The motivation for North Dakota farmer Jack Bruns to dig into the niche market for non-GMO soybeans is the same as every farmer when it comes to selecting seeds: “To make more money,” says Marketplace. “But they’re a lot trickier to manage,” with hurdles ranging from weed control and preventing cross-contamination from biotech beans to presenting a spotless product to the buyer.
Some of Bruns’ soybeans are marketed as food-grade so they can’t have cracks or be stained by mud. “I always tell guys, ‘If what’s in the hopper is something you don’t want to put in your mouth, no one else will either,'” crop production specialist Joel Owen told Marketplace. Owen works for one of the companies that buys Bruns’ soybeans.
Most of the soybeans grown in the United States are sold on the commodity market, where every kernel of corn or every soybean is interchangeable. But producers such as Bruns operate in a system where food processors keep track of who grew each batch of soybeans they buy and where that batch goes. At the retail end of the food chain, a company that sells soy milk can tell its customers that it knows the farmer behind the product, the chief marketing officer of Healthy Food Ingredients said in a Marketplace interview.