How soybeans took over America — and the world

Americans have a weird relationship with soy, one of the most important and widely cultivated crops in the world.

Most of us associate the protein-packed, butter-yellow orbs known as soybeans with niche vegetarian products like tofu, soy milk, and veggie burgers (hence the anti-vegan epithet “soy boy”). In reality, though, pretty much everyone is eating soy all the time, and if you’re not a vegetarian, chances are you’re consuming more soy than those who avoid meat, not less.

That’s because soy is the invisible backbone supporting modern, meat-heavy diets. The overwhelming majority of soy on Earth — about 77 percent — is grown to feed not humans but the billions of chickens, pigs, and cows raised to feed us, supplying the chief protein source in livestock diets.

Humanity’s prodigious appetite for meat explains why the US produces so much soy. Although for most of agricultural history it was exclusively an East Asian crop, grown to make foods like miso, soy sauce, and tofu, today, almost all soybean cultivation is concentrated in the Americas. As recent trade war headlines reminded us, the US is, after Brazil, the world’s second leading soy producer, and soybeans are our top agricultural export. The humble bean has become, over the last century, as much an ambassador for American abundance as corn syrup and chicken nuggets.

Because it is demanded everywhere but production is geographically clustered, the soybean has attained curious geopolitical significance as the single most traded global agricultural commodity. China, long ago the world’s leading soybean grower, is now the world’s top importer, buying most of its soy from Brazil and the US, primarily to feed its factory-farmed pigs, chickens, and fish. In fact, in most years, China buys most of all US soy exports. Brazil, meanwhile, has, in recent decades, become an agricultural superpower partly on the back of its soy sales to China. Seeking to limit its dependence on imports, China is even striving to develop livestock feeds lower in soy content.

When delicate diplomatic relationships like these become strained — like, say, when the head of a major soy-producing country starts a trade war for no reason — export-dependent industries suffer. That’s the position that US soybean farmers now find themselves in. Beijing placed steep tariffs on American soybeans this year in retaliation for President Donald Trump’s aggressive tariffs, vaporizing US soy sales to China. The total value of American soy exports from the first half of this year are down nearly a quarter from 2024, and, according to the most recent US Department of Agriculture data, Chinese traders have placed zero orders for US soy from the current harvest year, which started September 1. (By this time last year, they’d already ordered millions of tons.)

American soy producers, watching China buy record levels of soy from Brazil and Argentina while boycotting the US, are understandably irate. Just as predictably, the White House has signaled it will throw money at farmers to make up for their losses, just as it did during Trump’s first trade war in 2018.

For all that, though, there may be less to this dust-up than meets the eye. Soy exports are not actually economically important to the US — all of agriculture makes up less than 1 percent of our economy — though they do matter to local economies in farm states. And while Trump’s trade war is pointless and destructive to the country as a whole, the reason farmers in particular are likely to be bailed out — with tariff revenue extracted from all Americans — is political, not economic. Traditionally, we subsidize agriculture because growing food is really important — we do need to eat — but there’s no reason (other than the electoral influence of Iowa farmers) to view the export of feed for China’s pigs as a national priority worth spending perhaps $10 billion.

We should all care less about the fortunes of the soybean industry. It is, as a few experts told me, likely going to be fine. Rather, the way to understand soy is as a miraculous and precious technology that, if used more wisely than we use it now, could sustainably feed a world of 8 billion and counting. The trade war is mostly a sideshow, but it could, on the margin, move us even farther from that goal.

Every so often, a very confused post goes viral online, blaming vegans for the global soybean industry’s razing of tropical rainforests.

This may shock you, but these claims are not, in fact, true. Only about 13 percent of the world’s soy output is processed into soybean oil that humans eat — found in ubiquitous packaged foods like crackers, cookies, and salad dressings — and less than 6 percent is used for the foods you might associate with the vegan aisle.

But it’s not just that more soy goes to animal products than into food for people. It’s that soy is used disproportionately and inefficiently to make animal products. We waste more land and more calories feeding soy to farmed animals than we would if we ate the crops directly.

That means that surging global meat consumption over the last few decades has accelerated the clearing of some of the planet’s most ecologically important land, like the Amazon rainforest and the Brazilian Cerrado, to farm livestock and their feed crops, including soy.

But here is the thing: As long as people are eating animals, the animals need to eat something. And soy has emerged, alongside corn, as one of the crops of choice because it’s essentially the most productive, most land-efficient — and therefore least environmentally destructive — protein source in the world.

“Don’t blame the soy,” Timothy Searchinger, a senior research scholar at Princeton University and a leading expert on the planetary impacts of agriculture, told me. “If it weren’t soy and we were increasing meat [consumption] and we had to feed meat with lentils, we’d need three times as much land to feed the meat with the lentils, and we’d all be cursing lentils.”

In other words, soy is the least bad option for feeding livestock, but livestock aren’t a good use of the soy. And the demand for animal feed is now rising alongside another major global user of soybeans, one that also squanders land that could otherwise be spared to maintain wild, biodiverse, carbon-storing ecosystems. That use is biofuels, or liquid fuels refined from agricultural crops that power cars, trucks, planes, and other machinery. Once embraced as a renewable alternative to fossil fuels, biofuels like corn ethanol and soy biodiesel are now believed by many climate experts to be just as bad, or even worse, in their carbon emissions than their petroleum counterparts when their land use is taken into account.

