Large mounds of oats piled in farmyards and fields are not unusual, but Bruce Roskens would rather not see them.
The senior manager of agricultural research and commodity development at Quaker Foods and Beverages told farmers attending a Cargill information day that dirty oats is the company’s main concern.
“We have more dirt in our oats this year than we ever have before,” Roskens said.
Quaker customers who find something flat and black in their oatmeal don’t necessarily think it’s dirt from a “clean Saskatchewan farm,” he said. Instead, they think it is an insect or rodent feces.
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“They perceive the worst,” Roskens said.
“Our consumer complaints have never been higher.”
Before 1992, American processors weren’t interested in Canadian oats because they perceived the product to be dirty. It was too wet to process, too full of wild oats and not uniform because it was blended.
That changed when Quaker officials did some calculating.
“We bought more oats out of North Dakota than the state provided,” Roskens said, pausing to let that sink in.
“(The oats) didn’t fall across the border on their own.”
Oat exports to the U.S. surged after 1992, and production there dropped accordingly. Quaker now buys 80 percent of its oats in Canada.
Roskens said he buys ingredients, not commodities. That’s why clean oats are so important.
Quaker is a dry miller, which means oats aren’t washed before milling. As a result, they must be as clean and uniform as possible heading to mills in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and Peterborough, Ont.
The company has a policy of allowing no foreign material in its product, yet dirt keeps showing up.
Roskens said western Canadian farmers will have to change the way they harvest and handle oats.
Consumers notice when there is more in their bowl than oatmeal. For example, the company gets letters if just a bit of barley slips in. The company requires 96 percent sound cultivated oats, and allows up to one percent canola, one percent wheat, one percent barley and one percent wild oats.
But even that would be too much for people who are gluten-intolerant, Roskens added.
Although oats is on the list of food that gluten-intolerant people must avoid, new research is looking at whether the protein in oats is different enough from that of wheat and barley. If it is, people who are allergic to wheat or barley or are gluten intolerant could some day be able to eat oats.
Roskens also cautioned growers against using unregistered chemicals. He said they will get caught – he once received a call from a competitor warning him that some growers had done this – and the oats will be graded as feed.
