Genuine ask, it (feels like) more and more fields have been shifting to soybeans for more than a decade. Who else is a major importer that justified the swing from corn and feeder silage, before China got on board?

E:googled my questions- its a high protein alternative to meat, so it is popular in China, Mexico, and EU where mass meat farms are not on the same priority or scale as the US. Its also easily swapped into animal feed, and is a good energy yield crop that costs less soil-nutrients than most other high value crops as it produces much of its own Nitrogen to grow. In scale - In those 7 years China now imports about 20-25% of all US soybeans harvested accounting for over half of all soybeans exports. The US accounts for 30% of world soybean exports.

Most farms in the US are on 3 crop rotation and private farms often use a 5 year payback plan (for land and equipment). They JUST GOT DONE paying off the loans they took to get massively into Soy. They saw Trump promise farmers the world, took loans and grew Soy, got slapped with a recession, and just as they are recovering from poor sales, they get hit again. Given 1 in 5 farms are an export farm (the 20% statistic from earlier), and where they're at in crop rotation, I would make a (wildly uneducated) guess that 1 in 3 farms will experience extreme hardship. Either they have savings to just eat the second recession hit and will remove any edge on "getting ahead", or will need bailout, or will go broke. The other 2/3 are on a different rotation or are major corporate farms that will find a buyer within their own meat farms system to try and mitigate the massive excess.