That applies to the season here in Canada, but also to the members of the committees (including the Oat Newsletter committee) overseen by the American Oat Workers (AOW) group! The 2024 American Oat Workers' Conference (AOWC) was held in Saskatoon, SK, Canada, in July, and there is a lot of information to share. First, though, I will let you know that I was re-elected Editor of the Oat Newsletter for another four years. The committee was also restructured, and I would like to thank all past members for their efforts, as well as welcome Taner Sen, Steve Michel, Steffen Beuch, and Jennifer Mitchell Fetch to the team!

Here's a list of the types of information available from the meeting:

• The main website, hosted by the University of Saskatchewan (U of S; this will not be maintained, so the files will eventually be transferred to the newsletter site)
• The abstracts, which are now available on the U of S site and in the newsletter
• The presentations, which will be made public (if permission was granted) soon
• The draft minutes of the business meeting, which are here (and will be approved (or not) at the 2028 meeting)
• My report concerning the Oat Newsletter, which is here
• An updated list of AOW committee members, which is here
• The biographies for the “Distinguished Service to Oat Improvement” (DSOI) award recipients, which are in the "Hall of Fame" section of the newsletter
• Some photos, which will be available soon!

Links to most of these items are also found in the "AOWC" section of the newsletter.

I hear that Aaron Beattie and his team did a great job hosting the conference. Thank you to all who helped, including the sponsors! Because of the way the Executive committee is structured, Aaron is now the Chair of the AOW group. It was decided at the business meeting in Saskatoon that the 2028 AOWC will be held in Fargo, ND, USA, which means that Craig Carlson takes over from Aaron as Chair-elect. For those of you wanting to plan early, the most likely dates for the next conference will be in early August, 2028.

Let’s get back to the DSOI recipients now! This time, there were six, in part because it had been six years since the last conference instead of the usual four. In alphabetical order, the recipients were Harold Bockelman (USDA-ARS), Roger Caspers (UMN), Steve Harrison (LSU), Rick Jellen (BYU), Nick Tinker (ORDC, AAFC - retired), and Weikai Yan (ORDC, AAFC). Congratulations to all!

Weikai, in particular, has been in the news a lot this summer. First, Seed World magazine published a video of an interview with him. His work is also discussed in this article, which features the genomics work done with Wubi Bekele and his lab. That is immediately followed by an article about Aaron Beattie and his work at CDC, University of Saskatchewan.

A summary of Weikai’s work on mega-environments was put together by AAFC communications staff and is presented in modified form in the "Research Reports" section of the newsletter. You can always find out more about Weikai’s work by attending the annual Oat Day at ORDC. An article describing this year's event is in the "Community News" section here.

A later issue of Seed World contains an interview with AAFC's François Eudes, who discusses AAFC's breeding programs. François will also be speaking at a webinar hosted by Seed World that will include a talk by Jim Dyck of Oat Advantage. The webinar will be held on September 25th, and registration is required.

Moving on to agronomy, AAFC Saskatoon's Shaun Sharpe was interviewed recently about his work smoking out wild oats in farmers' fields. By the way, AAFC email addresses with the "canada.ca" domain will no longer function soon. Please make sure you are using addresses with the "agr.gc.ca" domain!

One of the groups sponsoring AOWC was POGA, the Prairie Oat Growers Association. The group held elections recently, and has new co-presidents. Their June "Oat Scoop" newsletter is here, and more information about the nitrogen use projects they’ve funded is here.

For those interested in intercropping, Susanne Vogelsang describes the work that her group is doing for the CROPDIVA project in this video. Also from the CROPDIVA project comes this article on the oat food value chain in Belgium.

If you're interested in oats for people with celiac disease, the Celiac Disease Foundation has published the recording and some resources from a webinar they held back in April.

Those resources may be of use to people in Australia, who are still debating the use of oats in a gluten-free diet. Meanwhile, oat research projects are receiving quite a lot of funding there, as summarized in this article about GRDC funded projects. Further details can be found in these articles about the Oat Grain Quality Consortium and the Oat Septoria Research Consortium. The Processed Oat Partnership project is also involved, and the new Project Manager is now Sue Bestow. Some of this work was communicated to more than 250 growers, as well as industry and agribusiness people, at a recent event called the OATSPO agronomic showcase.

Concerning rust disease issues in Australia, the current map is here. This season's rust reports from the United States, including the final one for this year, can be found on the Cereal Disease Laboratory (CDL) website.

The CDL is located on the campus of the University of Minnesota, where Jim Bradeen used to be a professor, as well as the Director of Oat Global (and creator of the "Speaking of Oats..." webinar series). While he has moved on, I would still like to congratulate him on becoming a Fellow of the American Phytopathological Society!

Of course, diseases aren’t the only challenges being addressed by oat researchers. Manuel Spannagl, Nadia Kamal, and Klaus Meyer feature in this article about genomics projects and the molecular basis of drought resistance.

The Oat Frontiers group is addressing issues with growing oats at more northern latitudes, and will be hosting a virtual meeting as part of their conference in Iceland on the 8th of October. More about that is in the calendar, and you can register here. You may have already heard about that event from Juho Hautsalo via OatMail. Please remember that anyone can post a message to this list (note that the messages are curated).

For something completely different, if you’re near Cardiff, Wales, this Saturday, the 21st of September, you can attend an event called "When Seeds Speak", during which a visual artist, a musician, a dancer, a musical improviser, and a composer will respond and interact with a raw unprocessed dataset generated by the metabolomic fingerprint analysis of a Black Oat seed ('Cierch du Bach').

Some of the information above was included in the "Weekly Web Harvests" posted in the "Community News" section throughout the summer. Don't forget to check those out every Monday (or, um, Tuesday...)!

While summer is on its way out here and the temperatures will soon turn cold, things are warming up in the southern hemisphere. This reminds me to remind you to plan to attend the next International Oat Conference in Chile, in November, 2026. I’ll leave you with a photo of the Chilean group promoting their meeting at AOWC. More information about that will be coming soon!