Soybean Farming in the United States (NAICS 111110)

An investor's primer. Under the 2022 North American Industry Classification System (NAICS), code 111110 covers U.S. establishments primarily engaged in growing soybeans and/or producing soybean seed. This primer is written for both public-market and private investors; company tickers, fund expense ratios, and market values are held back until Sections 4 and 10.

1. Overview

Soybeans are one of the two crops — corn is the other — that anchor U.S. row-crop agriculture. In 2024 the U.S. soybean crop was worth about $44.1 billion at the farm gate, making it the country's second-most-valuable field crop after corn [1]. Roughly 271,000 farms grow soybeans, almost all of them family-owned operations spread across the Midwest and the Mississippi Delta [2].

Why an investor should care: soybeans are a global commodity whose price is set on world markets, so the industry is a leveraged bet on a handful of forces — Chinese import demand, the U.S. biofuel mandate, Brazilian competition, and weather. Those forces move the same way for a farmer in Iowa and for a shareholder in a soybean processor. But the industry is unusual in one respect: there is essentially no way to buy "a soybean farm" on a stock exchange. Production is overwhelmingly private, held by families, partnerships, and private farm corporations.

The opportunity is therefore a value chain, not a single investable sector:

• Public-market exposure comes indirectly — through the companies that buy, crush, and trade the beans (processors and merchants), the input suppliers that sell farmers seed, chemicals, fertilizer, and machinery, the farmland real-estate landlords that rent ground to growers, and the funds that track the soybean price itself.
• Private-market exposure is more direct — owning farmland and renting it to operators, operating a farm, or investing in grain elevators, crushing plants, cooperatives, and specialty-soybean supply chains.

2. What it is and how it's structured

Scope. NAICS 111110 is the farming of soybeans — planting, growing, and harvesting the bean, plus growing soybean seed [6]. Soybeans are typically planted in May and early June and harvested from late September through October [2]. The broader chain runs:

Seed and traits → planting and crop protection → harvest and storage → elevator or cooperative → crush or export → soybean meal, oil, food, and biofuel markets.

What NAICS 111110 excludes (important, because the value chain is much bigger than the farm) [6]:

• 311224 — Soybean and Other Oilseed Processing. The crush plants that turn beans into meal and oil sit in manufacturing, not farming.
• 111120 Oilseed (except soybean) farming (canola, sunflower, flax), 111130 Dry pea and bean, 111140 Wheat, 111150 Corn, 111160 Rice.
• 111191 Oilseed-and-grain combination farming and 111199 All other grain farming — the buckets for diversified operations where no single crop family is at least half of market crop value.
• 424510 Grain and Field Bean Merchant Wholesalers (grain elevators and merchandisers), 493130 Farm-product warehousing and storage, and 115112 / 115113 / 115116 (soil preparation, custom harvesting, and farm-management services).

A classification quirk that matters for the numbers. Most U.S. soybeans are grown in rotation with corn on the same ground. A farm is coded to a single NAICS industry by its primary commodity, so a typical corn-and-soybean operation may be classified as corn (111150) or as a combination/other-grain farm (111191/111199) even though it grows a lot of soybeans. The "111110 soybean farm" is thus a narrower legal category than the ~271,000 farms that actually plant soybeans in a given year.

Ownership mix. Soybean production is a family-farm business — mostly sole proprietorships, family partnerships, and family LLCs; corporate ownership is rare and usually just a family that incorporated. In the 2022 Census of Agriculture, 95% of all U.S. farms were family-owned (a national figure, not soybean-specific) [8]. But family ownership does not mean small: large-scale family farms accounted for 51% of the value of cash-grain and soybean production [9], and among soybean growers specifically, farms with fewer than 250 acres were 67% of growers but produced under 18% of the 2022 crop [2]. Output comes from a minority of large operations that rent substantial acreage, employ workers, and run like professional businesses. Land ownership is more split than operation: a large share of cropland is rented from non-operator landlords (retired farmers, heirs, and increasingly institutional owners) under cash-rent or crop-share leases — so the "owner" earning the return is often two parties, the landowner collecting rent and the operator running the farm.

