YORKTON, Sask. – The 200 farmers gathered in a community hall in Yorkton might not seem like a big deal.
But these growers are a huge deal to big American oat milling companies that sent their top executives to St. Mary’s Catholic Cultural Centre Dec. 4 to convince Saskatchewan and Manitoba farmers to keep growing oats.
“Contrary to what’s going on in the U.S., where it’s all biofuels all the time, we want you to know that we think that growing food is a noble profession,” North American Millers Association president Jim Bair told the Prairie Oat Growers Association.
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Bair and executives from all major American milling companies were in the audience, including senior managers from Quaker and General Mills.
That’s a big turnout of high-priced managerial talent from the towers of Minneapolis, Chicago and Washington, but Bair said U.S. millers are worried about the loss of cereal grain acres to corn because of biofuel subsidies and want to encourage prairie farmers to keep growing oats.
Already U.S. food oat production has virtually ended, as part of a long-term trend away from the once staple crop.
“We can see the writing on the wall,” Bair said in an interview.
“It’s going to be next to impossible to stabilize the oat production situation in the United States. We have incentivized growers in the United States to grow anything but food grains. Basically, that comes down to corn.”
Almost all North American food-use oats are produced in east-central Saskatchewan and western Manitoba.
Bair said U.S. legislation mandating biofuel use means that corn will be seeded on more acres each year, with about four million extra corn acres in 2009. That’s killing the production base of not just oats, but also spring wheat.
“The demand for corn to feed the biofuel monster is just pushing food grains production on a northwesterly vector,” said Bair.
“It’s just going to continue to accelerate. We’re fearful that wheat production in a few years is going to be essentially where oats are today in the U.S. It just goes down and down and down.”
Bair said this worry has pushed U.S. millers to do something for oats that they do for no other grain: millers are directly funding oat variety research. That’s essential because if farmers don’t get varieties that compete with the returns for corn, they’ll switch acres.
“We have a billion dollar oat industry in the U.S. that’s totally dependent on Canadian prairie oats,” said Bair.
A particular anxiety for millers is the claim of corn variety developers that they are within three years of releasing drought-tolerant varieties. If that is true, corn could quickly advance across North Dakota and displace other cereal grains.
“Ten years ago that could not have happened, but thanks to biotechnology we’re now growing corn in regions that could never before have grown corn,” said Bair.
Millers are willing to pay directly for variety development, but are also pleased to see checkoffs established in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, because that will provide money to keep oats competitive with other crops.
“We’re very happy about that,” Bair said.
“We can’t do much about the weather or farm programs, but we can do something about variety development.”
