Much effort has been expended to find agronomically important QTLs for improving soybean yield. However, the complexity of genome, such as genome duplication, limits the utility of genome-wide association studies and linkage analyses to identify genes controlling yield traits. We propose the variation block method, a three-step process for recombination block detection and comparison. The first step is to detect variations by comparing short-read DNA sequences of the cultivar to a reference genome of the target crop. Next, sequence blocks with variation patterns are examined and defined. The boundaries between the variation-containing sequence blocks are regarded as recombination sites. All the assumed recombination sites in the cultivar set are used to split the genomes, and the resulting sequence regions are named as variation blocks. The practicality of this approach was demonstrated by the identification of a putative locus determining soybean hilum color and known genes such as flower color gene. We suggest that the variation block method is an efficient genomics method for recombination block-level comparison of crop genomes. We expect that this method holds the prospect of developing crop genomics by bringing genomics technology to the field of crop breeding.