Crops and Cars

Marysville, Ohio – Don Baley is growing some of the best soybeans in Japan not far from an auto plant in Marysville, Ohio. Inside the plant, an enterprise founded in Japan builds some of America’s most popular cars.

This sounds like the “global economy” gone a little haywire. 
But Baley is part of an imaginative trade deal that’s as real as the dirt under his beans.

“They say the taste of the bean produced in Ohio is higher in protein,” Baley says of his Japanese customers.  “They like the taste of it better.  Our climate, our soil is ideal.”

Baley’s as enthusiastic as a chamber of commerce booster about his area’s unusual relationship with Japan and the Japanese.
“Most of the reactions from the customers that come from Japan is the beauty of our state. They remark how beautiful it is and how wide open our fields are. 

“‘Course, the biggest problem is the language barrier,” he adds. 
The name that connects the crops to the cars is a familiar one:  Honda.

“When Honda first came in with a motorcycle plant, it was a good source of employment for folks,” recalls Bayley.  “But I never dreamed we would have an agricultural product exchange program with Japan through Honda.”

Honda started building cars in Marysville in 1982.  That was before many people in the Heartland had ever noticed one on the road.  The factory’s 8,000-acre location just happened to be in the heart of soybean paradise.
 
As Don Baley said, a perfect place to grow premium soybeans – which, it turned out were just the thing to fill up empty shipping containers headed back to Japan.

Ron Lietzke of Honda of America Manufacturing explains: “We had a challenge of all of these shipping containers coming into Ohio with the parts that we needed to build the motorcycles and the cars.  But then those containers had to go back to Japan to get more parts.  And Honda didn’t want to send them back empty.”

Joe Hanusik, the plant manager, shows off the plant’s massive shipping area. 

“Everything is shipped out of this location through the Honda network through Columbus [and] Seattle, where most of our products are loaded on the barge and shipped direct to different ports in Japan, whether it be Tokyo, Osaka, or other locations.”
Hanusik’s employer is now optimistically named “Harmony Agricultural Products,” or “HAPI Ohio.”  Honda spun off the agricultural business a few years ago, fearing that shipping soybeans under the Honda name would confuse consumers.  His explanation of how this curious “foreign exchange” works is well-practiced.

“The Ohio soybean historically is a little bit smaller, and not surprisingly the cost is less.  Because of the limited acres of production land available in Japan, it tends to drive the price of Japanese domestic soybeans up pretty high.  So even though soybeans can be raised here in the U.S. and shipped to Japan we can actually be under cost with the domestically grown soybeans in Japan.”

Baley grows about 150 acres of “HAPI” soybeans. That’s a portion of about 33,000 acres of beans the company exports. Baley is one of about 200 farmers in Ohio and southern Michigan doing the growing.

That brings him attention most Heartland farmers aren’t used to.
“They do bring a lot of their prospective customers, their customers from Japan over to the United States. And they like to come out and visit the farm, see the crop growing in the summertime.  And then harvest they like particularly to come out and watch the harvest.”
Baley says he likes the visits, likes to show off beans the emperor of Japan himself has been known to munch on. It’s a fair trade, he believes, for containerloads of crankshafts, cotterpins, paint and gas pedals.
 
And it’s pretty good training for 200 Heartland farmers learning to navigate in the global village.

“We take pride in having a good quality product that we know will have our name on it basically all the way to the customer in Japan. 
I thought it was pretty imaginative of them, and a good use of their resources.”