Farm Country Highlights The Importance Of Trade

World Trade Month in May celebrated trade’s significant impact on U.S. agriculture. Cary Sifferath, vice president of the U.S. Grains Council, said trade is incredibly important to the American farmer.

“The trade of our corn, sorghum, and barley crops and many of their related co-products that the U.S. Grain Council deals in, such as grain-based ethanol, distillers dried grain or DDGs, some of the other corn coal products, or even barley malt, that amount that we are able to export and sell to the international market helps kind of set the farm gate price,"  Sifferath said.  "Most people are never quite happy with the price that we see, but we'd receive even lower prices without moving a portion of our production out of the country. And it varies, and all our sorghum production is quite dependent on exports.”

Sifferath highlighted some of the top trade the Council has been involved in this year.

“Well, yeah, we're working to - around the world - develop new export markets for our products, as well as keeping the ones that are there open and moving," he said.  "So, if that's taking on discussions that are dealing with tariffs or non-tariff barriers that might be out there to deal with logistics issues, that's always important to be working on, but then, what are we doing to create the new South Korea or the new Columbia? What are those kinds of big markets that are coming down for feed grains and other co-products 5, 10, and 15 years from now? What are we doing today to help make that happen and make sure there's everything from the right policies in place to even infrastructure in those countries to be able to import our products?”

He noted they have some upcoming promotional activities the Council is excited about in 2025.

“Our Global Ethanol Summit. It will be the third time that we've had it," Sifferath said.  "That's scheduled to happen in Washington, D.C., this coming October. We'll be bringing in governments and policymakers that affect ethanol use and even production in different countries around the world. In September, we'll be having our Export Sorghum Conference down in San Antonio, TX, and working not just to keep establishing the good sorghum customers we have now, but to expand and develop new sorghum customers, or even some more higher-valued sorghum customers.”

Sifferath added they have current markets with excellent demand for U.S. grains and are always looking at cultivating new markets.

“Mexico continues to be very, very big for us, and that's our largest market for corn exports, for DDGs exports, and barley exports. We just talked about the barley and the beer industry down in Mexico, and we exported a record amount of corn to Mexico in the 2023-2024 marketing year. We've seen other longstanding U.S. corn customers in Japan and Colombia increasing the amount of corn they're buying this marketing year. But as we look at Sub-Saharan Africa, whether that's the Western African countries of Nigeria, Ghana, even Angola, or East Africa, when you look at Kenya, Mozambique, we've been able to put more market promotion programs into Sub-Saharan Africa, and we're expanding our work there, our footprints there. Even on the ethanol side, we have a lot of hopes for Nigeria, not just to import some corn and sorghum, but we see them starting to buy some U.S. ethanol.”

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