OPINION: Secret to soybean prices is in the Pacific Ocean

Jul 13, 2022

More than 90 % of the world’s soybeans are grown in North and South America. With the three biggest producers (Brazil, United States, and Argentina), and a handful of minor producers like Paraguay, Uruguay, and Canada, the world’s number one oilseed crop is actually grown on a relatively small portion of the entire globe.

That’s key for us to remember as the Russia –Ukraine war carries on and grain export challenges out of the Black Sea continue to make headlines. The soybean market is largely driven by things outside of eastern Europe and we need to consider how the forces drive soybeans differently.

Soybean futures prices on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange actually made their big jump up through the $17/bushel price threshold following the February 10 USDA’s World Supply and Demand Estimates where they confirmed the lower South American yields due to this past season’s drought. That was a full two weeks before Russian tanks rolled across the border into Ukraine. It was a third step up in soybean values following both the December and January USDA reports, where analysts lowered their expectations for South American soybean production due to drought, and price responded accordingly.

Estimates of the South American soybean crop production shrunk by 20 million metric tonnes between the planting time yield estimates in November’s report and the February reports when the crop was reaching maturity.

Click here to see more...

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