At the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, an island in a sea of farmland where corn and soybeans grow, sits the Soybean Innovation Lab. The institution, part of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Feed the Future initiative, helps advance soybean production in sub-Saharan Africa, assisting farmers there and developing markets for soybean farmers in the United States.
And it’s scheduled to close in April.
The lab has created communications tools for growers and infrastructure for soybean processing since it opened in 2013, helping the market grow fourfold over that time. Now it’s one of many USAID-funded programs scheduled to shutter as the result of President Donald Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order freezing foreign aid.
“We were absolutely moving the needle,” said lab director and principal investigator Peter Goldsmith, noting that work done by the lab resulted in higher yields that improved opportunities for African farmers. Now, he said, “We’re done.”
Soybeans provide both cooking oil and protein in the form of animal feed. In Africa, where the population and many countries’ economies are booming, there’s the potential for a bigger soybean market that incorporates rural African farmers, helps alleviate malnutrition and opens doors for U.S. growers to participate, said economist Alex Winter-Nelson, a professor emeritus at the university. It could also help reduce dependence in Africa on imported palm oil, which is often associated with deforestation.
The sudden halt to U.S. involvement creates a vacuum, Winter-Nelson said. Other countries could come in and set up systems and plantations that don’t involve local farmers—or the U.S.
“There was this tremendous opportunity to nudge development of a soybean value chain on the continent,” said Winter-Nelson, who served on the lab’s advisory board until he retired in May. “That could be beneficial for poor and vulnerable people in Africa and beneficial for the U.S. soybean industry.”
The lab helped create a database where growers could add and access information on how well different soybean varieties fared—and which diseases they encountered—under various conditions. The cooperative testing network consists of 240 locations in 31 countries. Growers in places like Malawi, Ghana and Kenya who had commercialized only a few varieties could see others they might want to license and plant.
Climate change already aggravates food insecurity in Africa, and the soybean varieties now available to African growers thanks to international collaboration could provide more resilience as global-warming consequences worsen. Some soybean types might be more suitable for more extreme climatic conditions. The diseased plants that farmers put into the database could also help people identify emerging plant pathogens, said Winter-Nelson, reducing the risk of those diseases emerging in other places.
Students at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, a land-grant university whose mission is to address challenges facing society related to food, agriculture and natural resources, also had an opportunity to investigate plant pathogens, commodities markets and farm machinery safety through work at the lab.
“Those challenges often have an international component,” said Winter-Nelson. “Viruses don’t pay attention to borders. Market demand can be foreign, so we need to have international awareness in our students so they are trained to engage in a world where global phenomena affect local interests.”
The White House did not respond to requests for comment about the lab’s impending closure as a result of Trump’s funding freeze.
One of the lab’s biggest successes was the development of a thresher that allowed farmers to separate the plant’s bean from the pod.
Farmers without that piece of equipment often do the work by hand, beating the plants with a stick, said Annie Dee, a soybean farmer who owns 10,000 acres in Alabama. When she went to Ghana to present practices she employs on her farm to women growers there nearly a decade ago, she saw firsthand how labor-intensive the process is. After her trip, she joined the Soybean Innovation Lab board, which worked with farmers in Ghana, Ethiopia and Zambia to set up thresher fabricating facilities.
But the lab’s benefits, Dee said, amount to so much more than just developing infrastructure. Countries that can grow their own crops and are not wholly dependent on imports are more secure, which creates more global stability, she said, pointing out that the Arab Spring began in part because of skyrocketing food costs.
Global hunger, malnutrition and poverty are associated with immigration, radicalization and terrorist threats, according to a report from the Farm Journal Foundation, on whose board Dee sits, and whose work she highlighted in a recent op-ed.
“There’s a responsibility we have to help other people less fortunate become more successful and to survive where they are,” she said. “It was a very important, worthwhile investment for our country, and it was really making a difference.”
Correction: This story was updated April 29, 2025, to correct lab director Peter Goldsmith’s name.
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