3. How big it is

Because soybean growing is agricultural production, it sits largely outside the standard federal business statistics. The Census Bureau's County Business Patterns and Economic Census exclude crop and animal production (NAICS 111–112), so there is no official establishment/employment/payroll series for soybean farms the way there is for restaurants. The authoritative headcount comes instead from the USDA (U.S. Department of Agriculture) Census of Agriculture, and the size measures come from USDA's crop reports.

Our ingested federal figure:

• U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) size standard: $2.25 million in average annual receipts — the ceiling below which a soybean farm counts as a "small business" for federal programs (2023) [3]. This is an eligibility threshold, not an industry-revenue estimate. In practice nearly every U.S. soybean farm falls under it, which tells you how the industry is structured: many operators, few giants.

The supplied federal file does not provide a NAICS-level revenue, establishment, employment, payroll, or profit figure for this industry, so none is stated here. For scale we use USDA's crop and census data.

Structural snapshot (2022 Census of Agriculture) [7]:

• 270,851 farms harvested soybeans, on 84.6 million harvested acres, producing 4.076 billion bushels.
• The soybean-farm count is down more than 30,000 from 2017 — the industry is consolidating [2].
• Average harvested acreage ~312 acres per soybean farm, up from 114 acres in 1978 — farms are getting bigger even as they get fewer [2].
• The Census counts any operation with $1,000 or more of sales (or intended sales), so it is the thorough structural source [7].

Most recent crop year (2024) [4][1]:

• Production 4.37 billion bushels, up 5% from 2023, on 86.1 million harvested acres at an average yield of 50.7 bushels per acre.
• Value of production $44.1 billion — second among field crops behind corn.
• Corn and soybeans together were $112.7 billion, or 46%, of all U.S. crop cash receipts in 2024 [5].
• Top states: Illinois, Iowa, and Indiana alone account for more than 37% of U.S. production [2].

Undercount caveat. The Census of Agriculture is thorough; the gap is that the business-statistics view simply doesn't cover farms. Census Nonemployer Statistics exclude crop production [10], and the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) excludes proprietors and most self-employed farm operators — it captures only about half of U.S. agricultural employment [11]. On top of that, NAICS 111110 captures only a slice of soybean acreage because of the rotation/primary-commodity issue above. Read soybean scale off USDA crop and census data, not off business registries.

4. The investable universe

There are no pure-play publicly traded U.S. soybean farming companies. Production is private. Public investors buy the ecosystem around the farm; every public name below combines soybeans with other crops, geographies, and businesses. The table groups the main routes.

These are exposure proxies, not recommendations. An ETP holding futures can diverge from the spot price because of futures-market roll effects.

Major private and cooperative participants. The farms themselves are hundreds of thousands of family operations. Around them:

• Cargill — privately held; one of the largest global grain and oilseed merchants and processors, a direct peer to ADM and Bunge but not investable in public markets.
• Louis Dreyfus Company — privately controlled global grains-and-oilseeds merchant and processor.
• CHS Inc. — farmer- and cooperative-owned agribusiness with grain handling, agronomy, and soybean processing.
• Ag Processing Inc. (AGP) — farmer-owned cooperative focused on soybean crushing, oil refining, renewable fuels, and grain marketing.
• Scoular — private grain and oilseed merchant with storage, handling, transport, and specialty-soybean activities. [35]

On the land-owning side, alongside the two REITs, large private and institutional farmland investors (pension-fund and insurance-company portfolios, plus specialist managers) own row-crop ground and rent it to operators. These value-chain firms should not be confused with owners of large amounts of soybean acreage — the primary owners of soybean-producing land remain farm families, partnerships, and private farm corporations.

