“I look out across my bean field, and I know that every third row goes to China,” says Bill Wykes, who farms in a slim slice of the Illinois soyabean belt an hour and a half from Chicago, the city that grain built.

Over the past decade, Mr Wykes and many of the surrounding family farms in Kendall County have made a large bet on China and its rising meat consumption, which has driven purchases of animal feed made from soyabeans.

“Fifteen years ago we hardly put a bean into China,” says Mr Wykes, 63, who has doubled his soyabean acreage in order to meet demand.