April 25th is quite a solemn day for those of you in Australia and New Zealand, being Anzac Day. In ancient Rome, however, that was when people celebrated the festival of Robigalia, dedicated to the preservation of cereal crops from rust and other diseases.

It's rust season in the United States, and Oluseyi Fajolu is once again asking for samples to be collected and sent to her at the USDA-ARS Cereal Rust Lab. The instructions and form needed for doing so are here. The first report for this year has also been released, as has a summary of the "Small Grain Losses Due to Rust" report for 2025.

Rust is a problem worldwide, of course, and the origin of a UK crown rust isolate was recently traced back to the USA.

Work involving stem and crown rust resistance was described by PhD student Janam Acharya (from Ali Babar’s lab at the University of Florida) back in January, during the most recent "Speaking of Oats..." ("SOO...") webinar (the first we’ve had since 2024). The recording of the webinar, which also featured Samuel Adewale, is now available here on the newsletter site. Samuel was successful in defending his PhD thesis recently – congratulations, Samuel!

Please note that ALL of the "SOO..." webinar recordings on YouTube have been removed until they can be properly captioned. This is a new requirement from the University of Minnesota, which runs the channel. The uncaptioned videos are still available on the newsletter site, however. Links can be found in the different "Research Report" sections (grouped by year; see menu bar), as well as on the "SOO..." page. There is also a list of all the webinars here.

Thinking of other community activities, please remember that abstracts for the International Oat Conference being held in Chile this November are due on May 15th!

In terms of other meetings, the annual Oat Day (plus barley this year) at ORDC, AAFC, in Ottawa, Canada, will be held on July 16th. It will feature a mini-symposium on genomic selection in addition to the usual field tour. That portion of the meeting will be hybrid.

One person who frequently attends the meeting is Austin Bruch, and he will be hosting his own field day in southwestern Ontario some time in June. Please contact him if you would like to attend (austin@bruch.on.ca). Please let me know, too, about any other upcoming field days or meetings (oatnewsletter@gmail.com). Oat-specific ones are added to the newsletter calendar, and others are mentioned in the "Weekly Web Harvest" in the "Community News" section.

This is the first full newsletter update of 2026, and a lot has been happening. Firstly, 2026 is the International Year of the Woman Farmer. The International Day of Women and Girls in Science was on Feb 11th, and IAS-CSIC in Cordoba, Spain, featured both Elena Prats and Gracia Montilla Bascón in their social media (in Spanish).

Elena's lab has been posting videos about their drought tolerance experiments on 'X' and Instagram. If you recall their article from last year, drought-prone areas can also flood!

Climate change is a big topic in Europe. You can read more about sowing spring oats in autumn in Germany in this translation of an article submitted by Steffen Beuch for the "Research Reports" section.

If you'd like to learn more about the Oat Frontiers project in northern Europe, you can access all of their newsletters, including the most recent one (#=4), here.

Atik Rahman from TEAGASC in Ireland is a part of that group and has developed new tests for Oat Mosaic Virus and Oat Golden Stripe Virus.

Looking at some other traits, Art McElroy, from PhytoGene Resources, was interviewed recently about panicle architecture in this podcast.
AAFC's Adam Foster was interviewed about his group's Fusarium forecasting tool, first released in 2024. One of its limitations, however, is the different management practices used by farmers, which are also discussed in this article about lodging.

Breeding techniques have developed rapidly over the last number of years, and, at the University of Illinois, PhD student Anup Dhakal routinely uses a Single-Seed-SpeedBulk technique.

A post by Alf Ceplitis on LinkedIn discusses genomic selection in breeding and some of the reasons why researchers and practical breeders can sometimes find themselves at odds.

For more information concerning how to integrate genomic selection into an already-established breeding program, you can watch this recording of a seminar by Wubi Bekele from AAFC presented at EUCARPIA last fall.

Wubi was also interviewed for an article about how the results of sequencing projects like PanOat will eventually translate into better varieties for farmers.

The PanOat data and associated browsers are available on the GrainGenes website, as are the data from the Avena sativa, A. insularis, and A. longiglumis genome browsers with annotations produced by a group in China led by Yuanying Peng and Changzhong Ren. If you're using the GrainGenes website, please remember to cite the most recent paper describing it.

The GrainGenes group also helps run the Plant and Animal Genome meeting (PAG) in San Diego, California, every January. A list of oat-related abstracts from this year's meeting can be found here, in the "Other meetings" section.

Genotypes are useless without phenotypes, and the Practical Farmers of Iowa have released their field trial data for 2025. GrainMillers also produced a video concerning their oat variety testing for 2019-2025.

Farmer and millers have very specific needs, and the Prairie Oat Growers Association (POGA) recently released their research strategy for 2025-2030.

In other milling news, Oat Mill Finland has rebranded and now has a new website. You can also follow them on LinkedIn.

Consuming oats for food is known to have certain health benefits, and a new health claim put forward by ScanOats was recently assessed. This health claim was filed pursuant to Article 13(5) of Regulation (EC) No 1924/2006 in the EU. The conclusion from the assessment was that "The following wording reflects the scientific evidence: 'Consumption of beta-glucans from oats contributes to the reduction of the glucose peak after a meal'."

Oats are about more than the flaked grain. Lantmännen produces an oat protein that "offers a low bitterness and low astringency alternative to many other plant-based proteins".

Meanwhile, SAGIT, in Australia, is developing a spoonable oat snack that has been fermented. Guisella Yarasca describes its development in this podcast (access requires Spotify or another similar platform).

Fermenting oats as a practice is not really new, even if the commercial products are. On her "Ancestral Kitchen" website, Alison Kay has quite a bit of content about oats, including how to ferment them. The latest post is her recipe for "Oat Gnocchi".

Oat-based products are excellent for people with celiac disease, as long as they are certified to be gluten-free (GF). One company that produces GF oats is Montana Gluten Free, which was acquired by ZEGO last year. ZEGO also sells its own GF oatmeal blends.

Glebe Food Farms in the UK also produces GF oats. This year, they made it to the finals of the "IFE Manufacturing Ingredients Awards" in the "Public Health Impact – Ingredients" category. Congratulations to them!

Finnish company Raisio produces oat-based products under the Elovena® brand, which was recently selected as Finland's most sustainable brand for the fourth time! Congratulations to them, also.

Newer to the flavoured oatmeal market is Canadian company Goldys. Their strawberry lavender oatmeal recently went into space with the Artemis II crew!

It's not just people who eat oats, of course. Slime moulds, some of the weirdest creatures on this planet, also enjoy them.

I wish you oat fields free of invading organisms this season!