5. How the money works

A soybean operation's revenue is simple arithmetic: yield (bushels per acre) × price (per bushel) × acres, plus quality/identity-preserved premiums and two government-linked layers — commodity-program payments and crop-insurance indemnities. The economics are those of a thin-margin, price-taking commodity producer, so the levers are cost control, yield, and scale — not pricing power.

Price. Growers are price takers. The soybean price is set on the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) futures market and adjusted by local basis (the local cash price minus the futures price, reflecting transport, storage, elevator capacity, and nearby processor demand). A strong futures price can still produce poor farm economics if basis weakens. The realized farm-gate price averaged around $10 per bushel for the 2024 crop [1], well below the 2021–2022 highs.

Costs. Per university/USDA budgets, 2025 total cost of production ran roughly $662 per acre, about $11.03 per bushel at a 60-bushel yield [12]. The cost stack is dominated by land (~28%) and machinery/repairs (~28%), then seed (~12%), pesticides (~7%), and fertilizer (~7%) [12]. Two structural points: soybeans fix their own nitrogen, so fertilizer is a smaller cost than for corn; and land is the swing cost — cash rents rise and fall with recent crop profitability, on a lag.

Three ways to read the return [30]:

• Operating return — after variable production costs.
• Farm cash return — after interest, rent, labor, and overhead.
• Economic return — after also charging for unpaid family labor and the opportunity cost of land and capital. A farm can look profitable on cash and still earn a weak return on total invested capital.

Margins and cyclicality. This is a boom-bust business. When Chinese demand and drought pushed prices up in 2021, soybean cash receipts hit about $57.5 billion [5]. By 2025, with prices near breakeven, the American Soybean Association projected a market loss of roughly $89 per planted acre — a third straight year of losses on the crop before government support [13]. Thin normal margins mean small moves in price or yield swing a farm between profit and loss.

The safety net. Two federal layers cushion the cycle. Crop insurance — subsidized, delivered by private insurers, with USDA Risk Management Agency (RMA) Revenue Protection policies covering yield and revenue shortfalls [29] — pays when results fall below a guarantee. Commodity programs — Agriculture Risk Coverage (ARC) and Price Loss Coverage (PLC) — pay when revenue or price drops below reference levels; for the 2025 crop, estimated payments were around 70 cents per bushel under ARC versus 46 cents under PLC [14]. In loss years these payments, plus ad-hoc disaster or trade-relief aid, are often the difference between black and red ink.

Who earns what. Processors earn a crush margin — the value of meal, oil, and co-products less the cost of beans, energy, labor, and logistics — and can actually benefit when farm-gate prices are weak, a natural hedge to farmer economics. Merchants earn on origination, storage, transport, and merchandising. Where land is rented, the landowner earns a rental yield on farmland value (historically a few percent, plus appreciation) with little operating risk — the return farmland REITs and institutional buyers capture — while the operator earns the far more volatile residual after rent, inputs, and labor. Understanding which return you are buying is the key to any farmland investment.

6. What drives demand

Roughly 80% of the world's soybeans are crushed into two products, and U.S. demand splits three ways [2]:

1. Exports. Historically about half of the U.S. crop is exported, overwhelmingly to China, which alone bought about $12.6 billion of the $24.5 billion in 2024 U.S. soybean exports — roughly half of all U.S. soybean export value [16]. China buys U.S. (and Brazilian) beans to crush into meal for its huge hog and poultry sectors, making Chinese purchasing the single biggest external demand swing factor. Mexico, the EU, Japan, and Taiwan are the next-largest markets.

2. Domestic crush → soybean meal. Crushing yields soybean meal, the dominant high-protein feed for U.S. poultry, hogs, dairy, and aquaculture. Domestic meal use typically accounts for about 74% of U.S. soybean-meal production, with the rest exported (exports hit record highs in 2023/24) [2]. Meal demand tracks animal-protein output and is relatively steady.

