From Miller to Market: South Dakota Farmer Earns Premium with Non-GMO Soybeans

A soybean grower who farms near a specialty processing plant helps fill demand for non-GMO soybeans. Located near Miller, South Dakota, JD Wangsness is in close proximity to a South Dakota Soybean Processors plant that crushes, among others, non-GMO soybeans, soybeans that are not genetically modified.

“So, I've integrated and worked into my rotation non-GMO soybeans over the last five to six years,” Wangsness explained, in an interview with the South Dakota Soybean Network.

Wangsness, District Five director for the South Dakota Soybean Association, harvested a thousand acres of the non-GMO soybeans in the fall of 2025. A conservation farmer, Wangsness said his non-GMO soybeans outperformed the soybeans he planted with the XtendFlex herbicide tolerance trait.

“Part of that is attributed to how I'm taking care of the soils and how weed management is a big issue with non-GMOs. But right now, there's a demand,” said Wangsness. “That's a product that's getting used right here in the United States. We don't have to worry about shipping it out to China or wherever to try and find our markets. And there's a really good premium on those soybeans right now. I've got next year another thousand acres that I plan to plant to non-GMO as well. And hopefully I'll have the same success next year as I did this year.”

To keep a lid on weeds, Wangsness applies more chemicals to non-GMO soybeans than he does to his GMO soybeans, including a fall-applied herbicide to target winter annuals and create a clean seed bed for spring planting.

“But if you have a nice robust program for your weed control, you can have pretty good success. This year, of course, we had some issues with water hemp, but it came on in the XtendFlex GMO type beans as well as in the non-GMOs,” he said. “It's just the nature of the year, and it's something you just have to work on and be very, very aware of what you have to do to make sure you take care of the weeds.”

To manage herbicide resistance, Wangsness uses good rotational stewardship. Nonetheless, he concedes that resistance issues are not going away.

“But there's ways to work around resistance issues if you work well with your agronomist and have a good plan for it,” said Wangsness. “Like with me, non-GMOs, I don't raise them every year. I've got to rotate them into the cycle so that I can get out there with some Roundup Ready type crops and traited crops that have different chemistries and control the weeds and then you can go back. So, it's not an every year deal. I've got to rotate them in and out.”