Grow it! Grain
(Page 6 of 11)
November/December 1973
By the Mother Earth News editors
OATS
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TThe world's most important crops are wheat, rice, corn, and, coming in fourth, oats. As animal feed, oats were once primarily the domain of horses. However, with the decline in the equestrian population, they have been used more and more as a general livestock feed, for dairy cattle, young sheep, hogs, and other animals. Oat hulls, the by-product, are used commercially to make furfural, a solvent and chemical intermediate widely utilized in oil refining, pharmaceuticals, and the production of nylon. For the small farm, if growing conditions permit, oats are highly recommended, not only for their food value, but also because the straw makes the best bedding of all grasses. And they are a good nurse crop for a forage field of alfalfa.
A nurse crop is one that grows quite quickly and is sown together with a much slower-growing one to provide shade and minimize weeds. When oats are sown as a nurse crop with alfalfa, the oat crop is harvested as it matures in summer. Then in fall the first alfalfa crop can usually be harvested from the same field. The alfalfa is harvested again the next year, maybe three or four times in a season...just like mowing a king-sized lawn.
ADAPTATION
Oats are a moisture-demanding cereal. They are particularly prone to poor yield if hot, dry weather predominates during the latter part of their growth and kernel development. Oats do poorly in high altitudes (over two thousand feet) and best in cool, moist climates. About soil they're a lot less fussy, however. Almost any well-drained soil will do.
TYPES
The five general types of oats, classified by the color of their hulls, are black, gray, red, white, and yellow. The most common in the North is the white; that preferred in the South is the gray or the red. You'll want to start with a regionally tested variety.
SEEDING
The more your oat seeds weigh, the better their quality. A heavy bag of oats means light, poor-yielding seeds have been culled out.
The amount of seed per acre you can sow will depend on the rainfall figures for your area. With a lot of rain, there will be less moisture competition among the plants, so you can have more of them to a field. In drier areas of the country, such as the Great Plains, four to eight pecks per acre is common. Land in the eastern states can usually carry a seeding of six to ten pecks. In the rain-laden Pacific Northwest the amount can be raised to ten to fifteen pecks. The heavier end of the seeding scale is used in fall planting to insure that a good crop is sustained through the winter for spring harvesting.
Oats may be fall- or spring-sown. Spring sowing predominates except in the more southern areas, where winter oats, along with all their other attributes, make an excellent cover crop. Fall seeding should be done early, usually thirty days before the first expected killing frost; spring seeding one week before the average last killing frost.
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