Japanese Delegation Meets with U.S. Farmers to Discuss Soybean Admixture in Wheat

Dec 22, 2025

Wheat farmers in the United States and consumers in Japan share a special relationship built on trust and mutual respect cultivated over the past 70 years. As a result, Japan is one of the largest and loyal markets for U.S. wheat, importing roughly half of its wheat needs from the United States. Maintaining this market means keeping Japanese government officials and millers informed about wheat availability and quality, and having ongoing, curious conversations about concerns, including the unintended presence of soybeans in wheat shipments to Japan.

In mid-December, a high-level Japanese delegation from the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries (MAFF), along with representatives from the Japanese Flour Millers Association (JFMA), traveled to the West Coast to discuss strengthening the supply chain and continuing to deliver stable, high-quality wheat shipments.

Japanese government officials have expressed concerns about soybean admixture in wheat shipments, referring to the unintentional presence of small amounts of soybeans or soybean pieces in bulk shipments of wheat. This foreign material (FM) is monitored according to strict quality control standards, as regulated by USDA’s Federal Grain Inspection Service (FGIS), and is an inadvertent result of farm equipment, storage facilities or transportation units (such as trucks, railcars or shipping holds) handling both bulk commodities.

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Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids