Hello Soy Family,

A new year always brings new challenges and new opportunities, and I believe this is especially true for the soybean industry.

I am honored to be the new president of the American Soybean Association and am excited to kick off 2019 with each of you. As we roll up our sleeves and get to work, I want to focus this year on “competing together."

What does “competing together” mean? It means that together, we work to ensure the competitiveness of the U.S. soybean industry, which is essential to our mission of ensuring the profitability of soybean farmers over the long-term.

In the past, efforts to improve competitiveness have included taking leadership roles in developing and advocating for farm policies that allow farmers to follow market signals in making planting decisions, supporting increased federal funding of ag research, partnering with FAS through USSEC to fund and carry out export promotion activities under the MAP and FMD programs, and more.

ASA’s track record for these and other initiatives over the past 25 years has been unmatched, and is evidenced by the 50 percent expansion of soybeans planted since 1992, from 59.3 to 89.6 million acres.

While ASA continues its work, recent and growing challenges to the competitiveness of U.S. soy exports make it imperative that we emphasize achieving four specific goals during the two-year term of the 116th Congress:

• Enacting legislation to modernize and expand capacity of the U.S. inland waterways infrastructure;
• Doubling MAP and FMD funding over the life of the 2018 Farm Bill;
• Pushing for negotiation of new Free Trade Agreements with key soy and livestock importing countries; and,
• Supporting industry efforts to gain broad international acceptance of new plant breeding technologies.

As I said, a new year brings both new challenges and new opportunities. This year I look forward to “competing together” as an industry, as growers, and as partners.

Davie Stephens, ASA President