3. Domestic crush → soybean oil → biofuel. This is the fastest-growing driver. About half of U.S. soybean oil now goes into biofuels — biodiesel and renewable diesel [17]. Crush capacity has expanded sharply (up roughly 14% since 2023) to feed new renewable-diesel plants, and USDA forecast 2025/26 crush at 2.49 billion bushels, about 57% of U.S. production [17][18]. Federal biofuel mandates amplify this: the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed raising the biomass-based diesel requirement under the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) by about 67% for 2026, to 5.61 billion gallons [17][31].

Secondary drivers: crop rotation and genetics (soybeans fit corn-soybean rotations, and herbicide-tolerant systems have supported acreage and yield) [2], and specialty demand (organic, non-GMO, high-oleic, and identity-preserved beans earn premiums but add segregation and certification costs).

The forward tension is clear: biofuel demand is rising while export demand to China has become unreliable. Whether domestic crush can absorb beans that China stops buying is the central question hanging over soybean prices.

7. Regulation

Soybean farming is shaped less by industry-specific rules than by four federal policy areas:

• Farm policy (the Farm Bill and its successors). Commodity programs (ARC/PLC), the federal crop-insurance program, and conservation programs are the core. As of 2026, much of the 2018 Farm Bill authority had been extended through September 30, 2026, while 2025 legislation amended several programs [30]. The 2025 reconciliation law commonly called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) raised ARC's maximum coverage to 90% of the benchmark revenue guarantee, widened the payment band, and directed billions toward crop insurance [14].
• Biofuel and tax policy. The RFS sets biofuel blending volumes (demand for soybean oil) [31], and the 45Z Clean Fuel Production Credit subsidizes low-carbon fuels; OBBBA extended 45Z through 2029 and restricted eligible feedstocks to those grown in North America — a direct benefit to domestically grown soybean oil [14]. California's Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) adds further demand for lower-carbon feedstocks [2].
• Trade policy. Because China is the marginal buyer, tariffs and trade agreements move soybean prices as much as any farm rule. U.S.–China tariff disputes in 2018–2019 and again in 2025 cut Chinese purchases and triggered federal aid to farmers [15][16].
• Environmental, input, and biotech regulation. The EPA registers pesticides, sets residue tolerances, and imposes label/worker-protection/endangered-species requirements (e.g., recurring dicamba-herbicide restrictions) [33]. USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), the EPA, and the FDA share oversight of the genetically engineered traits in most soybean seed [32]. The USDA National Organic Program (NOP) governs organic soybeans, prohibiting genetic engineering and limiting synthetic inputs [34].

8. Competitive dynamics and consolidation

At the farm level, competition is atomistic but consolidating. No grower has pricing power; advantage comes from high yields, low cost per bushel, cheap land and financing, efficient machinery and labor, a favorable local basis, and strong elevator/processor relationships. The "competition" is a slow squeeze in which larger, lower-cost operations expand and smaller ones exit — the 30,000-plus drop in soybean farms between 2017 and 2022, alongside rising acres per farm, is that consolidation in the data [2]. Scale spreads machinery, agronomy, data systems, and overhead over more acres, but does not eliminate local competition among growers.

Globally, the competition is Brazil. Brazil has overtaken the U.S. as the world's largest soybean exporter and now supplies the large majority of China's imports — around 93% in 2025 [16]. Brazil's expanding acreage and counter-seasonal second-crop capacity structurally cap U.S. export share; Argentina adds further South American supply.

Up and down the chain, the middlemen are concentrated. A handful of firms — ADM, Bunge (now with Viterra), Cargill, and Louis Dreyfus (the "ABCD" traders) — dominate crushing, storage, and export logistics [21]. Farmers sell into this concentrated buyer base, which shapes basis and margins. On inputs, seed and chemicals are similarly concentrated (Corteva, Bayer, BASF, Syngenta), and machinery is led by Deere and AGCO. USDA reports that U.S. crushing capacity has expanded since 2021, with new plants concentrated in states including North Dakota, Nebraska, Wisconsin, Iowa, Kansas, and Ohio [2]. The result is a barbell: many fragmented producers at the farm gate, a few large firms controlling the infrastructure and market access beyond it.

