have a report done by the early November. There's very little time for analysis on this thing. We just have to have everything ready to go. And we analyze samples for protein and oil and amino acids and sugars and all these things that we can get from NIR, but we also analyze the samples for seed size and test weight and moisture content, foreign material, and a number of other factors as well. So it takes a lot of manpower to turn this over in a very short amount of time.
Bruce Sundeen:
Can the soybean survey provide projections for the next growing season?
Seth Naeve:
Yeah. This, protein and oil, especially those two in soybeans, are very difficult to predict. Even into the late season, we do not really have a good feel for how these trends are going to shake out. In some ways, it's good job security for me and because I'm the guy doing the analysis on this every year. But I'm sure there's number crunchers in Cargill and Bunge and AGP that are are doing some of this, making some predictions themselves. But we found it to be very, very difficult to predict protein and oil and soybeans simply because there's trade offs between the two. There's trade offs with yield and in a very complex fashion. It's very difficult to predict.
Bruce Sundeen:
Do you have any other insights into last year's crop?
Seth Naeve:
Another really important factor from the 2024 crop was that the soybeans harvested were very dry. We had very dry end of season conditions, especially in the Western Corn Belt. But this plays a really interesting factor in this whole business because soybean farmers are paid less because they're selling their grain that's overly dry and seven, eight, nine percent. They're being paid on a 13% moisture basis, so they're giving a lot of extra seed away. But on the other hand, the buyers can see this as a potential benefit for them in that they get a lot more protein and oil per ton. It's actually a thing that we can use, although it's negative directly for the farmers, we can help promote US soybeans by promoting their physical quality as high quality, very dry soybeans that they can get good crush yields when they process those soybeans.
Bruce Sundeen:
Thanks, Seth. Our guest has been Seth Naeve, University of Minnesota extension soybean agronomist. You're listening to In the Pod, Soybean Updates, a weekly trek into the latest soybean information from NDSU Extension.