Soybean and Other Oilseed Processing in the United States (NAICS 311224)

An investor's primer. NAICS (North American Industry Classification System) code 311224 covers the plants that crush soybeans and other oilseeds into oil and protein meal. This is the industrial midpoint between the farm and the food, feed, and fuel markets.

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1. Overview

Soybean and oilseed "crushers" buy raw oilseeds — overwhelmingly soybeans, plus canola, cottonseed, sunflower, and flax — and mechanically or chemically split them into two products: vegetable oil and protein meal. A 60-pound bushel of soybeans yields roughly 11 pounds of oil and 44 pounds of meal [1]. The oil goes into cooking oil, food manufacturing, and increasingly renewable diesel and biodiesel; the meal is the world's dominant high-protein animal feed, especially for poultry, hogs, and aquaculture.

Why an investor should care: this is a large, capital-intensive, highly consolidated commodity-processing business sitting at the center of two structural stories at once — the global animal-protein diet and the U.S. biofuels build-out. It earns money on a spread (the "crush margin"), not on a retail markup, which makes it a distinctive way to play agriculture without owning farmland or betting on a single crop price.

Public vs. private ways in. The public routes are narrow and indirect: two large-cap agribusiness majors (Archer Daniels Midland and Bunge Global), a downstream renewable-fuel play (Darling Ingredients), and one tiny thinly traded pure-play cooperative (South Dakota Soybean Processors). The bulk of U.S. crushing capacity is held privately — by Cargill and by farmer-owned cooperatives such as Ag Processing Inc. and CHS. Private-market investors mostly access the industry through those cooperatives, through the wave of new plant joint ventures, or through the biofuel buyers downstream. (Details in Sections 4 and 10.)

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2. What it is and how it's structured

In scope (NAICS 311224): establishments primarily engaged in crushing soybeans and other oilseeds to make crude oils and oilseed meal/cake — soybean oil and meal, cottonseed oil and cake, sunflower, canola, and flaxseed (linseed) oil, and soy flour [2]. The typical plant runs a solvent-extraction process at large scale: beans are cracked, dehulled, conditioned, and flaked; the flakes contact hexane, which dissolves the oil; the oil-solvent mixture is separated and heated; solvent is recovered and reused; and the remaining meal is desolventized and toasted. The EPA identifies n-hexane as the principal hazardous air pollutant from oilseed solvent extraction [3].

What it explicitly excludes — and the adjacent NAICS codes where that activity is counted:

• Growing the crop — soybean farming is NAICS 111110; other oilseed farming is 111120.
• Refining and blending the oil into finished cooking oils, margarine, and shortening — NAICS 311225 (Fats and Oils Refining and Blending). Many integrated sites both crush and refine, so the two codes overlap in practice.
• Corn oil from wet milling — NAICS 311221.
• Making biodiesel or renewable diesel — that is chemical/fuel manufacturing (biodiesel ~NAICS 325199; renewable diesel at petroleum refineries, NAICS 324110), not oilseed processing. The crusher supplies the feedstock; it does not, under this code, make the fuel.
• Complete animal feeds blended from the meal — NAICS 311119.

Ownership mix. The industry is a barbell. On one end, a handful of vertically integrated global grain majors (privately held Cargill; publicly traded ADM and Bunge) and large farmer-owned cooperatives (AGP, CHS) run most of the tonnage. On the other, a long tail of single-plant operators and specialty (organic, food-grade, non-soy oilseed) processors. A defining feature is grower ownership: several of the biggest crushers are cooperatives owned by the farmers who supply them, which changes how "profit" is defined (see Section 5).

Plant logistics. Plants are located near dense oilseed production, rail, and sometimes river or export infrastructure. Local sourcing is important because the incoming bean is bulky relative to its value, while meal must be distributed to livestock regions and oil to refiners, food manufacturers, or fuel plants. South Dakota Soybean Processors, for example, reports that it primarily buys within approximately 50 miles of its plants, sells much of its meal within roughly 200 miles, and ships more than half of all products by rail [4].

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3. How big it is

Per U.S. federal statistics for NAICS 311224:

Two things stand out. First, this is a high-output, low-headcount industry: about $60 billion of shipments from fewer than 11,000 workers means enormous revenue per employee — a signature of automated, continuous-process commodity manufacturing. Second, it is extremely concentrated: four firms account for more than three-quarters of revenue, and the market-share HHI (Herfindahl-Hirschman Index, a standard concentration gauge) is suppressed in the federal data — not disclosed — precisely because so few firms dominate. Industry estimates run even higher: South Dakota Soybean Processors states that ADM, Bunge, Cargill, and AGP together control "nearly 85%" of U.S. soybean processing [4].

