United Soybean Board (USB) vice president for sustainability strategy Tim Venverloh recently attended the annual Southern Soybean Breeders Tour to learn more about the research being done by soybean breeders in the Southern United States. One of Venverloh’s charges is to help the U.S. soy industry connect with its end users. This year’s Southern Soybean Breeders Tour also took a look at how soybeans are used by consumers and end users, focusing on how breeding efforts might address marketplace demand.
Soybean breeders from southern public research institutions and agricultural industries, meeting at the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station headquarters this week, were focusing on a question that has taken a back seat in the past: What happens to soybeans after farmers grow them?
The annual Southern Soybean Breeders Tour meets each year at a different location, always hosted by one of the member public breeding programs. It was hosted this year by the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture at the Don Tyson Center for Agricultural Sciences at the Experiment Station’s Arkansas Agricultural Research and Extension Center.
The main purpose of the annual meeting is for breeders to exchange information and look for collaborative efforts, said Leandro Mozzoni, Division of Agriculture soybean breeder. But this year, attendees also discussed how soybeans are used by consumers and end-users, with an eye toward how breeding efforts might address their demands.
