ZUMBRO RIVER VALLEY, Minn. — From his combine one October afternoon, harvesting parched, dust-colored soybeans, Martin Larsen points to a hillside where his Scandinavian ancestors settled.
History could repeat itself at the Larsen farm.
Last year, on this plot of land along the Zumbro River, the 43-year-old farmer from Byron grew oats. No oats for pigs or cows. But oats for humans. He transported the oats to a miller across the border in Iowa. The year before, Larsen even had a contract with Oatly, the hip Swedish maker of milk alternatives.
A sort of oat renaissance has occurred in the fields west of the Mississippi River. During the winters, Larsen — through his work with the Olmsted County Soil and Water Conservation District — would evangelize his fellow farmers about the humble small grains.
His friends and neighbors listened. Since this fall, more than 60 farmers, covering 6,000 acres in southern Minnesota, have joined Larsen’s informal coalition to grow food-grade oats. They call themselves the “oat mafia.”
The star of breakfast foods, children’s books and, increasingly, non-dairy lattes, oats are kinder to the environment, requiring less nitrogen than corn, which means a lot in karst-rich mountainous region of southeastern Minnesota, where the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has tasked state officials with cleaning up drinking water.
“The nitrates come from there,” Larsen said, driving his gray Gleaner combine over a soybean patch under a knoll just beyond northwest suburban Rochester on a recent warm Friday afternoon. “I’m not going to beat around the bush anymore. That’s what the data says.
But as the oat mafia looks to the future, it faces a fundamental marketing question: Who will actually buy the oats they grow?
Shea-Lynn Ramthun walks through a field of volunteer oats on her Cannon Falls farm. Volunteer oats are oats that have reseeded due to a combine problem. The soil will benefit less from regrowth but it will remain healthy for the following year’s corn crops. (Alex Kormann/The Minnesota Star Tribune)
Formerly the land of oats
Minnesota was once a golden land for oat farmers. Alternated with corn and soybeans on small, diversified farms stretching from Wisconsin to the Dakotas, oats were traded as early as 1877 on the Chicago Board of Trade. In 1950, farmers planted 5 million acres of oats throughout Minnesota.
“We have a long history of oats in the state,” said Jochum Wiersma, a Crookston-based small grains specialist with University of Minnesota Extension. “A lot of that was never making it into becoming a Cheerio.”
Oats, quite often, were given to horses. But as mechanization replaced horses, oat production declined. Additionally, industry experts say, the Farm Bill — the twice-a-decade law that funds U.S. farm subsidies — prioritizes loan and insurance programs for other row crops. As corn and soybean prices rose, elevators stopped moving carloads of oats. The inconspicuous acres of grain fell.
“A lot of things have conspired against oats,” said Randy Strychar, president of Oatinformation and an industry analyst. “The money spent on research on oats was incredibly small…compared to that on corn and soybeans. »
In 1970, Minnesota farmers still grew 3.5 million acres of oats. But in 2020, that figure fell below 200,000 acres.
Meanwhile, in the North, Canada’s oat fields were booming. Cooler temperatures promoted a consistent harvest year after year. The slightly drier climate meant less disease. Soon, trainloads arrived from the north of the country to the United States to become morning porridge for children.
Today, the United States is the world’s largest importer of oats. But the Upper Midwest still has the mill.
General Mills, the Twin Cities-based grain maker, processes oats in giant mills along the rail yard east of the Mississippi River in Fridley. Quaker Oats, the Chicago-based subsidiary of PepsiCo, operates the world’s largest cereal plant in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Both companies buy oats from farmers outside the United States, primarily Canada, analysts say.
“It’s pretty well understood in the industry if you want oats for food, you buy them from Canada,” said Paul Werner, owner of Dundas, Minn.-based Werner Seeds, a who buys oats for animal feed. “Our summers vary too much.”
It is therefore in this formidable context that the oat mafia emerged in the Driftless region of Minnesota. Larsen said he tried, unsuccessfully, to get General Mills’ attention.
“If we want change, we need oat buyers,” Larsen said. “And that makes me angry. We take a risk by doing things differently. A significant risk. They must support us instead of continuing to buy oats in Canada, Australia or anywhere other than here.
In an email, General Mills said the ingredients come largely from Saskatchewan and Manitoba, with smaller portions from North Dakota and northern Minnesota.
Quaker did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.
What’s left for oat farmers in southern Minnesota is a handful of small mills or elevators that process oats for livestock feed or seed. A food-grade oat plant, owned by Eden Prairie-based Grain Millers, is operating in St. Ansgar, Iowa. Many Larsen farmers deliver oats to St. Ansgar, who in turn sells them to various food companies.
Yet the lack of competition, farmers say, leaves them suspicious that they are not getting a good price for their produce.
Shea-Lynn Ramthun, a farmer from Cannon Falls, Minn., who was among the converts through Larsen’s farmer-to-farmer talks, remains optimistic about oats as long as more processing comes online.
“This oat milk shortage was not an oat shortage, but an oat processing shortage,” Ramthun said, referring to supply issues over the past two years in meeting demand. oats. “There’s a lack of competition. (St. Angsar) is the only place we can go to take our oats right now.
Cows graze in a field inter-seeded with oats and clover at Flying J Farm in Cannon Falls on Tuesday. The combination of oats and clover helps remove nitrates from the soil and provides a significant reduction in nitrogen needed when planting corn the following year.
A culture they know
On a recent September morning, Ramthun sat on a patio near the family’s old barn and looked out from under her baseball cap at the green clover — a cover crop — where she had harvested oats in the summer. It will be a pasture for his livestock.
“Oats are a lower input crop,” she said. “The following year, when we continue with corn, we don’t need as much nitrogen. Now we are no longer leaching nitrogen, which means cleaner water and healthier soils.
And healthy for people too, a fact that helped fuel the rise of oats in the 2020s as a plant-based dairy alternative. Nationally, in 2022, domestic oat production jumped 45%. A year later, the U.S. Department of Agriculture expanded its insurance program to protect oats against falling prices.
Meanwhile, oat processing is back in Minnesota. In 2020, SunOpta, the Eden Prairie-based food company, invested $26 million in its Alexandria, Minn., plant to make oat milk. This year, Minnesota farmers are forecasting nearly 8 million bushels of oats, an annual increase of 15 percent.
This month, Landon Plagge, owner of Green Acres Milling and farmer from Latimer, Iowa, announced he will bring a new farmer-supported oat processor to Albert Lea, Minnesota. two years and handles 3 million bushels of oats per year, employing two dozen people.
“I just see the need for farms to go beyond commodity producers and actually produce food that people eat,” Plagge said.
As the University of Minnesota and others develop the next generation of supercrops, nitrogen-fixing oilseeds and greenhouse gas-capturing wheatgrass, oats are accessible to farmers. Their grandfathers grew oats. They don’t need a new planter. And they can do some of the same things as experimental cultures.
And there’s not much time to waste. In the Driftless, authorities estimated that more than 9,000 area residents drink water containing dangerous levels of nitrate. Residents say it’s high time to get serious about change.
From his machine rumbling on the field, Larsen is categorical.
“Oats, or small grains, or something other than corn and soybeans, is part of the only way we’re going to fix (nitrate leaching),” he said.
Larsen’s combine approaches the 50-foot prairie grass buffer from the Zumbro. It is a landscape where agriculture and water are closely linked. And his ancestors on the hill would not have hesitated to cultivate this powerful ordinary grain.