9. Risks

• Price cyclicality. A global commodity price the farmer can't control; multi-year down-cycles (like 2023–2025) push operations to losses without government support [13].
• Trade / China concentration. Dependence on one dominant export buyer means a diplomatic dispute can erase a large share of demand almost overnight — as in 2025, when China bought essentially zero U.S. soybeans for months [15].
• South American competition. Structural loss of export share to lower-cost, counter-seasonal Brazil and Argentina [16].
• Weather and biology. Drought, flood, heat, frost, disease, insects, and herbicide-resistant weeds can wipe out a season; climate variability raises the odds of extreme years.
• Input and financing costs. Land rents, machinery, seed, chemicals, fuel, and interest have ratcheted up and are sticky on the way down, compressing margins when prices fall [12].
• Logistics. River levels, rail service, export-terminal and storage availability, and local congestion all move basis.
• Policy dependence. Farm income increasingly leans on crop insurance, ARC/PLC, and ad-hoc aid; changes to the farm safety net or biofuel mandates would hit profitability directly [13][14].
• Interest rates and land values. Higher rates raise the cost of financing land and equipment and pressure farmland valuations — a direct risk to leveraged operators and farmland investors.
• Concentration and opacity. Private merchants and cooperatives are important counterparties but disclose far less than public companies.
• Environmental and reputational exposure. Pesticide restrictions, water-quality rules, carbon accounting, and supply-chain traceability can raise compliance costs or change market access.

10. How to invest, and the outlook

Public-market routes (indirect):

• Processors / merchants — ADM, Bunge (BG) — capture the crush margin between bean cost and meal/oil value, a natural hedge to weak farm-gate prices [20][21].
• Input suppliers — Corteva (CTVA) seed/chemicals, Nutrien (NTR) fertilizer/retail, Deere (DE) and AGCO equipment — sell into planted acres regardless of the bean price, though farmer belt-tightening in down-cycles hits them [22][24][26].
• Farmland REITs — Farmland Partners (FPI), Gladstone Land (LAND) — give a liquid, dividend-paying claim on farmland rents and appreciation; FPI is the more row-crop (corn/soybean) exposed of the two [25][26].
• Commodity / exchange / fund routes — Teucrium Soybean (SOYB) for a direct futures-based bet on the bean price, VanEck Agribusiness (MOO) for a diversified ag basket, or CME Group (CME) for exposure to the hedging-and-trading infrastructure itself [27][28].

Private routes (direct):

• Own farmland and rent it to a financially strong operator for a cash-rent yield plus land appreciation — the lowest-operating-risk way to own the asset, and the model the REITs institutionalize.
• Operate a farm, directly or through a share lease, taking full commodity and yield risk for the full residual return.
• Farmland funds and syndications pool capital into row-crop ground for accredited investors; infrastructure (grain storage, transport, crushing) and specialty/precision-ag businesses are further private plays. Due diligence should focus on historical yields, soil and drainage, tenant quality, rent coverage, local basis, crop-insurance structure, debt, equipment replacement, succession planning, and environmental compliance.

Near-term outlook. USDA's latest outlook forecasts 2026/27 U.S. production of 4.5 billion bushels from 85.4 million planted acres, a season-average price of $11.40 per bushel, and ending stocks of 310 million bushels [19] — forecasts, not results. The bull case rests on biofuel: rising renewable-diesel mandates and the 45Z credit could pull a growing share of the crop into domestic crush, tightening the oil market and supporting prices even if exports stay soft. The bear case is China and Brazil: if Chinese buying stays unreliable and Brazil keeps taking share, U.S. export demand and prices remain capped, keeping farm margins thin and leaning on federal support. The 2025 U.S.–China framework — a pledge of about 12 million metric tons late in 2025 and 25 million tons a year in 2027–2029 — would, if honored, restore much of the lost demand, but purchases through late 2025 fell short of the targets, so the recovery is uncertain rather than assured [15][16].