A caveat on what the numbers do and don't capture. The $60 billion Census figure is gross commodity shipments, not economic value added or processor earnings. Soybean values pass through both sales and cost of goods; ADM explicitly notes that revenue and cost of products sold in agricultural merchandising and processing are significantly correlated with commodity prices, and that margin is more informative than revenue when prices move sharply [8]. Unlike industries dominated by tiny sole proprietors (where federal business statistics undercount), 311224 is well captured — but the figures still understate the industry's true economic weight in two ways. (a) The largest crushers are business units of much larger private or diversified companies (Cargill, ADM, Bunge) whose farming, trading, refining, and fuel activities are counted under other codes, so no single ticker or NAICS line captures the whole enterprise. (b) The $60 billion of crushing receipts is a small slice of the value chain it anchors: USDA estimated installed U.S. soybean crush capacity at 2.8–3.1 billion bushels at the beginning of marketing year 2025/26, with maximum daily throughput rising from 6.4 million bushels in 2020/21 to more than 7 million in 2024/25 [9].

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4. The investable universe

Public exposure is limited and mostly indirect. There is no large, clean, pure-play "U.S. soybean crushing" stock; you buy the majors that do it among many other things, or the buyers downstream.

Publicly traded (reported figures):

Private and cooperative owners (not directly investable, or investable only indirectly):

• Cargill — privately held; ~21% of U.S. crush [12]. No public equity.
• Ag Processing Inc. (AGP) — farmer-owned cooperative; ~12% of U.S. crush [12]. Operates 11 Midwestern soybean-processing plants and further processes oil through its refineries for food and biofuel markets [17].
• CHS Inc. — large farmer cooperative and crusher; its common ownership is member-only, but it has listed preferred stock (e.g., CHSCP and related series on Nasdaq) that trades publicly — a rare indirect route into a farmer co-op [18].
• Louis Dreyfus Company — privately held global merchant; expanding U.S. crush (new Ohio plant) [19].
• Other meaningful operators — Perdue AgriBusiness, Riceland Foods, CGB Enterprises, Incobrasa, and Zeeland Farm Services, among others [20].
• New-plant joint ventures — the current build-out has created a set of private/JV owners: Platinum Crush (Alta, Iowa), North Dakota Soybean Processors (a CGB Enterprises / Minnesota Soybean Processors JV), and High Plains Processing (Mitchell, SD, a ~$500M plant that started up October 2025) [16][21].

Bottom line: for most public investors the industry is a component of ADM or BG, plus a fuel-demand bet via DAR/VLO. Real "pure-play" ownership is private, cooperative, or micro-cap.

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5. How the money works

The crush margin (the whole game). A crusher's gross profit is the crush spread: the combined market value of the oil and meal it produces minus the cost of the beans it buys. The industry standard "board crush" uses futures prices:

Crush spread ≈ (meal price × 0.022) + (oil price × 11) − soybean price [1]

(0.022 short tons of meal and 11 pounds of oil per bushel.) When oil and meal are expensive relative to beans, the spread widens and plants run hard; when beans are dear relative to products, margins compress and plants slow. Because a plant's costs are largely fixed (energy, labor, depreciation on an expensive facility), capacity utilization and throughput are as important as the spread itself — a crusher wants to run flat-out whenever the margin is positive.

Where margins sit now. Board crush margins spent 2021–2023 at historic highs of roughly $2.00–$3.00 per bushel, then normalized toward about $1.10–$1.50 per bushel into late 2025 as new capacity came online [22]. That normalization matters: the recent boom in plant construction was underwritten by peak margins that have since cooled. South Dakota Soybean Processors provides an illustrative example: it reported gross margin of about 4.9% in fiscal 2025, down from 5.3% in 2024 and 11.2% in 2023, citing weaker meal and oil values even as physical processing volume increased [4].

The oil-vs-meal mix has flipped. Historically meal was the "main" product and oil the byproduct. The renewable-diesel boom reversed that: soybean oil's share of total crush value rose from roughly 25–35% before 2020 to about 35–50% since [22]. Plants increasingly "crush for oil," which leaves more meal than the domestic market needs — pushing the U.S. to export record volumes of meal (see Section 6). Meal prices are consequently soft: forecast around $310 per short ton, roughly flat year-over-year, amid ample global supply [23].

