This prompted the SC Department of Agriculture and SC Ports Authority to team up, along with private industry, to save the crop. While one factor that had led to the crisis has been ameliorated, headwinds remain. One local economist seems optimistic about the outlook for soybean markets this year, albeit with caveats.

In late May, Chicago-based Archer-Daniels-Midlands Co. had shuttered its soybean processing plant in Kershaw. The plant had processed 14 million bushels of soybeans a year, Dane Lisser, media relations at ADM, said in an email. At about 60 pounds per bushels, that’s 420,000 tons of soybeans per year.

SC Agriculture Department Communications Director Eva Moore said in a phone interview that the plant was South Carolina’s only soybean crushing facility. “It was a major buyer from SC farmers,” she said.

Jody Lipford is an associate professor of economics at Francis Marion University; his main focus is public finance. In an email interview, Lipford called the Kershaw plant’s closure “a devasting blow to the state’s soybean farmers.”

The closure was part of ADM’s global restructuring, he said. According to Lipford, longer hauls and wait times for SC soybean farmers resulted in transportation costs tripling from 25 cents per bushel to 75 cents. The nearest processing facilities are Cargill Inc.’s plants in Fayetteville, NC, and Gainesville, GA; and ADM’s in Valdosta, GA, he said.

The second blow to SC soybean farmers came from China’s response to President Donald Trump’s tariffs, which “began in February 2025 and continued as a long series of tariffs on different goods at different rates that resulted in Chinese retaliation on US exports,” Lipford said.

China had initially imposed a 10% tariff on US soybeans, before having ceased buying them altogether in May, he said, adding, “The Chinese response is important, because half of US soybean exports go to China.” That’s about 25 million metric tons. He said the boycott had cost US farmers about $12.6 billion, as China turned to Brazil, Argentina and other South American countries for its supply.

In 2024, South Carolina produced 12.9 million bushels of soybeans, placing it 23rd in the country for soybean production. Valued at $138.24 million, soybeans were the state’s No. 2 crop in 2024, second to peaches at $174.47 million. In the same period, $98 million in soybeans had been exported; that’s about 70% of total production in the state.

“As soon as we found out about the closure, we started making plans,” Moore said. “We were concerned about excess soybean volume and storage. Soybeans get harvested late in the year, but we wanted to move out existing soybeans farmers had been wanting to sell to ADM or China. The fact that China was not buying soybeans is why we had come up with this plan with [SC Ports] basically to move soybeans to the inland port and ship them out to clients in Southeast Asia.”

Laura Clifton, public relations manager at SC Ports, said in a phone interview that the inland port in Dillon handles agribusiness in the eastern Carolinas, much of which comes from soybean exports for state farmers.

Moore said her department tapped public funding that had been made available for agribusiness in order to move the soybeans. SC Ports helped coordinate it with aid from some shipping companies, she said.

For its part, the Ports Authority worked to connect individual parties along the supply chain, according to Clifton. Ocean carriers — including CMA-CG, Evergreen, Hapag-Loyd and ONE — pitched in to connect soybean farmers with international markets, she said. They moved containers between Inland Port Dillon and Port of Charleston and to and from the broader Pee Dee.

The other partners in the endeavor were grain brokers who worked to find buyers, according to Moore. They had ultimately found buyers in Malaysia and Thailand.

Lipford called the combined effort of the Agriculture Department and SC Ports “heroic and effective. [They coordinated] shipping through the Inland Port in Dillon to Charleston by rail to enable SC farmers to export more than 3 million bushels through the Charleston port from May through August.”

"That’s huge,” he said. “If you’re moving 3 million bushels out, that’s a lot of soybeans.”

There is a downside, according to Lipford, who pointed out, “utilizing out-of-state facilities or exporting through the port is more costly than using the Kershaw processing plant.”

After Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping had met in October, China agreed to resume buying US soybeans to the tune of 12 million metric tons by the end of 2025 and then 25 million metric tons per year out to 2028. Lipford said that though China had fulfilled the first, “some worry that recent Trump tariffs — such as Trump’s proposed 25% tariff on countries that buy oil from Iran, which includes China — could jeopardize China’s 2026-2028 soybean commitment.”

Moore said, “Those new customers in Malaysia and Thailand will continue to be customers; China is buying beans again; and third, we also invested in other expansions last year that we hope will allow us to be more flexible as a state.”

She said the department provided a matching grant to the SC Farm Bureau to expand capacity of a grain elevator in Anderson to 610,000 bushels of storage. “It allows us to be more flexible as markets go up and down,” she said, adding that plans to expand other facility are “in the works.”

Lipford said an expected rise in global demand for soybeans, the largest US agricultural export, should translate to strong exports this year. “China remains the top destination for US soybean exports, followed by Mexico, the EU-27, Egypt and the Philippines,” he said. “Demand from emerging markets is also expected to grow.”

However, Lipford warns that US agricultural exports, as well as US farmers of any crop, could be jeopardized should China turn to alternative suppliers, such as Brazil or Argentina. “This problem is exacerbated if the US is seen as an unreliable business partner,” he said, “and evidence of this is mounting as China and other Southeast Asian countries are strengthening trade ties; the EU and India have signed a free trade agreement; and Europe is working on a trade deal with the Mercosur countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay.”

He said, “Markets and businesses like certainty, and Trump’s tariffs have been anything but that.”

Lipford said he is “generally opposed” to tariffs, but if they are implemented, “they should be low and rarely changed. If that were the case, businesses, at home and abroad, could at least plan accordingly.”

“Businesses cannot function when they do not know what the rules of the game are,” he said.

Eva Moore said, “I don't know what the year holds, but we’ll keep working hard on behalf of farmers.”