China imported no soybeans from the U.S. in September, the first time since November 2018 that shipments fell to zero, while South American shipments surged from a year earlier, as buyers shunned American cargoes during the ongoing trade dispute between the world’s two largest economies.
I’m not actually sure that we could eat all of it. The problem is that (a) IIRC, it’s the largest US crop and (b) vegetables are a lot more efficient to produce than animals. If we convert it from animal to human feed, a ton of calories show up. I remember a statistic that if the US went vegetarian, it could single-handedly feed all of Europe just from the increased surplus without putting any more land into agricultural production just because of the higher efficiency.
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/us-soybean-farmers-deserted-by-big-buyer-china-scramble-other-importers-2025-10-03/
https://sentientmedia.org/trumps-tariffs-are-hurting-soybean-farmers/
https://usafacts.org/articles/us-agricultural-exports/
https://vegnt.com/foods/1kg/soybeans_mature_seeds_raw.html
This says that 1kg of soybeans have 4460 calories, or enough to feed an adult male for about 2.2 days. So 25 million metric tons is 25,000,000 metric tons × 1000 kg/metric ton × 2.2 man-days = 55 billion man-days. There are about 347 million people in the US. Assuming that every one of them eats as much as an adult male, which is an unrealistically conservative estimate in favor of increased consumption, that’s equivalent to feeding all of them for 43% of a year on just the surplus would-have-gone-to-China-in-a-year soybeans here, before we even start eating anything else, like pizza and other stuff, like the soybeans that we’re already producing for domestic use.
EDIT: In fairness, my assumption is that some of this is gonna involve countries maybe selling soy production that they would have bought from, say, Brazil or whoever to China and picking up US production at a lower price than it would normally be available. Like, it’ll be a hit, but I don’t think that all of it will simply just sit there; Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand won’t be idle.
Process it into meat alternatives, and they’ll finally be cheaper than meat! Hell yeah!
Honestly, if this gets more people to eat more vegetarianly, it’ll be one of the few good things out of the Trump administration.