Some New England residents are turning to soybeans for heat. It is called bio-heat, and growers say it has become a solid market.
“It’s caught on well, very, very popular. People love it, and there’s a whole industry developed around it now, about what modifications and so forth are done to the heating plants of furnaces, if you will, the boilers, and so it’s pretty neat, and it’s become a nice demand center for our soybean oil. It burns cleaner. It has fewer carbon deposits. It has a lot easier maintenance. It has natural lubricity, which of course, when we took sulfur out of our petroleum-based products, we lost a lot of lubricity, so there’s a lot of built-in advantages and that’s what they like about it,” said Andy Bensend, District One Director, Wisconsin Soybean Marketing Board.
Bensend says it has been a gradual process. First, homeowners turned to fuels like bio-diesel over traditional heating oil, and from there, bio-heat took off.
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Tryston Beyrer, Crop Nutrition Lead at The Mosaic Company, examines planning trends as producers weigh corn and soybean plantings for 2026.
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Brooks York with AgriSompo joins us to offer an update on what agents are prioritizing as the calendar year winds down.
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Despite the need for swift action, many ag lawmakers and industry groups argue that farm aid alone will likely not be sufficient to help farmers without improved trade relations with China.
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