... your place for oat information.

Wishing everyone the best and most relaxing of holidays and a fabulous 2020!

Find this year's holiday card here!

There are many oat-related events coming up in 2020! The calendar has just been updated to include two Practical Farmers of Iowa meetings, the Saaten Union Oat Convention in Braunschweig, Germany, the NAMA Spring Conference in Florida, and a plant and animal breeding course being offered by the University of Edinburgh, SRUC, and CGIAR in Edinburgh, Scotland. Please check the bottom of the home page and the rest of the calendar to see all of the events listed and take note of upcoming deadlines. The deadline for registering for the Saaten Union event, for example, is December 16th!

If you follow long distance running, you’ll know that everyone has been all a-flutter because Eliud Kipchoge recently ran a marathon in under two hours. How did he do it? "Kipchoge got out of his hotel bed at 4:50 a.m. and had oatmeal for breakfast."

We have word from Kathy Klos that a new post-doc position is available at USDA-ARS in Aberdeen, ID! They are looking for someone to study crown rust resistance in oat and Fusarium head blight resistance in barley. This is an ORAU/ORISE post-doctoral fellowship open to recent PhDs who may be non-US citizens under circumstances described in the posting.

The link is here: https://www.zintellect.com/Opportunity/Details/USDA-ARS-2019-0160.

Much of our community's work begins with grant applications, and the Prairie Oat Growers Association (POGA) has just been awarded nearly two million dollars from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada's CAP program "to develop new oat cultivars suited for production in western Canada".

This Newsletter update brings you word of a brand-new oat breeder position! The position is with InterGrain, in Perth, Australia. Information about how to apply can be found here. (Note that word of this position went out to OatMail subscribers first. Sign up here if you're interested in joining the group.)

This update of the Newsletter brings you three new pages to peruse: "Nomenclature", "Germplasm", and "Pathology". They were created to make relevant tools and information easier to find, and to reflect the existence of the AOW/IOC Nomenclature and Germplasm Committees, as well as the Oat Rust Initiative. Each page is still very much a work in progress, and much more information will be added.

Unfortunately, this update brings a double dose of sad news. First, Harold Marshall passed away on April 27th, 2019. Harold was the oat breeder at Pennsylvania State U. for many years, and continued to develop new oat lines at his farm after retirement. Then, Marty Carson passed away on May 9th. Marty was a plant pathologist, and did much work on crown rust during his tenure as Research Leader at the USDA-ARS Cereal Disease Laboratory in St. Paul, MN.

I left off in January by mentioning some of Vern Burrows’ work. Well, in the past year, Vern has been recognized for his work three more times! Most recently, he was promoted within the Order of Canada. You can read about these recent awards in the “Hall of Fame” section under “Other Awards and Accolades”, or go directly here.

Happy 2019 everyone! I have a couple of items to finish off 2018: the Web harvest for December is in the “Community News” section, and a summary concerning oat cultivars released in Canada in 2018 is in the “Research Reports” section. I would like to see summaries concerning new cultivars released in other countries as well. Are there some of you who would be willing to put those together, please?