On December 3rd and 4th, Bo Zhang hosted the second annual Edamame Project Meeting at Blacksburg for the USDA SCRI Project sponsored by USDA-NIFA to jump start domestic edamame production in the U.S. About 30 attendees included faculty, research associates, graduate and undergraduate students representing food science, economics, plant breeding, phenomics, plant pathology, vegetable entomology, and soil nutrient management disciplines, six members of the project’s advisory board from USDA-ARS, Mississippi State University, Virginia Soybean Association, Delight Soy Foods, American Vegetable Soybean & Edamame Inc., C and E farms, Inc., and special attendees including Tom Bewick, program leader of USDA-NIFA SCRI, Saied Mostaghimi, director of the Virginia Agricultural Experiment Station and associate dean for research and graduate studies in CALS and Mike Evans, director of SPES.

To kick off the conference, a poster session was held where graduate students orally presented their projects and findings. Once the conference was underway, project PI, and co-PI, graduate students, and research associates shared research progress and outlined future plans for the upcoming year. Many of the updates pertained to agronomic and sensory data collected from 2019 edamame variety trials and progress in variety development. The conference also featured a talk on cyberbiosecurity of food and agricultural data by Susan Duncan – associate director of VAES, professor in the department of food science and technology, and co-PI on the project – as well as the debut of “Edamame Virtual Field Day”, a video intended to summarize on-going research, findings, and insights attained from the project in a format that can be more easily disseminated to stakeholders across the U.S .