Soybeans and Their Products: Markets, Models, and Policy

Soybeans and Their Products was first published in 1972. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

This is the report of a comprehensive study designated to identify and measure empirically the forces, interrelationships, and processes which shape the behavior of the total soybean market. The research focused on the years from 1946 to 1967, a period when the soybean economy developed from its small beginnings to its present magnitude. Soybeans are now the leading oilseed in world trade; soybean oil is the most prominent among the many edible oils available in the world; and soybean meal stands first in importance in world markets for high-protein livestock feeds. As a top cash crop in U.S. agriculture soybeans are rivaled only by corn.

Much of the remarkable surge in soybean and related markets in recent years can be explained and analyzed by using the concepts of demand growth and commodity substitution developed in this book. In addition to serving the specific interests of commodity experts, the study will be useful to econometricians and price analysts as an example of empirical investigation of a major agricultural and industrial raw material.

The research was carried out through close cooperation between the University of Minnesota’s Department of Agricultura and Applied Economics and the Economic and Statistical Analysis Division of the Economic Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture.