SC soybean plant open for half-century to close amid U.S.-China trade tensions
A plant in Kershaw, South Carolina has for 50 years been crushing the tiny yellow pearls called soybeans into powder and oil.
Those products get put on a train or a truck and shipped off to be used in food and to feed farm animals. But now, amid tense trade negotiations between the U.S. and China, one of the nation’s top buyers of soybean products, the Kershaw plant in Lancaster County will close.
The massive food processing company Archer Daniels Midland announced to employees at the Kershaw plant earlier this month that the facility would be permanently closed “later this spring.” The Lancaster News reported last Tuesday that front office employees had been told the facility would close May 30.
The State has contacted the South Carolina Department of Employment and Workforce for information on whether ADM has formally reported that closure to the state. As of an April 18, 2025 layoff notice report produced by that department, ADM had not provided that information.
ADM, which has food processing plants all over the world, did not mention the current trade situation between the U.S. and other countries as the reason for the plant’s closure in a statement provided to media.
Instead, the company cited a goal to “modernize” its footprint as part of a larger strategy.
“As part of the process, after exploring a wide variety of alternatives, we’ve determined that our Kershaw crush plant no longer aligns with our future operational needs,” the company’s statement reads.
The company did announce plans earlier this year to cut almost 2% of its global workforce, or about 700 jobs, as reported by Reuters. The Lancaster plant employs between 11 and 50 people, according to the South Carolina Department of Commerce.
ADM said employees that leave the company will receive financial severance and that ADM is “offering support” to help those people find other employment.
The news also comes as ADM is being investigated by the U.S. Department of Justice for accounting practices that have raised enough questions to get a grand jury involved, and as the company is cutting jobs at Chinese facilities, according to further reporting from Reuters.
While ADM did not name President Donald Trump’s trade policies as reason for the closure of the Lancaster plant, soybean producers across the U.S. have said the trade battle, particularly between the U.S. and China, will have a detrimental impact on soybean exports nationwide. The U.S. is imposing higher costs on products it buys from other countries, called tariffs. In response, those countries are imposing tariffs on products the U.S. sells them.
South Carolina exported $202 million worth of soybeans in 2023. The U.S. as a whole exported more than $27 billion. Our top buyer is China.
“We run the risk of immediate impacts this growing season, along with the impacts a prolonged trade war with China will inflict on our industry once again,” Caleb Ragland, president of the American Soybean Association, said in a written statement earlier this month. “The short-term disruptions are painful, but the long-term repercussions to our reputation, our reliability as a supplier, and the stability of those trading relationships are hard to even put into words.”
