... your place for oat information.

Twenty-eight years ago today, on February 24th, 1992, I (Charlene Wight) joined what is now the Ottawa Research and Development Centre of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) to work on oat genomics. Over those 28 years I have met many amazing people in the broader oat community, including Bruce Roskens, who recently retired from Grain Millers, Inc.. A summary of Bruce's career, which includes his being presented with the Award for Distinguished Service to Oat Improvement, has been added to the "Hall of Fame" section under "Retirements".

So is it the Year of the Rat? Or the Year of the Oat? How about both?

First, I would like to say Happy Year of the Rat to those of you celebrating Lunar New Year, which is this Saturday, January 25th. Saturday is also Burns Night for those of us with a Scottish background, so be sure to raise a glass to the Immortal Memory of Robert Burns and indulge in some haggis or cranachan, both of which are made with oats.

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.