U.S. farmers harvested 76.4 million acres of soybeans in 2009 totally 3.36 billion bushels. That’s up 13 percent from 2008 and up 5 percent from the previous record set in 2006. It’s an abundant supply of food for humans, feed for livestock and ingredients for biobased products.

The United Soybean Board (USB) is committed to increasing the supply of biobased products that benefit our nation’s economy, including creating green jobs; improve the environment and reduce dependence on foreign oil. Through their checkoff, soybean farmers like me are investing our dollars on research and development of soy biobased products. Soybean farmers are committed to green products, and dedicated to sound environmental practices on farms. That’s why the United Soybean Board has a sustainability initiative. Production agriculture has made great strides and this initiative will help to perfect it.

Everybody Wins When Farmers Keep Score on Sustainability

The United Soybean Board (USB) and soybean checkoff fund tools that U.S. soybean farmers can use to positively impact the increasingly important issue of sustainability.

Field to Market: The Keystone Alliance for Sustainable Agriculture, of which the USB is a member, developed the free, online Fieldprint Calculator to tabulate sustainability performance for any soybean, corn, wheat or cotton farm. Now, farmers can access this free tool through a link on the USB home page at www.unitedsoybean.org.

Life Cycle Cost Checklist

This life cycle checklist has been developed for potential buyers to better understand and evaluate the life cycle costs of using biobased products compared to non-biobased products. The selection of a product should not be based solely on the initial purchase price but rather a comparison should be made with the competing product in all aspects such as performance per unit used, safety and health, environmental impact and end-of-life fate. Very few products are equal in all these aspects and attendant costs, thus the initial purchase price is but one factor that should be considered during the procurement decision-making process.

Use of a product life cycle checklist can be a useful tool for identifying and analyzing key differences between biobased and non-biobased products. The checklist can help differentiate biobased product characteristics than may not be readily apparent but, when considered over the useful product life, can frequently provide cost saving benefits. These benefits can be in the form of enhanced performance and/or worker safety, and reduced environmental impacts.

Click here for a copy of the Checklist and User Guide (pdf)
Click here for a copy of the 2-Page Checklist (Excel)