Arkansas and edamame (in the same headline)

Here it is on NPR's SALT blog, "Arkansas Aims to Make Edamame as American as Apple Pie."  The dateline is Mulberry, Arkansas, population 1,627, in the Arkansas River valley, where a Texas-based Asian foods exporter, American Vegetable Soybean and Edamame Inc., is working with "plenty of local farmers ... willing to grow the non-genetically modified vegetable soybeans."  The company built an edamame processing plant here last summer and is already supplying Costco, Sam's Club and Whole Foods.

Raymond Chung, CFO of American Vegetable Soybean , says:

We are turning Arkansas into the edamame capital of the U.S. and eventually the capital of the world.

Arkansas ranks tenth nationally for conventional soybeans and is the first to develop an edamame variety licensed for commercial production.