Soybeans
Let's Know Things
Colin Wright
4.8 • 593 Ratings
🗓️ 11 September 2018
⏱️ 40 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week we talk about Morse & Piper, fake milk, and the Dust Bowl.
We also discuss FDA standards, plant-based protein, and soybean politics.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | William Morse and Charlie Piper knew a lot about soybeans. |
| 0:20.2 | In fact, they wrote the book on soybeans, which they titled, fittingly, the soybean. |
| 0:26.7 | Piper was the elder of the two and a mentor to the younger Morse. |
| 0:31.0 | Back when they met in 1902, Piper was known by his colleagues as the Prophet, because he always seemed to see the potential in plants before anyone else, which was a very valuable skill for him to have, considering that he was the head of the USDA's, the United States Department of Agriculture's, Office of Forage Crops. |
| 0:52.7 | So Piper was the guy in the U.S. government in charge of figuring out which plants available |
| 0:57.6 | in nature, in the U.S. and around the world would serve as suitable, domesticable food for our |
| 1:04.8 | country's grazing livestock. |
| 1:06.9 | And Morse went to work for him at the very moment that Piper was planning to investigate the potential |
| 1:12.1 | of growing soybeans for forage purposes, a plant that grew wild in the area, and that they were |
| 1:18.7 | vaguely aware of being used for other purposes elsewhere, but which had never been a thing that |
| 1:24.1 | was intentionally grown in the country. They began by collecting the varieties they could find around the United States, then domesticated |
| 1:32.6 | them in little controlled gardens in various climates. |
| 1:36.3 | They then took the best most stable, most disease resistant, most nutrient-rich, most |
| 1:42.8 | overall growable versions of these soybeans, and started |
| 1:47.0 | distributing them by hand to farmers around the country. Those farmers would then dedicate a few |
| 1:52.1 | square feet of land to this new crop, happy to help the government test them out, to see if there |
| 1:58.0 | was any economic potential in them. And Morse, Piper, and their people |
| 2:03.0 | would then go back around and check in on how these test crops were faring from time to time. |
| 2:08.7 | The book they eventually wrote was the consequence of these initial experiences, |
| 2:13.7 | and the collection of research and notes that were accumulated over the course of the subsequent decade. |
| 2:20.6 | They published their measurements and observations as a collection of booklets and articles |
| 2:25.6 | and then aggregated everything into a larger, more cohesive, formal book, the soybean, |
... |
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