Story and photos by Dan Lemke

You just never know how opportunity will knock.

For me, the knock came as a phone call from Jim Palmer of the Minnesota Soybean Growers Association: would I be willing to accompany a group of Minnesota soybean farmers on a trip to China, Thailand and Singapore?

Let's just say that's not what I had planned for my summer vacation. But after a quick phone consultation with my better, wiser half, the answer was ... yes. A month later, farmers Kim Larson, Leroy Kellenberger, Mike O'Leary, Barry Mumby and I were on board a 747 heading 10,000 miles west to visit a region of the world I knew very little about. While still far from being an expert, I learned volumes about both international trade and life in China.

More than a billion people call China home. Having grown up on a Minnesota farm three miles from the nearest paved road, cities like Guangzhou, with 17 million people, were overwhelming. But it's in all those people that the opportunity for American products lies. It takes a lot of food to feed the multitude, and American farmers are helping to do just that.

The Chinese have huge aquaculture, poultry and swine industries. We discovered, for instance, that nearly 60 percent of the world's aquaculture takes place in China. That production is consumed almost entirely by China's own people.

The American Soybean Association has had an office in China for 16 years, providing outreach and education on effective production methods. Our group visited sites where American checkoff dollars are being spent to educate Chinese farm managers about the benefits of using U.S. soybean products. Our visit also served as a type of customer service call from producers to end users. By finding out what farmers' needs are, the Minnesotans hope to spur the sale of U.S. beans to China.

It's through such information exchange that more and more new markets are opening up for U.S. soybeans and soy products. In 1997, China imported more than 2.3 million metric tons of American soybeans.

The United States faces stiff competition for the Chinese market from Brazil and India, however. In 1997, a large portion of the 750,000 metric tons of soy oil and meal imported by China came from Brazil. The ASA sponsors swine, fish and poultry feeding trials in numerous Asian nations to demonstrate the quality advantage U.S. soybean products
have over those from other countries.

In many ways Chinese agriculture is light-years behind our standards. Most farms are small; many are less than an acre. Others, like the Beijing Swine Breeding Center, would be hard to differentiate from a typical Minnesota farm. Chinese farmers are becoming better educated and are hungry for good information on production. Like U.S. farmers, they're interested in improving profitability.

Thailand is another good consumer of U.S. soybean products. Beans here are crushed for oil and the meal is used for hog, chicken and fish feed. The tropical climate ensures two crops each year. Buyers are willing to pay a higher price, about $9 per bushel, to keep their local farmers profitable -- a fact not lost on the Minnesota growers, who wished the same was true at home.

We wrapped up in Singapore, a nation of three million people on an island 17 miles long. There we compared notes with soybean farmers from the States who had traveled to other Asian countries.

The 12-day trip was an eye opening experience I won't soon forget. Sitting in the Hard Rock Cafe in Beijing with my new friends, listening to an Australian band and enjoying a German beverage, I recall thinking that even though I was thousands of miles from home, for me, the world just got a lot smaller.