Soybean farmers finding new markets

The pressures to find clean, renewable fuels and make foods healthier have pushed Kansas soybean farmers into new markets.

Food and fuel have been portrayed as competing for crops such as corn as biofuels have become more prevalent, but with soy one hasn’t come at the expense of the other, said John Wray, an Ottawa soybean farmer who was manning the Kansas Soybean Commission’s booth at the Topeka Farm Show on Wednesday afternoon.

The farm show runs through 4 p.m. Thursday at the Kansas Expocentre.

In 2011, Kansas farmers harvested about 3.75 million acres of soybeans, with a market value of about $1.15 billion. That made it the third highest-value crop grown in the state, behind corn and wheat, according to the National Agricultural Statistics Service.

A soybean has two parts that people usually use — the protein meal and the oil — with most of the rest of the bean composed of fiber, Wray said. Though eating whole soybeans isn’t uncommon in some cultures, he said, most American-grown beans are crushed to separate the meal and the oil, which make different kinds of products.

Most of the meal goes into livestock feed, either in the United States or abroad, Wray said. Some aquaculture, or “fish farming,” operations also are using it as an alternative to feeding the fish being raised with ground-up flesh from fish that humans rarely use, he said.

“That’s our new growth market, aquaculture,” he said.

Until a few years ago, the oil from the soybeans was primarily used for human foods. Typically, it went through a process called hydrogenation to turn the liquid oil into solid fats that stood in for butter — and raised worries among nutritionists as they studied the impact of “trans fats” on consumers’ risk for heart problems.

As public concerns about trans fats grew, food manufacturers shifted away from soybean oil, and farmers increasingly sold it for industrial applications, including biodiesel, plastics and even the backing on the artificial grass that the Kansas Soybean Commission had set up for people visiting the farm show to putt golf balls on. That has made it easier to shift away from petroleum in some industries and to meet federal environmental standards, Wray said.

“There was about 2 or 3 billion pounds of oil on the market,” he said. “We’re using the surplus of the oil.”