The soybean plant is native to China and was some 3,000 years ago considered their most important crop and a necessity for life. Soybeans were introduced into Japan in the eighth century and many centuries later into other regions of Asia including Thailand, Malaysia, Korea, and Viet Nam. It wasn't until the end of the 18th century that soybeans made their way to France and England and then North America as animal feed. They came into prominence in the twentieth century as a healthy food staple thanks to George Washington Carver and John Harvey Kellogg.
During the 1950s, as countries were recovering from the War, a greater need for meat, milk, and eggs was apparent. Since there was no new grassland for the expanding beef and dairy herds, farmers looked away from grass to grain to support more meat, poultry, milk, and eggs. As the supply increased, world consumption of meat kept growing, growing to a sixfold rise.
This rise in demand and supply was helped further by the discovery that adding soybean meal with the usual grain boosted the efficiency with which livestock and poultry converted grain into animal protein. Thus, the demand for soybeans rose, enabling them to join wheat, rice, and corn as one of the world’s leading crops. The global demand for soybeans is growing at nearly 6 million tons per year.
The soybean is a legume, fixing atmospheric nitrogen in the soil, which means it is not as fertilizer-responsive as other crops such as corn or wheat. Since the soy plant uses a substantial fraction of its metabolic energy to fix nitrogen, it has less energy to devote to producing seed, making its yields more difficult.
Since 1950, U.S. corn yields have quadrupled while those of soybeans have barely doubled, yet the area of land needed for soybean yields has expanded fivefold while the U.S. area in corn has remained essentially unchanged since 1950.
By 1970 the United States was producing three fourths of the world’s soybeans and accounting for virtually all exports. When world grain and soybean prices climbed in the mid-1970s, the United States—in an effort to curb domestic food price inflation—embargoed soybean exports. Japan, then the world’s leading importer, was soon looking for another supplier. Brazil was looking for new crops to export.
And as Brazil grows their economy, the soybean is invading the Amazon rainforest.During the last years of the twentieth century, Japan was the leading soybean importer while China was essentially self-sufficient in soybeans, producing and consuming roughly 13 million tons of soybeans a year. However, that changed as rising incomes enabled many of China’s 1.3 billion people to move up the food chain, consuming more meat, milk, eggs, and farmed fish. By 2009 China was consuming millions of tons of soybeans, most of which were imported.
At about the same time the soybean was becoming an important crop to Brazil, its importance started to grow dramatically in Argentina as well, so much so that by today more than twice as much land in Argentina produces soybeans as produces grain. Together, the United States, Brazil, and Argentina produce easily four fifths of the world’s soybean crop and account for 90 percent of the exports.Because soybean consumption continues to climb, soybean growers as well as ranchers are expanding Brazil’s national herd of beef cattle. As soybean growers buy cleared land from ranchers who had grazed it for years, the ranchers then go deeper into the rainforest.
The Amazon rainforest recycles rainfall from the coastal regions to the continental interior, ensuring an adequate water supply for Brazil’s inland agriculture. And it is an enormous storehouse of carbon.
WorldWide Puzzle: how to save the Amazon rainforest yet still satisfy the continually expanding demand for soybeans.
Wonder Food: Soybeans
"Inhabitants of underdeveloped nations and victims of natural disasters are the only people who have ever been happy to see soybeans."
Fran Lebowitz, journalist
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