Crush Margins Explained (Soybean)

Board Crush Is the Benchmark; Executed Crush Is the P&L

A soybean crusher earns the gap between what it pays for beans and what it gets for the meal and oil pressed from them. Analysts measure that gap with the board crush, a formula set by CME Group, which runs the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) futures market. It turns the futures prices of soybeans, meal and oil into a gross margin per bushel. The margin a crusher actually locks in on physical trades, which ADM calls the executed crush margin, carries local cash prices, freight and timing, so the two move together but rarely match.

Value a crusher on a long-run crush. Today’s crush reflects one season’s prices, so it overstates mid-cycle EBITDA in a good year and understates it in a bad one. The illustrative long-run prices below give a board crush of $3.10/bu.

The CME Board-Crush Formula

CME Group defines the soybean crush as:

Board crush ($/bu) = (meal $/short ton × 0.022) + (oil ¢/lb × 0.11) − soybeans $/bu

A 60 lb bushel yields about 44 lb of meal and 11 lb of oil. 44 lb is 0.022 of a short ton (st, 2,000 lb), so 0.022 turns the meal price per short ton into meal value per bushel. 0.11 is the 11 lb of oil, divided by 100 to turn cents into dollars. Subtract the soybean price and you have the gross margin per bushel crushed.

They are assumptions, and the primer’s Excel model runs on them.

Executed Crush Versus Board Crush at ADM

Archer-Daniels-Midland (ADM) says its Crushing subsegment is driven by executed crush margins, not the CME formula. Crushing earned $159M of operating profit in FY2025, down from $844M in FY2024; ADM put the fall down to lower soy and canola crush margins and higher plant costs. Crushing sits inside Ag Services & Oilseeds, ADM’s merchant segment, the business that buys, trades, ships and processes crops. That segment earned $1,614M in all: grain buying and trading $636M, Crushing’s $159M, oil refining and other products $529M, and $290M as ADM’s share of the profit of Wilmar, a Singapore-listed agribusiness group it part-owns. The value chain guide sets out the full map.

Bunge Global processed 51.8M MT of oilseeds in FY2025, 41.0M MT of them soybeans and 10.8M MT softseeds such as rapeseed and sunflower. Its Soybean Processing & Refining segment earned $1,225M of EBIT, against ADM’s $159M from Crushing on 36.3M MT of oilseeds. Much of that gap is scope: Bunge’s segment also refines oil, trades soybeans and makes biodiesel, while ADM books its refining and grain trading in other lines. The margin per tonne guide sets each segment’s profit against its own volume.

Scale multiplies a thin margin. Bunge’s 41.0M MT of soybeans is about 1.5 billion bushels, so each $0.10/bu of margin on them is worth about $150M a year.

Worked Example: From Board Crush to a Crusher’s EBITDA

Take the model’s illustrative crusher: 40M MT a year of oilseed capacity running at 90%. A metric tonne of soybeans is 36.74 bushels (2,204.6 lb ÷ 60 lb), so capacity is about 1,470M bushels and throughput about 1,323M bushels.

A crusher does not earn the full board crush. The model assumes it keeps 45% of it, losing the rest to local price differences, competition and timing, and pays $0.95/bu for energy, labour and plant upkeep:

Net crush margin = 45% × $3.10 − $0.95 = $0.445/bu

On 1,323M bushels that is about $589M of crush EBITDA a year. The model adds a flat $900M from buying, storing and trading grain, for mid-cycle EBITDA of about $1.49B.

A $0.10/bu move in the board changes this crusher’s net margin by only $0.045/bu, because it keeps 45% of the board. That is about $60M a year, against $132M if it kept the full move.

Fixed plant costs make a crusher’s profit swing harder than the board. The model’s example starts at a trough board crush of $2.40/bu, where the net margin is 45% × $2.40 − $0.95 = $0.13/bu. A 23% fall in the board takes 71% off the net margin, because the $0.95 of plant costs does not fall with it.

Working capital takes cash too. The model holds it at 10% of revenue, close to ADM’s FY2025 operating working capital, 9.8% of revenue. The meal and oil sell for the bean price plus the board crush, $14.30 a bushel at mid-cycle, so revenue is about $18.9B and working capital about $1.9B. The working capital guide covers how merchants report it.

What to Watch in Filings

Before putting a through-cycle multiple on a crusher’s EBITDA, restate the crush earnings at the long-run crush, so one season’s margin does not set the value. The valuation guide covers that step; the ABCD traders guide explains why merchants also earn outside the crush.