Well, if you’re American, anyway! October 29th marks National Oatmeal Day every year in the USA. World Porridge Day was on the 10th of October, which is when the Golden Spurtle porridge championships were held (virtually, this time). The winner was Chris Young, from Scotland, and you can find the winning recipes here.

If you’re looking for an entertaining explanation of where your oatmeal comes from, Saskatchewan, Canada, farmer "Quick Dick McDick" has recently posted a two-part video (part 1 and part 2) aimed at helping children understand just that.

Oats are used for other things, of course, and two newer examples would be "Oatgurt" made by Hälsa Foods and "Pop Oats", being developed by the Pop Oats company in collaboration with scientists at the USDA.

The USDA has also given Mark Sorrells a $2M grant to develop infrastructure "to establish an organic industry for grains such as bread wheat, naked barley, hulless oats, rye, emmer, spelt and einkorn".

Producing oats is not without its share of controversy, though, as can be seen in this article from Germany regarding how oat flakes were tested by a "Consumer Reports"-style magazine.

As mentioned last week, we’ll be hearing from the North American Millers’ Association (NAMA) and the Canadian National Millers Association (CNMA) at the next "Speaking of oats…" webinar. Dale Nellor and Gord Harrison will be presenting. The webinar will be held on November 19th at 11:00 am EST (Canada/USA), and registration is open!

Bruce Roskens was recently named an honorary member of NAMA for all of his work with the industry. Also from the milling world, Dan Winderl has just retired from General Mills. If you would like to stay in touch with Dan, his contact information is in the article about his career in the "Hall of Fame" section of the newsletter.

In other news, Jae-Bom Ohm was recently made a fellow of the Cereals & Grains Association. Padmanaban Krishnan was presented with the "Edith A. Christensen Award for Outstanding Contributions in Analytical Methodology" by the same organization.

Robert Park is a finalist in the 2020 Australian Museum Eureka prize competition, competing for the CSIRO Eureka Prize for Leadership in Innovation and Science.

Also in Australia, Ashley Wiese has been elected chairman of GIWA, the Grain Industry Association of Western Australia, and Georgie Troup was featured in an article about rural women.

Ash and Georgie are two of the people coordinating the 11th International Oat Conference, which was supposed to be held earlier this month. Even though the conference had to be postponed, the seed sent for the nursery was planted, and breeders are invited to contact Georgie at Georgina.Troup@dpird.wa.gov.au if they would like to receive photos of their lines and any performance data.

If you’re in Australia and looking for work, Intergrain is looking for a genomic scientist.

In the USA, Juan Arbelaez and Jessica Rutkoski are looking for a senior research specialist to join them at the University of Illinois, and Jean-Luc Jannink has an opening for a post doc to work on the project "Imputation for Database-Wide GWAS".

The latter position will involve some collaboration with the Breeding Insight team. Moira Sheehan, their director, recently presented a great seminar concerning their work creating breeder-centric software and developing integrated data management solutions.

Another recent seminar of note was the one Nils Stein presented as part of the DivSeek series. His topic was "Genebank genomics to bridge the gap from genome information to educated utilization of genetic diversity hosted in Genebanks". The next DivSeek webinar will be held on November 3rd at 8 am CST (Canada/USA). Dr. Abhishek Rathore will present on the "Use of DOIs for breeding material; tools and policies". If you would like to attend this webinar, please email me at oatnewsletter@gmail.com for the Zoom call link.

The WiLDSI project recently hosted a meeting to present their new white paper on Digital Sequence Information (DSI) and open access policy options for using DSI. All of these discussions about new databases, using DOIs, and what to do about DSI will impact our breeders and associated researchers. Please take a look at the Germplasm Committee page for more information about related topics.

Don’t forget to register for the DivSeek and “Speaking of Oats…” webinars coming up in November. I hope to see you there!