Thirty-eight soybean buyers from six Southeast Asian nations learned how to improve their skills in electronic trading while they attended the Soybean Procurement Management for Importers short course at Northern Crops Institute from Sept. 22-25. The institute is located on NDSU’s main campus.
The focus of the course was to learn more about contracting and purchasing U.S. soybeans. Course participants were from Indonesia, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand and Vietnam.
Sponsors were the U.S. Soybean Export Council, North Dakota Soybean Council, Northern Food Grade Soybean Association and the Minnesota Soybean Research and Promotion Council.
“The mission of Northern Crops Institute is to educate the world about our region’s crops,” said institute director Mark Weber, who coordinated the course. “Soybeans have become increasingly important as the planted acres in the region multiply each year. Recent studies by the University of Minnesota show soybeans grown here have a potentially higher feeding value than previously thought. During this course, in addition to learning more about electronic trading skills, our participants visited the companies they are buying from and met a few of the region’s farmers who produce our soybeans.”
Course instructors were Gene Griffin, Global Innovative Solutions; Thunyaporn (Naggie) Jeradechachai, Northern Crops Institute crop quality specialist; Mike Krueger, The Money Farm; Frayne Olson, NDSU Extension Service; and William Wilson, NDSU Department of Agribusiness and Applied Economics.
A highlight of the course was training in the electronic Commodity Trading Room at NDSU’s Barry Hall.
Northern Crops Institute supports regional agriculture and value-added processing by conducting educational and technical programs that expand and maintain domestic and international markets for northern-grown crops. Northern Crops Institute is funded by the states of Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota and commodity groups in those states and Montana.