Hedging. Processors actively hedge commodity exposure. ADM, for example, uses exchange-traded futures and options to hedge soybean purchases and proportional meal and oil sales; during 2025, designated U.S. facilities hedged 94–100% of anticipated monthly crush and also hedged natural-gas consumption [8]. Hedging can lock in a positive conversion spread, but it introduces basis, timing, liquidity, and mark-to-market effects and does not protect against outages or yield shortfalls.

How owners actually take profit.

• Investor-owned crushers (ADM, Bunge): profit is the crush spread across a huge fleet, times throughput, minus overhead — reported through their oilseed segments, and returned to shareholders via dividends and buybacks (ADM has raised its dividend for 50+ years [11]).
• Farmer cooperatives (AGP, CHS, SDSP): the "profit" is partly captured upstream by member-farmers through the price paid for their beans and through patronage distributions — earnings paid back to members in proportion to what they delivered. A co-op can run at a modest reported margin because the value is deliberately passed to its farmer-owners.

Key operating levers to watch: crush margin, plant utilization, soybean basis (local cash price vs. futures), energy costs, and the oil-to-meal value split.

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6. What drives demand

1. Animal protein → meal. Soybean meal is the backbone of livestock and poultry feed worldwide. Domestic feed demand is steady; the swing factor is exports. U.S. soybean-meal exports hit a record ~16.3 million metric tons in 2024/25 and are forecast at ~19.4 million short tons in 2025/26, with domestic use forecast at 42.4 million short tons, as surging crush produces more meal than the U.S. can use [23][24].

2. Biofuels → oil. The dominant new driver. Renewable-diesel capacity exploded from ~791 million gallons in 2021 to more than 4.5 billion gallons in 2025 [22]. However, actual soybean-oil use in biomass-based diesel has softened: USDA's March 2026 outlook reduced the 2025/26 projection to ~14.0 billion pounds, down from earlier forecasts, after soybean-oil use in biomass-based diesel during October–December 2025 ran 22% below the prior-year period while tallow use increased 19% [23]. This demand is policy-made — it exists because of federal mandates and tax credits (Section 7) — which is both the industry's biggest tailwind and its biggest risk.

3. Food and industrial oil. Cooking oils, food manufacturing, and industrial uses provide a stable base of oil demand, though biofuel now sets the marginal price.

4. The crop and trade cycle. Ultimately the crusher's raw material is a weather-driven, globally traded commodity. Big U.S. and South American harvests, currency swings, and — critically now — China's buying patterns move soybean prices and therefore the crush spread. In 2025 China imported a record ~112 million metric tons of soybeans but sourced ~73.6% from Brazil, with U.S. beans carrying a 13% Chinese tariff; U.S. soybean exports to China fell ~76% to ~$3.1 billion, from a ~$17.9 billion peak in 2022 [25][26]. Weaker whole-bean exports leave more beans at home to be crushed — a paradoxical short-term support for domestic crush volume, but a sign of eroded farm-economy strength.

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7. Regulation

The industry itself is lightly regulated as a manufacturer (food-safety, environmental/air-emissions, and worker-safety rules), but its economics are set by federal biofuel policy:

• Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS). The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) sets annual volumes of biofuel that must be blended into the U.S. fuel supply. EPA's final 2026 and 2027 RFS set total applicable biomass-based-diesel volumes of 9.07 billion and 9.20 billion RINs, respectively [27]. (Note: these are RIN-equivalent volumes, not physical gallons — a frequent source of misreporting.) The size and timing of these mandates are the single most important policy variable for oil demand.
• Clean Fuel Production Credit (Section 45Z). This federal tax credit, whose implementing guidance arrived in January 2025, replaced a flat $1/gallon subsidy with a sliding scale based on the fuel's carbon intensity — crop-based feedstocks like soybean oil earn a smaller credit than waste fats and used cooking oil [28]. The credit applies to qualifying domestically produced transportation fuel sold from January 1, 2025 through December 31, 2029; fuel produced after 2025 must use feedstocks grown or produced in the United States, Mexico, or Canada [29]. How USDA/Treasury score soybeans' carbon intensity (including farming practices) materially affects whether soybean oil or cheaper imported/waste feedstocks win the marginal gallon.
• Trade policy. Tariffs and retaliation (notably the U.S.–China dispute) reshape where beans, meal, and oil flow, and are effectively part of the regulatory backdrop [25][26].

The through-line: a large share of this industry's newest demand exists because Washington created it. Changes to RFS volumes, 45Z rules, the biofuel blenders/tax-credit regime, or feedstock carbon-intensity scoring can swing crush economics quickly.

