... your place for oat information.

Happy 2024, everyone!

Let’s start the year off with some job opportunities:

Today (November 15th) is International Whole Grain Day, and, in Australia, they’ve dedicated the whole week to whole grains! Oats are, of course, generally consumed as whole grain, and the most popular form is still porridge. Alan Meikle, from Hamlyn’s of Scotland, talks all about porridge in this podcast.

As we used to sing at summer camp, "Make new friends, but keep the old, one is silver and the other gold." This update begins with two pieces of sad news. First, Romulo Trombetta passed away from brain cancer in May. He was based in Argentina, and worked as an agronomist for the Quaker Oats Company in South America. Romulo was a big part of the Quaker Oats South American Oat Improvement Project for many years.

The dates for the next American Oat Workers' Conference (AOWC) have been announced! The meeting, hosted by oat breeder Aaron Beattie from the Crop Development Centre at the University of Saskatchewan, will be held from 21-24 July, 2024, in Saskatoon, SK, Canada.

It’s the height of field season for oats in both the northern and southern hemispheres, and it seems that every second tweet I see on Twitter is an invitation to a field day! I retweet many of these, but, unfortunately, the latest changes to the Twitter platform have disabled the widget that displays my tweets and retweets at the bottom of the newsletter homepage. Most of you can access @OatNewsletter on Twitter directly, but it's less convenient, so here’s hoping that the issue will be resolved soon.

There are a few oat-related events the week of May 29th – June 2nd that might be of interest to you.

First, Andrea Silva-Espinoza, from UC Dublin and the Healthy Oats project, will be presenting her work on “Healthy Oats: Advances That Support New Oats Product Development” in a webinar on Monday, May 29th, at 1 pm (13:00) IST (GMT +1). Please register here.

The votes have been counted, and the next International Oat Conference (IOC) will be held in Pucón, Chile, in 2026. Congratulations to Karina von Baer and her team! You can read a statement from Karina here.

This is not the update you’re expecting, but it has some urgency.

Registration is now open for the 2nd Food Oats Conference in Lund, Sweden, from June 19th-21st, 2023. The theme of the conference is "Oats for Future – dietary fibers and other bioactive compounds". Take note that the deadline for registration and abstract submission is May 5th!

Performing another scan of Twitter brought up two more webinars, one on Monday, March 20th, at 1 pm GMT, and the other on Thursday, March 23rd, from 1:30-4:30 pm GMT.