One hundred and one years ago, USDA began counting the production of soybeans on US farms.  This is not because that is when farmers began harvesting soybeans for grain.  No.  This is when the quantity of soybean production was sufficient to be identified as a row crop.  Soybeans had been a hay/forage crop prior to oilseed production.  And farms were producing soybeans for the beans for a number of years before 1924.  That year is simply the reference year in which they began to be counted.

The Backstory: 1924 was less than a decade after WWI, a global conflict.  It was just a few years before the 1929 stock market crash.  The population of the United States in 1924 was 114,109,000 people.

In 1924, about 6,400,000 people were farmers.  One out of 18 people were a farmer.  Soybean yields were at 11 bushels per acre and US farmers harvested 4,947,000 bushels in 1924.

In 2024, the Census Bureau reports the US population is now 340 million.  USDA reports there are 1.9 million farms in the US.  In 2024, the US soybean producers produced 4,366,492,000 (4.4 billion bushels), with a national average yield of 50.7 bushels of soybeans per acre.

This is the mighty story of US agriculture that fuels the motto that farmers feed the world.  It is a great story.  But of course, there are more stories. Today’s story is mostly about the benefit of the marketing infrastructure that is required to produce 4.4 billion bushels of US soybeans a year.  It has not been simply a demand decision to produce 4.4 billion bushels in 2024 instead of the 1924, 4.9 million bushels.  It took three major components.

1. It took a growing demand: growing hungry consumers. = Choice
2. It required the knowledge and technology to do so  = Micro Technology
3. And it took a market infrastructure to get the supply (#2) to the demand (#1) = Macro Policy

Three Legs of the Economic Stool.  An article on biomassules.com, Which Facts are We Using?, outlines these three economy defining components.  US agriculture is great at all three.  On a national level, discussions about the best use of resources often get confounded because these three components often define the same word differently.

Demand is defined based on cultural perceptions: GMOs, AI/drones, and organic food.  Often they are rooted in science or the law, but not always.  Things that influence demand are:

• Population
• Income
• Consumer preferences
• Seasonality
• Product price, and the prices of product substitute and complement product prices

Production technologies: biotechnology, digital technology, and soil organics; are engineered based on the best available science.  The production technologies are not well understood by the consumers.  This is the difficult task of the macroeconomic, market infrastructure connectors.  And certainly, they all overlap from one sphere of influence to another.  Factors that influence supply include:

• resource/input availability
• production costs
• facility capacity
• uncertainty
• legislation, taxes, policy rules, and supply chain efficiency and capacity

This last bullet contains multiple macroeconomic factors.  For these reasons it is most effective to separate supply into microeconomic firm-level components, and macroeconomic supply chain/market infrastructure components.

The Story of US Soybeans: These three economic components best tell the story of 100 years of US soybeans.

Soybean demand has met the nutritional needs of a population that grew from 100 million to 300 million people.  Steady income growth has kept the consumers in position to purchase the goods like soybeans they desire.

As with supply the ability to deliver the consumer-demanded products cost-effectively is a function of market chain/infrastructure.  US highways, riverways, airways, and railways, as well as cell towers and market information transparency have lowered the cost of connecting the supply of products to the consumers who demand them.  These market chain factors are shaped by macroeconomic factors and laws that provide consistency and accountability to producers and consumers.

All these benchmark events are macroeconomic-shaping factors that influence 100 years of US soybeans.  These events bridge available supply with demand, but by themselves are neither supply nor demand.

The ‘demand’ for soybeans drove up production.  The ‘supply’ of US soybeans kept all the costs competitive with substitute goods, complementary goods, and soybeans themselves.  The percentage of 2024 production is identified on the chart.

• In 1957, 33 years after 1924, US soybean production reached 10 percent of 2024 levels.
• In 1995, 71 years after 1924, soybean output reached 50 percent of current levels
• By 2013, 89 years after 1924, soybean production reached 75 of current production.

Eleven years ago, US soybean production was 25 percent lower than in 2024. Remarkable. US output of soybeans is increasing at an increasing rate even as resources like land become more limiting.

This chart became part of Biomass Rules, LLC presentations twenty years ago when agriculture embarked upon the biofuel frontier.  In the mid-2000s, there were a lot of hopes that if US agriculture could only produce enough corn and soybeans, all fossil fuels could be replaced with biofuels.  Looking at this chart perhaps we are only 20 years into the 100-year story.

The first twenty years (lefthand box) shows the baby steps the soybean production industry took. By 1944, production had grown from 5 million bushels per year to 192 million bushels per year.  Farm numbers were beginning to decline even as productivity increased.

No one in 1924 was forecasting 4.4 billion bushels of US soybean production.  But 100 years later, here we are.  It is not conceivable that yields can or will grow by 200 times in the next 80 years.  But as we move to cellular cultured agriculture, which is already ramping up, it may be conceivable to increase vegetable oil production for use in biofuels several hundred-fold.

Fuel producers may move from purchasing RINS to offset fossil fuel with biofuel production, to manufacturing biofuels in tanks and vats using cellular replication techniques.  Will that be a win, or a lose?  If the goal is to power the world with sustainable and renewable fuel using 2124 technologies, it just may be possible.