I left off in January by mentioning some of Vern Burrows’ work. Well, in the past year, Vern has been recognized for his work three more times! Most recently, he was promoted within the Order of Canada. You can read about these recent awards in the “Hall of Fame” section under “Other Awards and Accolades”, or go directly here.

Two others have also been recognized recently. Amir Ibrahim was honoured as Texas A&M Regents Professor and Sarah Carlson has been recognized as one of the “2019 Grist 50” for her work with Practical Farmers of Iowa (PFI).

I joined the PFI learning call about oat variety selection presented by Melanie Caffe-Treml at the beginning of February and it was very interesting. Several articles relating to PFI, including one summarizing that call, have been published in the last couple of months. Links to these are in the “Web Harvest” for January and February that is found in the “Community News” section. There are many other articles in the “Web Harvest” as well, so please don’t miss those!

Continuing on with field work, rust is beginning to be a problem in the American south, and Steve Harrison has provided two updates that are included in the “Research Reports” section. Shahryar Kianian is asking those of you in the US to send rust samples and associated information to the USDA-ARS Cereal Disease Lab in St. Paul, MN. Details concerning how to do that are here. Please note that Katie Liberatore has moved on, and samples should be addressed to Shahryar instead.

Shahryar and Steve both send updates concerning rust to the Cereal Rust Survey Listserv List. I forward those messages, as well as other oat-related information, to the members of the OatMail list. If you’d like to join the OatMail list, which is also meant for discussion, you can sign up here.

Discussion is always a large part of meetings, of course. If you are interested in reading the oat-related abstracts from PAGXXVII and the Second Spanish Symposium on Cereal Physiology and Breeding, they can be found in the “Other Meetings” section.

Finally, for those of you working on quality, be aware that AACC International is accepting papers for a Cereal Chemistry Focus Issue on “Cereal Grains for Nutrition and Health”, to be published in January 2020. The deadline for submission is May 31st!