My Dad Helped Build North America’s Oat Supply Chain: Can It Be Remade? - OffrangeAmbrook Research is now Offrange

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Perspective<br>My Dad Helped Build North America’s Oat Supply Chain: Can It Be Remade?

By Jeff Manuel<br>Jun 26, 2026

Graphic by Adam Dixon

In the wake of headlines about the “Oat Mafia” attempting to disrupt America’s oat infrastructure, one writer shares some lessons from the recent past.

For the first time in decades, the market is changing for the humble oat. Long overlooked in favor of more profitable and prolific row crops like corn and soybeans, demand for oats is growing, thanks in part to the popularity of oat milk. In Minnesota, Green Acres Milling is building a new oat mill, the U.S.’s first new mill in decades. It’s the brainchild of a cadre of upper Midwest farmers colloquially known as the “Oat Mafia.”<br>Read Next

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As Aimee Rawlins reported, adding oats to Midwestern farmers’ corn-and-beans rotation can manage weeds, cut down on nitrate pollution, and cushion farmers against the whipsaw of volatile input prices. The benefits for farmers are obvious, but they are building their own mill because selling oats has been a struggle. Existing oat mills, which process raw oats into intermediate products used by food companies, currently get all the oats they need by importing them from Canada. Today, Americans’ overnight oats and granola mostly come from oats harvested on the Canadian prairies and cheaply shipped to U.S. mills by train or truck.<br>America’s oat mills didn’t always import millions of bushels of cheap, high-quality oats from Canada, however. My uncle, Thomas Manuel, ran a Minneapolis mill in the early 1970s that purchased all their oats from U.S. farmers. My dad, Kerry Manuel, followed his brother into the grain business and worked 30 years as an oats broker, connecting people who had oats with companies that needed them. He played a key role the last time the oat market changed dramatically. Responding to agricultural policies in the U.S. and Canada, my dad and others created a supply chain to replace oats that American farmers quit growing with oats from Canada.<br>Time will tell whether changes in today’s oat market are long-lasting or ephemeral. But farmers hoping to break into — or break apart — the current supply chain would be wise to understand why the market changed 40 years ago and why the supply chain has proven so resilient.<br>Like the saying about how you go bankrupt — slowly, then all at once — the decline of oats in the United States began with gradual changes that transformed American farms during the 20th century and then accelerated quickly in the 1980s due to agricultural policy.<br>After 1950, oat acreage began a decades-long slide as trucks and tractors replaced farm animals. Better herbicides meant farmers didn’t need oats in the rotation for weed control. Most importantly, farmers could make more money growing corn, wheat, or soybeans. A 1990 USDA report summarized the shift: “Soybeans and corn have replaced oats throughout much of the Corn Belt, reflecting both the greater profit potential for soybeans and corn and a shift from livestock to cash grain farming.”<br>Federal agricultural policy accelerated oats’ long decline. Oats “were always an afterthought” in agricultural policy compared to “the big players — corn, wheat, and cotton,” Jonathan Coppess told me. Coppess is director of the Gardner Agriculture Policy Program at the University of Illinois and author of The Fault Lines of Farm Policy: A Legislative and Political History of the Farm Bill. Agricultural policies created strong incentives for farmers to shift fields from oats to other crops.

After 1950, oat acreage began a decades-long slide as trucks and tractors replaced farm animals. Better herbicides meant farmers didn’t need oats in the rotation for weed control.

The emergency feed grants of the 1960s were “basically paying farmers to take oats out of production,” Coppess said. Expansion during the 1970s — the era when Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz told farmers to “get big or get out” — was followed by collapse in the 1980s. “Once you get to the 80s,” Coppess said, “it’s locked in at that point. We just cannibalize within agriculture and narrow it more and more to the major crops.” Oats were not a major crop.<br>Payment-in-kind programs and the 1985 Farm Bill were the nail in the coffin for U.S. oat acreage. That year’s Farm Bill included the Conservation Reserve Program, which paid farmers to take marginal acres out of production. Often, the idled acres were those that had been planted with oats. The cumulative effect of these policies erased oats from Midwestern farms. Each year from 1950 to 1987, the acreage U.S. farmers collectively planted in oats...