But biofuels remain stubbornly entrenched in the US energy mix, through policies like the federal Renewable Fuel Standard, with the backing of politically powerful commodity crop industries (which are quite open about the fact that the whole point of biofuels policy is to guarantee them a market). Over the last 20 years, an ever-increasing share of US soybean oil has been siphoned to biofuels, from around 15 percent in 2010 to a projected more than half in the 2025-2026 harvest year.

All the while, this diversion of US cropland to grow fuel is pushing actual food production into new frontiers, driving the destruction of irreplaceable forestland elsewhere in the world — a predictable market outcome known as indirect land-use change. Soybean oil used in packaged supermarket foods is highly substitutable for other vegetable oils, like canola, sunflower, and palm, Richard Sexton, an agricultural economist at University of California, Davis, explained. And so, as more US soybean oil is funneled into fuel tanks, the rich rainforests of Southeast Asia — among the most important carbon reservoirs on Earth and home to our critically endangered great ape cousins, orangutans — are mowed down to grow oil palm.

As Sexton put it: “We are deforesting Indonesia and Malaysia due to our biofuel policies.”

What will the trade war mean for the future of soy?

Whether we’re feeding it to pigs and chickens or trucks and tractors, the principle is the same: Humans use too much soy, a magnificently productive crop, for perilously unproductive purposes.

But that doesn’t mean it’s a good thing that American farmers are now struggling to sell their soybeans. Because soy is a global market, any soybeans that China doesn’t buy from the US, it can source from South America. And South American soy is worse for the planet than US soy, because it’s a region where significant land clearing for agriculture is still taking place. “If you are going to shift production from the US to Latin America, you end up having higher carbon costs, as well as biodiversity costs,” Searchinger said.

It’s not clear, though, whether the trade war will meaningfully shift production from the US to South America. For that to happen, South American soybean prices would need to be high enough to entice farmers to expand production more than they otherwise would have. There’s a bit of evidence to support that — US soy prices have been depressed this year due to lack of Chinese demand, while export prices in Brazil have been elevated — but the counterfactual is unclear, nor is it clear how long these price effects will persist.

“I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that these types of tariffs could incentivize more planting and land use change in” South America, Sexton said. At the same time, he noted, the trade war’s impacts will probably be transitory and unlikely to change the fundamental nature of the world soy market. South America only has so much soy to sell, so if Brazil and Argentina sell more of its supply to China, then the US will simply sell more to countries that South America leaves behind. And all the soybeans that farms can’t sell now, he said, will be sold eventually; they’re shelf-stable and will sit in storage until a buyer appears.

US soy growers worry that they’ll have to sell their beans for a “deeply discounted price,” Virginia Houston, director of government affairs at the American Soybean Association, told me. “There’s a lot of anxiety in farm country right now.”

But if the trade war with China is, on balance, not having much impact on US soy, then the soy industry stands to be bailed out for nothing, and the coming farm aid might just represent another wealth transfer from the American people to farmers. That is, in fact, what happened under the first Trump administration’s trade war, when bailouts to soy farmers significantly exceeded their economic losses. Searchinger suspects the current hype about the industry’s plight from the trade war is “a bit of a scam.”

Some of the most important global problems of the 21st century, from malnutrition, to climate change, to the large-scale torture of animals raised for food, could be mitigated if humans ate more soy directly.

Significantly higher in protein per calorie than other legumes, as well as in other key nutrients like iron and calcium, soy is the best plant-based alternative to many of the nutrients found in meat. It’s practically a superfood (to the extent there is such a thing), yet it’s structurally wasted.

Some people still believe consuming soy can be dangerous or “feminizing” to men, which is wholly untrue. If I were being uncharitable, I’d say that viral myths about the health risks of soy look like a suspiciously convenient cultural defense mechanism against having to face up to the problems of high meat consumption. We farm massive amounts of the world’s most ideal protein source, shovel it to farm animals, and tell ourselves there’s something wrong with eating it ourselves.

Now, I love traditional soy foods like tofu and soy milk, which have been around for centuries. But these are old technologies, and for a country whose soy industry is so dominant on the world stage, the US has had surprisingly little innovation in making soy foods more delicious, easy to cook, and culturally legible (products like Impossible burgers and soy curls are notable exceptions).

America should have greater ambitions for the soybean, treating it not just as slop for the world’s abused livestock but as a technological treasure with the potential to reshape global diets for the better. As a policy matter, we should invest massively in research and development to make soy foods sexy and appealing — not just to vegans, but to mainstream America.

Agricultural innovation has, after all, already thoroughly transformed soy from an East Asian specialty to an all-American mass commodity. The next transformation will be even more challenging but more worthy of our national pride: turning soy from an industrial feedstock back into human food.

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Update, October 16, 1:15 pm: This story has been updated with a comment from the American Soybean Association.