“…raise the song of harvest home.”(1) All is, one hopes, “safely gathered in”, at least in the Northern hemisphere! In this season of Thanksgiving, let us take some time to reflect upon the things for which we are thankful, including this wonderful community.

The members of the oat community have been busy. Chris Green gave a talk titled “Oats: 32,000 years in the value chain” at the Farming Futures conference in October. He was also interviewed after the European Seed Association annual meeting, and spoke about the challenges facing the seed industry.

We have also received word that Nancy Ames received the Edith A. Christensen Award from AACCI at their recent conference. Congratulations, Nancy!

Several more conferences of interest to this community are coming up, including Oats 2020 next week. If you’ll be tweeting from the conference, please use the hashtag #Oats2020. For details on more upcoming conferences, take a look at the “Upcoming Events” listing.

More news from the community is found in the “Community News” section. To begin, we welcome Lucia Gutierrez, the new oat breeder at the University of Wisconsin. There have also been personnel changes at the University of Minnesota. Lastly, we have a press release from the Crop Trust concerning their new on-line plant genetic resources database, Genesys.

There is also a new article in the retirement section of the “Hall of Fame” – Steve Molnar has retired from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada after 35 years of service. Thank you, Steve!

Continuing with our theme of Thanksgiving, the Oat Newsletter now has an “Oat Recipes” section. Some of the recipes are suitable for a gluten-free diet (assuming pure oats are used), and the ones with “Gluten-Free” in the title have been specifically modified for this purpose. Canadian Thanksgiving was in October, and my family celebrated by eating “Turkey Gut Soup” and turkey stuffed with “Gluten-Free Scottish Stuffing”.

Thank you all for being part of this community, and here’s wishing all American oat workers a very Happy Thanksgiving on November 26th!

(1) The words to the hymn “Come, Ye Thankful People Come” were written by Henry Alford in 1844.