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. Obituaries for both Harold and Marty can be found in the “Hall of Fame” section under “Obituaries” or go here (Harold) and here (Marty).

In happier news, Shea Miller retired from the Ottawa Research and Development Centre of AAFC on April 17th. You can read about her work in the “Retirements” section of the Hall of Fame or go here.

Two people received special accolades recently: Anne Osbourn, from the John Innes Centre, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and Mark Sorrells, from Cornell University, received the 2018 CSSA Editor’s Citation for Excellence for his work as Associate Editor of The Plant Genome. Congratulations to you both!

Our best wishes also go to Doug Keesling, who was recently named to the Oat Global Board of Directors and to Jenneth Johanson, who took over the role as President of the Prairie Oat Growers’ Association (POGA) on May 1st.

You can catch up with everything that POGA has been doing by reading the latest issue of their “Oat Scoop” newsletter, which includes several research project updates. In our own “Research Reports” section, I have reports for you from Peter Hozlar and Steve Harrison.

If there are any Canadian researchers or students wishing to spend some time on projects with collaborators in Ireland, or vice versa, you may be eligible to take part in the James M. Flaherty Program. The deadline for applications is the 20th of May.

Speaking of deadlines, keep in mind that the last day to submit articles for AACC International’s January 2020 Cereal Chemistry Focus Issue on Cereal Grains for Nutrition and Health is May 31st. Also, there are still places in the “Genomic Selection in Plant Breeding: A hands-on short course in R” course being offered June 3rd-6th in Spain. More details can be found here and the deadline to apply is May 21st.

This Thursday, May 16th, is the Golden Porridge Bowl competition in Munich, Germany, and the winner will head to Scotland for the Golden Spurtle World Porridge Championships in October. Deadline for entries to that competition is June 10th. How about one of our food research people give this a go?!

The next major event for the oat community will be the 11th International Oat Conference in Perth, Australia, in October, 2020. The organizing committee is now looking for sponsors. More information about that is in the “Meetings” section, on the IOC page.

Finally, my “Web Harvest” for March and April is available in the “Community News” section, and, once again, has many different types of articles for your perusal. I would also suggest that you take a look at the @OatNewsletter Twitter feed, as there has been a lot of tweeting about oats by farmers in recent days!