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8. Competitive dynamics and consolidation

This is one of U.S. manufacturing's most concentrated industries: four firms hold ~76% of revenue and the top 20 hold ~97% [5]. The trade group NOPA (National Oilseed Processors Association) reports its 19 members operated 69 soybean and softseed solvent-extraction plants across 20 states in July 2025 and crushed more than 98% of U.S. soybeans, equivalent to more than 2 billion bushels annually [21][20].

Two forces define the competitive map today:

Consolidation at the top. Bunge's ~$18 billion acquisition of Viterra (completed July 2, 2025) created a roughly $100 billion-revenue global agribusiness and reinforced the "ABCD" oligopoly (ADM, Bunge, Cargill, (Louis) Dreyfus) that has long dominated global grain and oilseed trade [13].

A capacity build-out at the base. Spurred by the biofuel boom and peak-margin years, NOPA members have collectively invested about $6 billion to expand U.S. crush capacity by more than 25% relative to 2023, with roughly 189 million bushels of new annual capacity coming online near-term [21][30]. New and expanded plants include Cargill's ~$225 million Sidney, Ohio upgrade; a Bunge–Chevron joint venture doubling a Louisiana plant; Louis Dreyfus's new Ohio plant; and greenfield JVs like Platinum Crush, North Dakota Soybean Processors, and High Plains Processing [19][21][30].

The risk this creates: analysts warn of overbuild. Much of the new capacity was justified by biofuel demand that depends on policy; if mandates or credits disappoint, the industry could face too many plants chasing a spread that has already narrowed [22][30].

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9. Risks

• Policy dependence. The oil-demand growth story rests on RFS mandates and the 45Z credit. Weaker-than-expected volumes, unfavorable carbon-intensity scoring for soybeans, or loss of biofuel tax support would hit oil values and crush margins directly. ADM noted that deferred U.S. biofuel policy compressed oilseed margins in 2025 [8][28][27].
• Overbuild / margin compression. A ~25%+ capacity expansion into already-normalizing margins risks a period of excess capacity and thin spreads [22][30].
• The meal glut. Crushing "for oil" produces surplus meal; if export demand softens, meal prices — and the meal side of the crush spread — weaken further [23].
• Trade and China. U.S. beans are largely priced out of China by tariffs; Brazil's record harvests and share gains pressure U.S. bean prices and farm income, and any escalation reshapes flows [25][26].
• Commodity and weather volatility. Margins depend on the relationship between bean, oil, and meal prices; droughts, bumper crops, and currency moves can whipsaw all three.
• Input and energy costs. Solvent extraction is energy-intensive; natural-gas and logistics costs matter to unit economics.
• Environmental and operating hazards. N-hexane emissions are regulated under EPA's solvent-extraction NESHAP [3]. OSHA classifies grain handling as high hazard: combustible dust can explode, while bins, conveyors, and augers create engulfment, entanglement, and amputation risks [31].
• Concentration/regulatory scrutiny. Extreme concentration invites periodic antitrust and "food-price" political attention.
• Feedstock substitution. Because 45Z rewards low carbon intensity, waste fats, used cooking oil, and imported feedstocks can displace domestic soybean oil in the fuel pool [22][28].
• Labor. Plants require reliable operators, electricians, mechanics, instrumentation technicians, laboratory staff, and safety personnel, often in rural labor markets. Skilled-labor shortages show up through lower uptime and deferred maintenance rather than simply higher headcount [4].

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10. How to invest and the outlook

Public-market routes.

• The majors: ADM (NYSE: ADM) and Bunge Global (NYSE: BG) are the only large-cap ways to own U.S. crushing scale — but oilseed processing is one segment among grain trading, milling, refining, and nutrition, so you get diversified agribusiness, not a pure spread bet. ADM offers a long dividend-growth record; BG is now larger and more trade-focused after Viterra [11][13]. Neither is a pure U.S. NAICS 311224 exposure: both have global merchandising, refining, and other processing operations whose results may overwhelm domestic soybean-crush performance.
• The demand side: Darling Ingredients (NYSE: DAR) and Valero (NYSE: VLO) give exposure to the renewable-diesel pull on oil via Diamond Green Diesel, rather than to crushing itself. These may benefit from cheap feedstock rather than strong crusher margins, so their economic sensitivity can be opposite that of a crusher [15].
• Pure-play / co-op access: South Dakota Soybean Processors files with the SEC but its units are not exchange-listed; transfers occur through a restricted matching service [4]. CHS's publicly listed preferred stock (Nasdaq) provides creditor-like or preferred-income exposure to a diversified cooperative, not residual common-equity ownership of its crushing business [18].
• Commodity route: sophisticated investors can trade the crush spread directly using CBOT soybean, soybean-oil, and soybean-meal futures — the cleanest expression of the industry's core economics, and a hedging tool the plants themselves use [1]. Note that this is leveraged commodity and basis exposure, not ownership of plant assets, local origination advantages, or operating execution.

