USAPEEC: A Driving Force in Promoting U.S. Poultry and Soybean Meal Exports

To hear it from Mike McCranie, his USA Poultry and Egg Export Council membership is “a really good fit.” The northeastern South Dakota soybean grower sees it that way because chickens, ducks, and turkeys gobble up more than 60 percent of the soybean meal produced in this country.

“It’s a way of marketing [soybean] meal through meat,” said McCranie during an interview with the South Dakota Soybean Network. “It does a couple of things; it keeps the production of poultry in the U.S. at a higher level than what we can consume here, and it markets that meal through that poultry.”

McCranie is a representative on USAPEEC through his membership on the board of the South Dakota Soybean Research and Promotion Council, the checkoff arm of South Dakota Soybean. The Claremont, South Dakota farmer has promoted U.S. poultry and egg exports – and therefore U.S. soybean meal consumption – all over the world. He’s done trade shows in the United Arab Emirates and Peru, poultry promotions in Gambia, and most recently, he spoke to soybean meal customers in Vietnam. What he takes away from these missions is the high degree of confidence foreign buyers have in U.S.-produced poultry.

“They realize that it’s the highest quality poultry in the world, and so if you can promote that, it’s definitely a big win for both us and those foreign countries,” he said.

In addition to overseas trade missions, McCranie attends no less than three conferences annually to discuss international marketing of soybean meal-hungry poultry. And McCranie is by no means alone in efforts to promote U.S.-produced soybean meal through poultry exports.

“There’s a lot of states that are involved in promoting the export of poultry and it’s that collaboration that we have with all the producers and their needs,” said McCranie. “We get a real big bang for our buck and we really work at it very strategically.”

With the increasing production of soybean oil-based renewable fuels, it stands to reason that there will be a corresponding jump in soybean crush and more soybean meal on the market.

“That will help increase the production of meat, whether it is poultry or swine, in the U.S. but it will also make soybean meal more reasonable abroad with a larger supply,” McCranie explained, “so we feel that we can actually get into those markets that we’ve not been able to be competitive in.”

McCranie goes into greater detail about his role on the USA Poultry and Egg Export Council in an episode of The Soybean Pod, sponsored by the South Dakota Soybean Checkoff and available on most podcast provider platforms.