By the 16th century, soybeans were used in Burma, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Philippines, Nepal, Thailand, and Vietnam.
The first record of soybeans in Europe was in England in 1790. The soybean was introduced into Europe in 1712 by Kaempfer and into the United States in 1804.
The first soybean uses in the USA dates back to 1765 in the present-day state of Georgia. In 1804, a Yankee clipper ship returning from China to the USA carried a cargo of soya beans as ballast. In 1829, U.S. farmers first grew soybeans.
In United States for several decades, it was regarded more as a botanical curiosity than as a plant of economic importance.
During the Civil War, soldiers used soybeans as “coffee berries” to brew “coffee” when real coffee was scarce. In the late 1800s, significant numbers of farmers began to grow soybeans as forage for cattle.
Since 1890 nearly all of the State Agricultural Experiments have experimented with soybeans and many bulletins have been published dealing wholly or partly with the crop.
Additional varieties of soybeans were brought into the United States in 1854, 1900 and 1905, but it was not until 1915 that they were grown in quantities sufficient for commercial utilization.
In 1904, George Washington Carver discovered that soybeans were an efficient source of oil and protein. His discoveries changed the way people thought about the soybean; no longer was it just a forage crop. Now its beans provided valuable protein and oil.
In 1916, 30,000 bushels were processed for oil. The general shortage of fats and oils during the first world war gave a temporary, but rather short lived, stimulus to the production of soybeans for extraction purposes.
By 1929, U.S. soybean production had grown to 9 million bushels. That year, soybean pioneer William J. “Bill” Morse left on a two-year odyssey to China during which he gathered more than 10,000 soybean varieties for U.S. researchers to study.
The United States of America expanded its production and by the 1970s supplied two-thirds of the world’s soybean needs. In the early 1970s, Latin America began to emerge as a major soybean producing area.
Introduction of soyabean to America