Private-market routes. Most true ownership is private: equity in the co-ops (AGP, CHS, SDSP) generally requires being a farmer-member, and the growth capital is flowing into new-plant joint ventures (Platinum Crush, North Dakota Soybean Processors, High Plains Processing) backed by grain companies, cooperatives, and biofuel partners [16][21]. Private investors also access the theme through the renewable-fuel producers and feedstock aggregators downstream.

Near-term outlook (forward-looking judgment). The base case is record crush volumes — USDA forecasts ~2.58 billion bushels in 2025/26 [23] — driven by biofuel-oriented oil demand and a wall of new capacity. But the margin outlook is more cautious than the volume outlook: crush spreads have already normalized off their historic highs [22], meal is in structural surplus and being exported to clear [23], and the whole demand thesis is hostage to biofuel policy (RFS volumes and the 45Z carbon-intensity rules) [27][29] and to a China trade relationship that currently favors Brazil [25][26]. The softness in soybean-oil use for biofuel in late 2025 — down 22% year-over-year while tallow gained share [23] — is a warning against treating renewable-diesel demand as a one-way secular curve. Expect strong throughput, softer per-bushel economics, and a multi-year test of whether the ~25% capacity build was warranted or an overbuild [30]. For investors, the practical read: this is a policy-levered, spread-driven cyclical, best owned with a clear view on biofuel mandates and the oil-to-meal value split — not as a simple bet on "more soybeans."

