Friedrich J. Haberlandt

Friedrich J. Haberlandt, born in 1826 and died in 1878, was a professor of agriculture at the Hochschule fur Bodenkultur, the Royal College of Agriculture, in Vienna, best known for introducing soybean cultivation to Western and Central Europe. After encountering nineteen soybean varieties at Vienna's 1873 World Exposition, he cultivated and distributed the seeds to farmers across the region and collected their cultivation reports, publishing his findings in the 1878 book Die Sojabohne, or The Soybean, the same year he died at age fifty two, a premature death that is thought to have delayed wider European adoption of the crop by roughly fifty years.