Indian appetites are changing US crop mix

Legumes such as dried peas, lentils, kidney beans and chickpeas fight erosion and replenish life-giving nitrogen, reducing the need for chemical fertilisers.

That made Beau Anderson an early convert to pulses on his wheat and barley farm outside Williston, North Dakota, where he added them to his crop rotation more than a decade ago.

There wasn’t much money in it then. Pulses are high in protein and low in fat, but Americans don’t eat a lot of them. Expanding demand for corn ethanol and surging US soybean exports to China helped keep pulses in the background. “When we first started growing lentils, our strategy was to break even on them,” Anderson says.

For him and many other farmers, that calculus has changed. The biofuels industry and the Chinese economy are stagnant, which is weighing on demand and prices for US corn and soy. And India, an emerging buyer with a huge appetite for pulses, is beginning to assert itself on the world food market.

“The next couple decades could belong to India,” says Erik Norland, an economist with the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. “It will have a real impact on what farmers choose to grow and on what the world eats.”

Led by India, global demand for US-grown pulses reached $702 million last year, more than double that of a decade ago.

“Over 57% of our pulses went to India in 2014,” says Chris Westergard, a wheat farmer in Dagmar, Montana, who devotes about a third of his 5,000 acres to peas and lentils. “I always knew they were a big buyer, but I didn’t realise they’d become that important.”

The US is still a small player in the pulse world, and it has competition from other nations. Russia and East Africa have seen exports increase, and Canada’s shipments reached almost $4.2 billion in 2015.

For US pulses to go mainstream, Americans will have to start eating more of them. That’s been a bit of a tough sell: Among their less desirable attributes, dried legumes take a long time to cook and give a lot of people gas, says Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition at New York University.

“If there is a stable export market, farmers will grow pulses, but it will take a huge education campaign for the public and for chefs to start using them here.