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Sources

1. CME Group, "Soybean Crush Reference Guide" (yields and board-crush formula), n.d. — https://www.cmegroup.com/education/files/soybean-crush-reference-guide.pdf
2. U.S. Census Bureau, NAICS 311224 profile, 2022 — https://data.census.gov/profile/311224_-_Soybean_and_Other_Oilseed_Processing?codeset=naics~311224
3. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, "Solvent Extraction for Vegetable Oil Production: National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants (NESHAP)," n.d. — https://www.epa.gov/stationary-sources-air-pollution/solvent-extraction-vegetable-oil-production-national-emission
4. South Dakota Soybean Processors, LLC, Form 10-K FY2025 (~2,200 members; logistics; gross margins; transfer restrictions), 2026 — https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1163609/000116360926000010/sdsp-20251231.htm
5. U.S. Census Bureau, 2022 Economic Census, Concentration Ratios / receipts and firm counts for NAICS 311224, 2022 — https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/economic-census.html
6. U.S. Census Bureau, County Business Patterns (establishments, employment, payroll for NAICS 311224), 2023 — https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp.html
7. U.S. Small Business Administration, Table of Size Standards (NAICS 311224 = 1,250 employees), 2023 — https://www.sba.gov/document/support-table-size-standards
8. Archer Daniels Midland Company, Form 10-K FY2025 (revenue correlation with commodity prices; hedging practices; biofuel policy impact), 2026 — https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/7084/000000708426000011/adm-20251231.htm
9. USDA Economic Research Service, "Oil Crops Outlook: July 2025" (installed capacity 2.8–3.1 billion bushels; daily throughput trends), 2025 — https://ers.usda.gov/sites/default/files/_laserfiche/outlooks/112916/OCS-25g.pdf?v=15177
10. Statista, "Revenue of Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), by segment" / company 2024 revenue ~$85.5B, 2025 — https://www.statista.com/statistics/274518/revenue-and-operating-profit-of-archer-daniels-midland-by-segment/
11. Macrotrends, "Archer Daniels Midland — Market Cap and Dividend History" (ADM ~$36.5B market cap mid-2026; 50+ years dividend growth), 2026 — https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/ADM/archer-daniels-midland/market-cap
12. Farm Action, "Agricultural System Concentration Data" (U.S. soybean crush shares: Bunge 26%, ADM 21%, Cargill 21%, AGP 12%), 2024 — https://farmaction.us/concentrationdata/
13. DTN/Progressive Farmer, "Bunge, Viterra Complete $18 Billion Merger" (~$100B revenue, closed July 2, 2025), 2025 — https://www.dtnpf.com/agriculture/web/ag/news/business-inputs/article/2025/07/02/bunge-viterra-complete-18-billion
14. Bunge Global SA, Form 10-K FY2025 (post-Viterra segment reporting), 2026 — https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1996862/000162828026009842/bg-20251231.htm
15. Darling Ingredients Inc., "Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2025 Financial Results" (Diamond Green Diesel JV; ~$6.1B net sales), 2026 — https://www.darlingii.com/media/news/20260211-darling-ingredients-inc-reports-fourth-quarter-2025-results
16. South Dakota Soybean Processors, LLC, Form 10-K FY2024 and company profile (~2,200 members; ~145M bushels/yr; Volga, SD), 2025 — https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1163609/000116360925000010/sdsp-20241231.htm
17. Ag Processing Inc., corporate overview (11 Midwestern plants; refining for food and biofuel), n.d. — https://www.agp.com/
18. CHS Inc., Form 10-K FY2025 (cooperative structure; preferred stock), 2025 — https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/823277/000082327725000038/chscp-20250831.htm
19. Ohio Ag Net, "Big expansion for Ohio soybean crush" (Louis Dreyfus, Cargill Sidney upgrade), 2023 — https://ocj.com/2023/11/big-expansion-for-ohio-soybean-crush/
20. National Oilseed Processors Association, member plant locations (19 members, 69 plants, 20 states), 2025 — https://www.nopa.org/oilseed-processing/nopa-plant-locations/
21. National Oilseed Processors Association, membership and capacity releases (Platinum Crush, North Dakota Soybean Processors; ~98% of U.S. crush; $6B expansion), 2024–2025 — https://www.nopa.org/platinum-crush-joins-nopa-to-expand-influence-and-help-drive-the-future-of-u-s-soy-and-biofuels/
22. farmdoc daily (University of Illinois), "The Value of Soybean Oil in the Soybean Crush" (margins, oil value share, renewable-diesel capacity), 2025 — https://farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/2025/10/the-value-of-soybean-oil-in-the-soybean-crush.html
23. USDA Economic Research Service, "Oil Crops Outlook: March 2026" (meal price ~$310/short ton; soybean oil to biofuel revised to ~14.0 billion lb; meal export/domestic use forecast; crush forecast 2.58B bushels; Oct–Dec 2025 biofuel use down 22%), 2026 — https://ers.usda.gov/media/20862/ocs-26c.pdf?v=56117
24. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Foreign Agricultural Service, "U.S. Soybean Meal Exports Expected to Reach Record High," 2025 — https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/us-soybean-meal-exports-expected-reach-record-high
25. Farm Policy News (University of Illinois), "China Buys Brazil Soy as US Crop Still Faces 13% Tariff," 2025 — https://farmpolicynews.illinois.edu/2025/11/china-buys-brazil-soy-as-us-crop-still-faces-13-tariff/
26. S&P Global, "Tariff gap likely to keep China's soybean imports anchored to Brazil" (Brazil 73.6% share; U.S. exports to China down; $3.1B vs $17.9B), 2026 — https://www.spglobal.com/energy/en/news-research/latest-news/agriculture/021926-analysis-tariff-gap-likely-to-keep-chinas-soybean-imports-anchored-to-brazil
27. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, "Final Renewable Fuel Standards for 2026 and 2027" (9.07B and 9.20B RINs biomass-based diesel), 2026 — https://www.epa.gov/renewable-fuel-standard/final-renewable-fuel-standards-2026-and-2027
28. Fastmarkets, "US soybean oil prices stall amid biofuel policy, 45Z uncertainty: 2026 preview," 2026 — https://www.fastmarkets.com/insights/us-soybean-oil-prices-stall-amid-biofuel-policy-45z-uncertainty-2026-preview/
29. Internal Revenue Service, "Clean Fuel Production Credit" (Section 45Z; Jan 2025–Dec 2029; domestic feedstock requirement), n.d. — https://www.irs.gov/credits-deductions/clean-fuel-production-credit
30. Industrial Info / American Soybean Association, "U.S. Soybean-Crushing Facilities" capacity build-out (~$6B, +25% capacity, ~189M bushels new, overbuild risk), 2024–2025 — https://www.industrialinfo.com/news/article/us-soybean-crushing-facilities-add-billions-to-nations-project-spending--353119
31. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, "Grain Handling" (high-hazard classification; combustible dust; engulfment risks), n.d. — https://www.osha.gov/grain-handling