Editorial judgment. The long-term case is strongest for productivity technology, efficient logistics, domestic crushing, and soybean-oil demand. The direct farm case is more conditional — returns stay highly sensitive to weather, land costs, interest rates, South American supply, and trade policy. For general investors, diversified value-chain exposure is usually more practical than trying to buy a pure U.S. soybean-farm business. That split screen — structurally growing domestic biofuel demand against a structurally weaker export franchise — is the defining tension of the soybean industry heading into the second half of the 2020s.

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Sources

1. USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS), Crop Values 2024 Summary, Feb. 2025 ($44.1B value; ~$10/bu realized 2024). https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Todays_Reports/reports/cpvl0225.pdf
2. USDA Economic Research Service (ERS), Soybeans and Oil Crops — Oil Crops Sector at a Glance, 2025 (270,851 soybean farms; 312 acres/farm; small-farm concentration; planting/harvest calendar; export share; crush split; meal ~74% domestic; top states; new crush-plant states). https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/soybeans-and-oil-crops/oil-crops-sector-at-a-glance
3. U.S. Small Business Administration, Table of Small Business Size Standards (NAICS 111110 = $2.25M receipts), 2023. https://www.sba.gov/document/support-table-size-standards
4. USDA NASS, Crop Production 2024 Summary (4.37B bushels; 50.7 bu/acre; 86.1M harvested acres), Jan. 2025. https://www.nass.usda.gov/Newsroom/printable/2025/2025_Jan_10_Crop_Production_News_Release.pdf
5. USDA ERS, Corn, soybeans accounted for 46 percent of U.S. crop cash receipts in 2024 (chart gallery; 2021 cash receipts ~$57.5B), 2025. https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery
6. U.S. Census Bureau, 2022 NAICS Manual (definition of 111110 and adjacent-code exclusions). https://www.census.gov/naics/reference_files_tools/2022_NAICS_Manual.pdf
7. USDA NASS, 2022 Census of Agriculture (270,851 farms; 84.6M harvested acres; 4.076B bushels; $1,000 sales threshold). https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/AgCensus/2022/
8. USDA NASS, 2022 Census of Agriculture: Family Farms (95% of U.S. farms family-owned — national figure), 2025. https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Highlights/2025/Census22_HL_FamilyFarms_FINAL.pdf
9. USDA ERS, Large-Scale Family Farms Lead in Value of Production for Many Commodities in 2022 (51% of cash-grain/soybean value), 2023. https://ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/108249
10. U.S. Census Bureau, Nonemployer Statistics (excludes crop production), 2025. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/nonemployer-statistics.html
11. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, QCEW Questions and Answers (excludes proprietors; ~half of ag employment), 2025. https://www.bls.gov/cew/questions-and-answers.htm
12. Purdue University Center for Commercial Agriculture, 2025 Purdue Crop Cost and Return Guide (~$662/acre; ~$11.03/bu; cost breakdown), 2025. https://ag.purdue.edu/commercialag/home/paer-article/2025-purdue-crop-cost-and-return-guide/
13. American Soybean Association, The Rising Cost Squeeze: Soybean Farmers Face a Third Year of Losses (~$89/acre projected 2025 market loss), 2025. https://soygrowers.com/news-releases/the-rising-cost-squeeze-soybean-farmers-face-a-third-year-of-losses/
14. American Farm Bureau Federation, One Big Beautiful Bill Act: Agricultural Provisions / 45Z Clean Fuel Production Credit (ARC to 90%; ARC/PLC payment estimates ~70¢/46¢; 45Z through 2029; North-America feedstock rule), 2025. https://www.fb.org/market-intel/one-big-beautiful-bill-act-final-agricultural-provisions
15. CNBC, China buys US soybeans, falling short of trade agreement goal, Dec. 2025 (near-zero purchases; 12/25 MMT framework). https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/09/china-buys-us-soybeans-trump-trade-agreement.html
