Rethinking Lifestyle

Soybeans is a very recent crop to Manitoba. However, soybeans is not a recent crop in the world. Nikolai Vavilov, a Russian scientist, identified 8 center of crop origins in the world. Each of the eight regions had a diversity of crops, both carbohydrates and proteins. Soybeans, a protein crop, originated in China along with its carbohydrate companion: rice. Very few of the crops we grow in Manitoba are native to Manitoba. Probably only strawberries and sunflowers. Wheat, barley and oats along with lentils and peas came from the Fertile Crescent, today Iran and Iraq. Central America produced corn, potato, tomato, pumpkin and various kinds of beans.

In 1995, nobody in Manitoba was growing soybeans. In 1996, one brave soul tried it, and by 2000, 179 farms had over 10,000 acres. It grew rapidly from there to peak in 2017, with 8784 farms (half of all farms in Manitoba) growing 2.2 million acres with an excellent yield of over 34 bushels per acre. Last year, 5073 farms grew 1.2 million acres of soybeans. This rapid rise was due to a number of factors, the major one being new short season varieties were developed by plant breeders that could mature well in our short summers. The other factors were that soybeans do not need nitrogen fertilizer, an expensive input on most other crops (except alfalfa) and soybeans turn out to tolerate flooding and wet soils better than almost any other crop in Manitoba and can be planted and harvested with common equipment. Soybeans can also tolerate heat over 30 degrees Celsius, whereas canola cannot.

Soybeans are a favourite source of protein feed for animals. Well over 90% of all soybeans are grown for animal feed. An interesting complication about soybeans is that you cannot, or should not eat them raw because they have anti-nutritional factors in them. The main one is a trypsin inhibitor. Trypsin is an enzyme that is involved in the breakdown of many different proteins. Trypsin inhibitors in plants is a common defense mechanism to prevent animals from eating and grazing the plant, and animals quickly learn to avoid eating soybeans in the field.

Fortunately, it is easy to eliminate the problem by either roasting or heat-extruding the soybeans. The heating of the soybeans for only a short time deactivates the anti-nutritional factors and turns them into an excellent source of proteins for animals and even humans.

Soybeans are 36% protein, 30% carbohydrate and 20% oil. In Manitoba we typically do not separate these components because we are too small a producer, but just roast or extrude the whole soybean and feed it to animals. In the USA, which is the world’s largest producer of soybeans, the soybean is fractionated into its component parts. Soybean oil is easily the most produced and consumed vegetable oil in the world at 363 million tonnes (MT) annually. The next closest is canola oil at only 70 MT followed by sunflower oil at 57 MT, peanut oil at 50 MT, cotton seed oil at 43 MT and palm oil at 20 MT.