Farmers are currently very busy trying to get this year's corn and soybean crops planted. They probably won't stop to think about how a plant from Asia came to dominate the landscape of the American Midwest. I was working on a program this week and had to review information on the introduction of soybeans and thought I would share this fascinating story.

The evidence indicates that soybeans were first adopted in northeast China around 1100 B.C. or slightly earlier. Many wild relative species can still be found in this area.

By the first century A.D. soybeans had spread throughout China and into Korea. They continued to spread across eastern Asia and by the time of the arrival of European explorers in the 15^th and 16^th century soybeans had spread to Japan, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Burma, Nepal and north India.

The first westerners to visit China and Japan reported on the local diet and included information on the extensive use of the products we now know as miso, tofu, soy sauce and tempeh. However these products have little visibly in common with the plant from which they were derived, the soybean.

During the 1600's soy sauce became a common item of trade from Asia to Europe, but it wasn't until 1712 when Engelbert Kaempfer, a Dutch medical officer previously stationed in Japan, wrote a book that explained the connection between the cultivation of soybean plants and food products produced from it.

The first documented appearance of soybeans in America was in Savannah, Georgia in 1765. Samuel Bowen returned from world travels to plant soybeans on his plantation just east of Savannah. A somewhat more well-known introduction occurred in 1770 when Benjamin Franklin had soybeans planted near Philadelphia. Neither of these events led to the widespread adoption of soybeans as a major agricultural crop.

The introduction of soybeans into Illinois and subsequently the whole Corn Belt is a fascinating story of coincidence. In December of 1851 an American sailing ship, the Auckland was returning from Hong Kong to San Francisco. Far off the coast of Japan the Auckland came across a sinking Japanese junk where they rescued the Japanese crew and continued on to San Francisco arriving on March 4, 1851. In San Francisco the Japanese sailors were not allowed to disembark because of disease fears.

At this same time, Dr. Benjamin Franklin Edwards (Edwardsville and Edwards County are named for his brother, Ninian Edwards, Territorial Governor of Illinois, First Senator from the State of Illinois, and third Governor of Illinois) was returning from the California gold fields. He was waiting for his ship to depart San Francisco when the Auckland arrived. He evidently examined the quarantined Japanese and came to possess seeds he referred to as Japan peas. On April 25, 1851 he arrived home in Alton, Illinois with the soybean seeds. He gave the seeds to John Lea of Alton to grow in his garden. After harvest Mr. Lea sent seeds to several others including J. J. Jackson of Davenport Iowa and to the Cincinnati Horticultural Society. In 1853, the Cincinnati Hort. Society sent samples to the New York State Agricultural Society, the Massachusetts Hort. Society and U.S. Commissioner of Patents. These groups disseminated seed to numerous farmers across the United States.

Until the 1920's soybeans were considered mostly a forage crop. In 1941 for the first time the number of acres of soybeans harvested for grain exceeded the number of acres harvested for other purposes. The value of soybeans as a high protein livestock finally became widely understood.

Dr. Theodore Hymowitz, Emeritus Professor of Plant Genetics at the University of Illinois is one of the leading sources on information about the domestication and dissemination of soybeans. Most of this information was obtained from his research and can be found on-line at the website of the University of Illinois's National Soybean Research Laboratory, http://www.nsrl.uiuc.edu/aboutsoy/history.html.