Oats

[malleefarmer]

Probably stating the bleeding obvious you guys must eat a lot of porridge or oatmeal do you call it for breakfast?

Basically a niche crop here , feed yes, hay yes, grazing standing crop yes, human consumption niche market.

Finite demand

[farmaholic]

Too bad the "zero" gluten oat market isn't very big. We have Avena close to us, they want oats with very very little gluten cereals in the harvested sample. I think you can actually have more wild oats present than gluten cereal grains.

With direct seeding, volunteer wheat can linger longer than normal. Between trampled sprayer trails, white caps that maybe made it over the chaffer sieve, thrown out grain....and the fact spring wheat doesnt germinate as quickly as barley or durum, you can have volunteers longer than you want. Maybe two special crops after wheat then oats would help.

We never get the huge yeilds to make oats attractive.

Price premium needs to be big enough to make it worth trying

[WiltonRanch]

I really like growing oats. My land can grow high quality when conditions are close to decent. My land can grow wild oats well also but if you make an effort you can deal with that. I’m with you Farma on the volunteer wheat. Nothing worse than that. I’ve had hrs volunteer for 3 years. Makes it a challenge to prepare a field for oats with that in mind. I don’t grow a lot of wheat so not a big issue. If I could get barley to yield enough probably would grow less wheat.