Research support to ‘move the pile’

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. — Several years ago the Illinois Soybean Association team started to look for ways to “move the pile” by developing new uses for the crop.

“This is an idea that came about seven or eight years ago, and it’s come to fruition through a great team at ISA, the board members, staff, and we’ve been able to put something together,” said Steve Pitstick, ISA board member and past president, to open the Soy Innovation Center’s SpringBoard Challenge.

As a result of those early discussions, the ISA board ramped up its efforts in support of research that led to the Soy Innovation Center and SpringBoard Challenge that provide seed money through the checkoff for developing new soybean-based products.

In his second year on the ISA board, Pitstick, a Maple Park farmer, became vice chairman and said then-ISA chairman Doug Schroeder, of Mahomet, “kept talking about this idea of moving the pile.”

“We, as farmers, go out every year trying to grow the biggest crop we can, no matter what the price is. If it’s low, we need lots of bushels to pay the bills. If it’s high, we want to make bank,” Pitstick said.

“I’m formulating a plan to give me the biggest yield that I can, but I spend absolutely no time figuring out where that’s going to go. I just hope the market is going to buy it.”

When Pitstick became ISA chair in 2021 he looked at the trend-line growth of soybeans in Illinois, “and we’re on a path of about a 10-million-bushel per year growth in production,” he said. “So, I took that as my challenge as a chairman to find those next uses, whatever that was.

“It’d be real easy to find a new buyer in Southeast Asia that could take a couple boat loads to get that 10 million bushels, but the idea was to build something within the state that was sustainable, would be around and would be a constant use.

“If we look back over history, soybean oil mixed with diesel fuel is a big deal. It was a 10% use and those things happen once in a lifetime. That wasn’t going to happen here.

“My focus was to find 10 things that were 1% better, or 100 uses that were one-tenth of a percent better. How do we build that demand? So, through people I’ve met, we came up with this idea of where do we go now.”

Academic Partnerships

Among the ideas was to develop partnerships with universities in Illinois.

“There are people with many different disciplines that may have no idea what we grow. They have no idea the protein that we grow is renewable, or that soybean oil could be a replacement for diesel or any oil product,” Pitstick said.

“So, how do we bring these people together for us to show the people of knowledge what we have and what you could do with it? Here’s where we are today.”

That led to ISA’s SpringBoard Challenge, now in its second year.

The challenge now draws numerous university researchers and industry partners with a wide range of expertise and a goal of finding new uses for soybeans.

“The idea is to bring an idea forward, and we’ll help you fund it and let’s build uses for our soybeans. It’s a renewable product within Illinois. How do we do better? We can all combine our talents. I’m just a farmer. I had chemistry 52 years ago for one semester. There are people in here who are geniuses in chemistry,” Pitstick said.