Ag Processing Margin per Tonne by Segment

Profit Is a Thin Margin on a Very Large Volume

Grain merchants and oilseed processors make a few dollars on each tonne they trade and tens of dollars on each tonne they crush, so their profit is a thin margin multiplied by an enormous volume. Ten segments at four US-listed companies earned between $4.4 and $223.4 a tonne in FY2025. The order follows what each segment does to the tonne: buys and resells it, crushes it into meal and oil, or turns it into a specialty product. It also follows which profit line and which tonnes each company reports. It says little about who runs their plants better.

Profit per tonne, as used here, is a segment’s own profit measure divided by the volume the same company reports for that segment in the same year; no company files it as a ratio. The profit is whatever the segment note uses: segment EBIT at Bunge, segment operating profit at Archer-Daniels-Midland (ADM), segment adjusted EBITDA at Darling Ingredients and The Andersons. EBITDA is struck before depreciation, so it reads higher per tonne than EBIT would for the same business. The volume is whichever tonnes the company reports: seed crushed (“processed”), product sold to outside customers, raw material taken in, or commodities traded. Both labels belong beside every figure.

FY2025 Profit per Tonne, Ten Segments

Years to 31 December 2025; Darling’s ended 3 January 2026. Profit and tonnes come from each company’s FY2025 10-K and fourth-quarter 2025 earnings release, except The Andersons’ tonnes, which come from the summary of the year in its 2026 proxy statement. ADM’s Crushing is a subsegment of its Ag Services and Oilseeds segment, reported in the earnings release. ADM’s Carbohydrate Solutions also mills wheat, but ADM reports processed tonnes for corn only, so that figure is per tonne of corn. Softseeds are oilseeds such as rapeseed, canola and sunflower; Other Oilseeds covers palm, coconut and other specialty oils.

Fuels are sold by the gallon, so the two fuel businesses get their own table.

Diamond Green Diesel’s row is the whole venture: twice Darling’s $103.7M half-share of its adjusted EBITDA, after broker and discount fees, over all the gallons it sold. The $0.21 is Darling’s own figure on that basis. The Andersons’ Renewables segment also sells ethanol made by other producers, and those gallons are not in the 518 million.

What the Segment Does to Each Tonne

The table falls into three groups, set by how much work goes into a tonne before it is sold.

Trading earns the least. Bunge’s Grain Merchandising & Milling and The Andersons’ Agribusiness buy grain from farmers, store it, ship it and sell it on, and their margin is the gap between buying and selling prices less freight and storage. That comes to a few dollars a tonne. ADM’s own trading business, Ag Services, earned $636M in FY2025, but ADM reports tonnes only for the oilseeds and corn it processes, so its trading profit has no volume to divide by.

Crushing sits in the middle. A crusher buys seed and sells the meal and oil pressed from it, and Bunge’s three oilseed segments also refine that oil. Darling’s Feed segment lands among them for a similar reason: rendering splits animal by-products into fats and protein meals, much as a crusher splits a seed. ADM’s Crushing line is the outlier, for reasons set out in the next section.

Making a product earns the most per tonne. Darling’s Food segment turns hides, skins, bones and intestines into collagen, natural sausage casings and crude heparin, the raw material for a blood-thinning drug. ADM’s Carbohydrate Solutions turns corn into sweeteners, starches and ethanol. Each tonne goes through more steps and is sold to a customer’s specification, where a traded tonne is sold at the going market price.

Same Profit, Different Tonnes

The tonnes you divide by can move the answer as much as the business does. Bunge’s Soybean Processing & Refining segment crushed 41.0 million tonnes of soybeans in FY2025, sold another 20.5 million tonnes of whole soybeans to outside customers, and refined 3.6 million tonnes of oil. Its $1,225M of EBIT covers all three. Divide by crushed plus traded tonnes, 61.5 million, and the $29.9 a tonne in the table falls to $19.9. Neither is wrong, but two figures compare only when they divide by the same kind of tonne.

Segment boundaries matter as much. ADM’s Crushing line holds only the crush: ADM books oil refining in a separate subsegment, Refined Products and Other, which earned $529M, and grain trading in Ag Services. Bunge’s soybean segment holds crushing, refining and soybean trading in one line. Part of the gap between their figures is a gap in what each line contains.

The profit line matters too. Bunge’s segment EBIT is the reported figure, and it carries mark-to-market timing differences: swings in the value of hedges, freight contracts and inventory that Bunge’s adjusted figures move out. Grain Merchandising & Milling’s $465M also includes a $155M gain on selling Bunge’s North American corn milling business in 2025. Without it the segment earned $310M, or $4.6 a tonne. Bunge completed its acquisition of Viterra, another grain merchant, on 2 July 2025, so its FY2025 profit and tonnes both carry Viterra for the second half only.

Tonnes to Bushels

US soybean prices are quoted per bushel, so a per-tonne figure often needs converting. The US Department of Agriculture weighs a bushel of soybeans at 60 lb, and a metric tonne is 2,204.6 lb, so a tonne holds 36.74 bushels. Divide a soybean figure per tonne by that factor: Bunge’s soybean segment earned $0.81 a bushel crushed. Other grains have other bushel weights, so the factor is for soybeans only.

That $0.81 is not a crush margin. The board crush, set out in the crush margin guide, is a gross spread built from futures prices for beans, meal and oil, before any cost of running a plant. Segment EBIT comes after running costs, depreciation and overheads, and Bunge’s also includes refining and soybean trading. The two measure different things, so one cannot be read against the other.

One Segment, Two Years

A year’s profit per tonne records that year’s spread. ADM processed 35.7 million tonnes of oilseeds in FY2024 and slightly more in FY2025, yet Crushing profit fell from $844M, or $23.6 a tonne, to the figure in the table. ADM’s earnings release puts the fall down mainly to lower crush margins. With volume that steady, the per-tonne figure moved with margin and plant costs, which is why one year’s figure should carry its year wherever it is quoted.

What Profit per Tonne Leaves Out

It says nothing about the money tied up behind each tonne. A trader carries grain in store and money owed by customers; a processor carries a plant. A few dollars on a tonne that turns over in weeks and tens of dollars on a tonne that needs a costly plant cannot be ranked against each other on this measure alone. The working capital guide covers the trader’s side.

Nor does it compare across companies unless the profit line, the tonnes and the segment boundary all match, and in this table they rarely do. The Andersons’ figure is the roughest. Its tonnes count commodities traded, taken from the proxy statement, while its profit covers the whole segment, including fertiliser and feed businesses whose volumes the proxy lists separately. The value chain guide shows how each company’s segments map onto trading, processing and ingredients.