16. Investigate Midwest, Soybeans have been a top US ag export for decades — what happens when the top buyer stops buying?, Dec. 2025 (2024 export value $24.5B; China $12.6B; Brazil ~93% of China imports). https://investigatemidwest.org/2025/12/15/soybeans-have-been-a-top-us-ag-export-for-decades-what-happens-when-the-top-buyer-stops-buying/
17. Terrain (Farm Credit), Renewable Diesel: The Soybean Crush Engine / AgWeb, Can Biofuels Make Up for Lost China Soybean Export Demand? (crush capacity +14% since 2023; ~50% of soy oil to biofuel; RFS +67% to 5.61B gal for 2026), 2025. https://www.terrainag.com/insights/renewable-diesel-the-soybean-crush-engine/
18. USDA ERS, More Soybeans Being Processed in the United States to Meet Rising Demand for Meal and Oil (2025/26 crush 2.49B bushels ≈ 57% of production), 2025. https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/112861
19. USDA ERS, Soybeans and Oil Crops: Market Outlook (2026/27: 4.5B bu; 85.4M planted acres; $11.40/bu; 310M bu ending stocks), 2026. https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/soybeans-and-oil-crops/market-outlook
20. Archer-Daniels-Midland Co., 2025 Form 10-K (~$80B revenue; Ag Services & Oilseeds ~$61.6B). https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/7084/000000708426000011/adm-20251231.htm
21. Bunge Global, 2025 Annual Report (Viterra combination; global crush/merchandising network). https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1996862/000162828026024590/annualreport_bg-12312025x.htm
22. Corteva, Fourth-Quarter 2025 Earnings Release (planned separation of seed and crop protection, targeted Q4 2026). https://www.corteva.com
23. Deere & Company, 2025 Form 10-K (equipment, precision ag, farm financing). https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/315189/000110465925122321/de-20251102x10k.htm
24. AGCO Corp., 2025 Annual Report (farm machinery and precision-ag technology). https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/880266/000088026626000027/agco2025annualreport_ars.htm
25. Farmland Partners, 2025 Form 10-K (farmland REIT; ~125,200 acres; ~90% row-crop). https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1591670/000110465926017533/fpi-20251231x10k.htm
26. The Motley Fool, Best Agriculture Stocks / Best Farmland REITs, 2026 (Deere market cap; Nutrien revenue; Gladstone Land). https://www.fool.com/investing/stock-market/market-sectors/consumer-staples/agriculture-stocks/
27. Teucrium, SOYB Soybean Fund / ETF.com & VanEck, MOO Agribusiness ETF (expense ratios; assets). https://teucrium.com/soyb
28. CME Group, Soybean Futures Contract Specifications, 2026. https://www.cmegroup.com/markets/agriculture/oilseeds/soybean.contractSpecs.html
29. USDA Risk Management Agency, Revenue Protection, 2026. https://www.rma.usda.gov/revenue-protection
30. USDA ERS, Farm and Commodity Policy / Commodity Costs and Returns: Documentation (Farm Bill extension through Sept 30, 2026; operating/cash/economic return framework), 2026. https://ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-commodity-policy
31. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Final Renewable Fuel Standards for 2026 and 2027, 2026. https://www.epa.gov/renewable-fuel-standard/final-renewable-fuel-standards-2026-and-2027
32. USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), Biotechnology Regulations, 2025. https://www.aphis.usda.gov/biotechnology/regulations
33. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Regulatory and Guidance Information for Pesticides (registration; dicamba), 2026. https://www.epa.gov/regulatory-information-topic/regulatory-and-guidance-information-topic-pesticides
34. USDA Agricultural Marketing Service, Organic Standards / National Organic Program, 2026. https://www.ams.usda.gov/content/organic-standards
35. Company profiles: Cargill (Agriculture), Louis Dreyfus Company (Grains & Oilseeds), CHS Inc. (About), Ag Processing Inc. (About), and Scoular (What We Do), 2026. https://www.cargill.com/agriculture; https://www.ldc.com; https://chsag.com/about/; https://www.agp.com/about/; https://www.scoular.com