It has a racy name, but naked oats is now being used in a sensible product designed to alleviate world hunger.
Naked oats, or cavena nuda, is grown mainly in Manitoba by Wedge Farms, which markets it as “rice of the Prairies.”
It has earned an investment from panel members on the CBC Television showDragons’ Den.
Fifteen months ago, Campbell’s Soup Canada officials asked what they were looking at when they saw a jar of naked oats sitting on a desk while visiting Michele Marcotte, science director at the Eastern Cereal and Oilseed Research Centre in Ottawa.
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“I said, ‘this is naked oats,’ ” Marcotte said. “‘This looks like rice, it cooks like rice and it has a higher nutritional value.’ ”
The oats, registered in 2008, was used for horse and hog feed, but a human food application had not been developed.
Campbell’s asked for 200 kilograms of the oats and Marcotte put it in touch with Wedge Farms.
Product development began and Nourish was launched earlier this month.
The nutrient-rich food, which also contains pulses and vegetables and can be eaten hot or cold, will be available at food banks and could be used for relief in disaster situations such as earthquakes.
“This is major,” Marcotte said. “We rarely see this ourselves, working in a research centre. We have seen the farmers can profit, the processors can also profit, the feed people can profit, and even the consumer can profit because they can eat a more nutritious product.”
Vern Burrows, research scientist emeritus at Agriculture Canada, spent years breeding the hulless oat variety that doesn’t have hairs on the grain.
He named it AC Gehl after Dave Gehl, who runs the federal research farm at Indian Head, Sask.
A flattered Gehl said Burrows didn’t have access to technical support for his breeding work because he had retired. Burrows sent Gehl a sample of his oats in the fall of 2000 and asked him to send it to New Zealand for increasing.
Then he asked Gehl to grow some of the crop, which he did for three years in co-operation with growers.
“I helped him when he had no other source,” Gehl said. “I think he appreciated that.”
Burrows’ work with oats was designed to make the crop more useful and eliminate some of the problems experienced by growers and processors.
“Hulless oats were not the favourite crop for my staff because they’re very unpleasant to work with,” Gehl said.
The little hairs on the groats cause irritated and itchy skin and respiratory congestion. They were also a challenge to thresh.
Fatuoids, which are mutants sometimes called false wild oats, cause shattering in standard oats.
“That’s why our standard oats, we are really averse to having awns or fatuoids in them,” he said.
But hulless oats are different.
“He took an awn from a wild oat and he put it onto the hulless oat and it behaved quite differently than in a standard oat,” Gehl said.
“They didn’t shatter and the awn made them very free threshing. This stuff threshes like wheat.”
Previous varieties could not be threshed hard because the soft groat could break.
Getting the hairs off the groat took years of breeding, but Gehl said Burrows is persistent.
“He bucked the system. Everybody told him you’re kind of flogging a dead horse here because hulless oats didn’t have a very high reputation. I think he really made quite spectacular progress in eliminating the major problems with that crop.”
Campbell’s thinks so, too.
Marcotte said replacing rice in its products with naked oats makes sense because it has twice the protein, 10 times the fibre and five times the iron of white rice.
It has high levels of beta glucan and can reduce cholesterol.
Whether the company decides to use the oats in all its products remains to be seen. Price is the issue because production is still small.
“The price of growing it and cleaning it and offering it for the food market is a little high at this point in time,” Marcotte said.
Gehl agreed the crop could remain a niche market for a while. Standard millers are set up for hulled oats and there isn’t much incentive for Canadian mills to switch because they are located close to growing areas.
Cream Hill Estates in Ontario has grown the oats for the celiac market for a few years, Quebec farmers plant it mainly for the horse market and Manitoba farmers grow it for swine rations and human consumption.
The agronomics are a bit better in the East because Burrows used eastern varieties to develop AC Gehl. The crop tends not to be as drought tolerant as other oats.
