Soybeans

Soybeans (cultivated variety, Glycine max; wild variety, Glycine soja), are native to Asia and were originally cultivated in north China. Soybeans are one of the world's most [Page 405]important crops because of their high protein content and their high production of edible oil. Along with rice, wheat, barley, and millet, soybeans have been an important part of the Chinese diet for many centuries. They did not arrive in Europe until the 18th century, and the first known report of their cultivation in the Americas was not until the early 19th century. Today, most of the world's soybeans are produced in the Americas, with the United States and Brazil being the leading producers. Soybeans are used to produce a variety of foods for human consumption, but their main use today is the manufacture of feed for livestock and soybean oil. Soybean cultivation in the Brazilian Amazon basin and the manufacture of soy-based biodiesel have been at the center of important debates about conservation, agriculture, and renewable energy since the end of the 20th century.

Mature soybeans in the pod. Soybeans are used in a wide variety of foods, but it is their use in livestock feed and for soybean oil that makes them one of the world's most important crops.

Source: U.S. Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service/Scott Bauer

The soybean was domesticated by the Chinese by the beginning of the 11th century B.C.E., during the Zhou Dynasty (1100 b.c.e.-256 c.e.), although the domestication process likely began several hundred years earlier, during the Chang Dynasty (ca. 1700–1100 b.c.e.). The earliest depictions of the archaic Chinese character for soybean (shu) can be found throughout the Book of Odes, a collection of Chinese poems written between the 11th century and the 7th century b.c.e. Though there is no explicit mention of the cultivation of soybeans in this book, scholars have interpreted these first depictions as evidence of domestication, because of the somewhat intimate knowledge of the soybean that the authors of the book must have had to create the pictograph for the soybean. The first specific reference to cultivated soybeans was not until 644 b.c.e., when it was recorded that the Shan-Jung tribe paid a tribute to the House of Zhou with soybeans. By the 1st century c.e., the soybean had spread to other parts of China as well as to the Korean Peninsula, closely mirroring the spread, rise, and fall of ancient Chinese dynasties. Soybean cultivation began to take off in Japan and southeast and central Asia starting in the 1st century c.e. The spread of soybeans throughout Asia was closely related to the establishment of land and sea trade routes, including the Silk Road.

Soybeans first arrived in Europe by way of the Netherlands and France in the middle of the 18th century. They were introduced in the United States by the turn of the 19th century. The first seeds were likely sent from France to the Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture by the U.S. ambassador to France, Benjamin Franklin, who established a seed exchange program between the two countries during his ambassadorship in the late [Page 406]18th century. The first specific mention of soybeans in U.S. literature was an 1804 recommendation for their cultivation in Pennsylvania from the president of the Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture. The soybean is known to have arrived in South America by 1882.

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