World News

US sugarcane is a protected market and is not globally competitive. US soy is globally competitive. You can't just go produce sugarcane, because nobody outside of the US would buy it at the rates that US sugarcane farmers would sell it for.

https://harvardpolitics.com/politics-of-protectionism/

Perry points to the cost of sugar as an example of protectionism hurting the consumer. Around the world, the price of sugar is about 14 cents per pound; in the United States, the price of sugar is double that at 28 cents per pound. Perry explains that “because we keep most of the foreign sugar out of the country, the cost of higher sugar prices is spread around two or three hundred million consumers. We all pay a little bit more, every day, for anything that has sugar in it.”

https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/candy-coated-cartel-time-kill-us-sugar-program

Barriers to imports of sugar have been employed nearly since the republic’s founding; a tariff on the product was first passed in 1789. Duties remained in place almost continuously save for a four-year period from 1890 to 1894, but modern-day sugar protectionism can be traced back to the 1934 passage of the Jones-Costigan Amendment.1 This legislation, passed as an emergency measure to provide assistance to sugar farmers and later incorporated into the Sugar Act of 1937, had as its key provisions domestic production quotas, subsidies, tariffs, and import quotas, all designed to restrict sugar supplies and boost prices.

As noted by the Yale Law Journal in 1938, the result of this market meddling was to harm consumers, while failing to serve as the industry savior the legislation’s backers imagined it to be:

Protection of the domestic beet and cane producers costs the American consumer three hundred million dollars a year even after the duties collected by the Treasury have been discounted. No attempt is made in the present scheme of regulation to encourage production in those fields which can produce sugar most economically and to discourage it in the fields which require subsidization. Thus, despite the inefficiency and expensiveness of the beet sugar industry and the well nigh intolerable working conditions in the beet fields, the latter area is the only one not really restricted by the quotas which have been imposed.

The most efficient producing areas have received the most drastic restrictions. A proration system has been devised which prohibits the State of Florida, the only area on the continent which could produce sugar profitably without a tariff or direct subsidy, from producing more than fifty percent of its own intrastate consumption. Moreover, the federal government has assisted in increasing the supply of sugar by spending enormous sums on research, irrigation, and reclamation during a period when production was already far outstripping consumption. As a consequence of these measures, legislation ostensibly enacted for the relief of domestic farmers results in a net loss to them.2

Despite such documented costs even at this early date, the system persisted with only minor adjustments through 1974, when a tripling in the price of sugar coincided with the expiration of the Sugar Act of 1948, and Congress decided against renewal. A decline in sugar prices then led to the temporary creation of price support loans, that is, government loans secured by sugar as collateral, which the borrower can either repay with interest or, if prices are too low, default on. These were enacted for the sugar crops of 1977–1979 and lapsed in 1980 and most of 1981 in the wake of a dramatic sugar price increase. A sugar support program reappeared in the 1981 Farm Bill following a price retreat.3

Officially known as the Agriculture and Food Act of 1981, the Farm Bill featured the reintroduction of price support loans that continue today and form one of the U.S. sugar program’s four key pillars. Extended through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Commodity Credit Corporation, these loans are made to sugar processors at an average national rate of 18.75 cents for every pound of raw sugarcane provided as collateral (rates vary slightly by region of the country) and 24.09 cents per pound of refined beet sugar.4 These rates effectively serve as a price target for the USDA.

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/179295426

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/

China purchased about 45% of all U.S. soybean exports last year

https://sentientmedia.org/trumps-tariffs-are-hurting-soybean-farmers/

Of course, this also has a reciprocal effect on China, as it no longer has the 25 million metric tons of soybeans that it would otherwise have purchased from the United States.

https://usafacts.org/articles/us-agricultural-exports/

The US’s biggest food export is soybeans: they were 14.0% of all agricultural exports in 2024, with a market value of $24.6 billion. Around half of American soybeans ($12.85 billion worth) are exported to China.

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.

Actually thinking about the idiom, I wonder if people used to complain a lot about the types or quality of vegetables they grew. It might be purely metaphorical, but I can definitely imagine it, having lived in a place where the owners didn’t box in their zucchini and I had to eat it twice a day for two months. I have a bunch of bomb zucchini recipes, including a self created prize winning quiche recipe (it’s just good homemade crust with an egg and no water, blind baked, then filled with zucchini rounds about 4mm thick sautéed with balsamic vinegar and rosemary, a little bit of good Parmesan and only two eggs in a 2:1 ratio with heavy cream- I don’t have it more precisely at hand rn), but I couldn't enjoy it for a decade afterward.

I think that one of the major alternative crops is corn.

kagis

Looks like it. Same sort of counties:

Soy production:

https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/graphics/SB-PR-RGBChor.png

Corn production:

https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/graphics/CR-PR-RGBChor.png

So might mean more corn production over time.