OATS Wheat, rye, and barley are members of one subdivision of the great Grass Family. They all bear their seeds in spikes, bald or bearded. Oats stand alone, the grain with a loose, branched head, made of separate kernels. Each kernel has an outside papery husk and an inner hull that is ground up in making oatmeal, or removed in some forms of the cereal. Oatmeal feeds thou sands of people every morning of the year.
Botanists, curious to find growing the wild parent of cultivated oats, are constantly being deceived by patches of oats, wild enough, but only run aways from fields. The seeds are often carried by birds, often by other chance rides. Oats are able to get on very well in wild land, where they come up year after year, and spread over wider areas by self-seeding. It is not likely that any one will ever find the aboriginal species of oats, and feel sure enough to satisfy himself.
Yet it seems probable that this grain was first cultivated in the temperate and colder parts of eastern Europe and western Asia. Its culture has extended into the United States and Canada, and eastward into China and Siberia, until to-day the oat crop is greater in bulk than any other grain crop.
Oats, "the grain of hardiness," divide hon ors with wheat, barley, and rye, in fields that stretch up north almost to the Arctic Circle.
In the bleak climate of northern Scotland, this is the staple food crop. So it is in Iceland, in Alaska, in Russia, and Siberia. Rye and oats furnished the bread of Europe in the Middle Ages, and wheat bread has replaced the coarser loaves and cakes but partially.
The reason oats are so extensively used as human food is because they lead all the grains in muscle-forming elements. They contain a large proportion of oily and nitrogenous materials, and a low percentage of starch. Oatmeal porridge is given the credit for producing the brain and brawn of the Scotch and other hardy European races.
England raises oats, but oatmeal porridge is not a national dish. The famous dialogue contains both a clever retort and a plain fact. An English man, with a party of friends, met on the road a Highlander carrying a bag of oats. Pointing to
it he said: "That is oats — the grain that in England is fed to horses; in Scotland it is fed to men!" The Scotchman was not so stolid as he looked, for his reply came promptly: "True enough; and that is the reason why in England you grow such fine horses, and in Scotland we grow such fine men!" Oats grow best in cold regions; they do poorly in countries around the Mediterranean, because the climate is too warm. The same is true in parts of the United States. In some regions where the heads do not fill out well the grain is profitably sown for forage and pasture. The succulent stems are rich in nutriment, they dry quickly and make excellent hay. Plowed under, they enrich the soil.
Oat straw is used extensively for paper-making, for packing, stuffing mattresses, and for bedding for stock in barns.
Smut is a fungous disease that appears when the oat plants should be setting seed. Instead, the heads become masses of loose, black powder. The particles of dust are the spores of the destroy ing smut. They are scattered by the wind, and lodge in the spreading bracts, the green "chaff" of sound oats. When these oats are sown next spring the spores sprout with the sprouting of the grain. The fungus grows into thread-like meshes that penetrate the tissues of the young oat plant, robbing it of the food that the leaves prepare, and finally replacing the seeds entirely with the black, slimy masses that ripen into the black powder.
Only oats that carry the spores into the ground with them will produce smut bodies in the place of kernels. This fact enables the farmer to prevent the disease. He simply soaks his seed oats for a day in a weak solution of formalin, a cheap drug that destroys the smut spores hid in the hulls, and does not injure the kernel at all. Spores that fly about the oat field cannot injure the plants they lodge on, but next year's plants are endangered. The formalin bath saves the farmers of the United States millions of dollars annually in the oat crop.