Naked Oats
Landrace Oats
The number of significant oat varieties cultivated in the United States prior to the USDA’s initiative to hybridize new varieties into existence in 1904 was rather limited. An American agronomist observed the following in 1870: “In Europe . . . there are a much greater variety of oats cultivated than is generally known in this country. In the museum of the Highland Agricultural Society of Scotland, there are deposited fifty-four varieties.” [“Chapter on Oats,” The New England Farmer (May 1870), 239.] The number of varieties for which seed was available in the United States during the 19th century probably did not exceed two dozen. (Precision in such an enumeration would be difficult given the tendency of different seed brokers to supply different names for the same strain in an attempt to suggest proprietary oversight of a variety.)
The public tended to categorize oats in broad terms: white oats were human food, black oats were livestock feed, oats with thick hulls or spiked awns were difficult to mill, which peel (skinless, naked) oats were easily processed, since husk slipped from the grain just by rubbing them with your hand. There were intermediate colors (grey, yellow) and a red brown variety as well. Most were sown in Spring for Fall harvest and did best in more northerly climes in the United States. The grey oat (Winter Turf Oat) and the red oat (rust resistant red oat) were the two important winter oats raised extensively in the South for pasturage.
Throughout the 19th century there was a debate about which of the oat varieties tasted best, with opinion splitting between those who preferred the skinless oat and those who favored the potato oat (that had a touch of sour to it).
Black Oat of England (1700-1850)
This landrace oat hailed from Great Britain, where it was grown extensively on poor soils, and identified by its black husk. [“The Oat,” The Farmer and Gardener (June 19, 1838), 60]. “Rather late. Straw fair length, and thin or wiry; is fair fodder. Grain rather long and thing, weight light, yields fairly.” [“On the Culture of Oats,” Southern Cultivator (May 1852), 134]. While most black oats in American fields were reckoned to be either the Old English black oat or the thinner black Tartarian, importations of black oat seed took place from other locales in Europe. In April 1822, for instance, Christopher Hughes reported that a shipment of black oat seed had been landed in Baltimore that was “heavier and far more nutritious” than standard crop oats. [“Black Oats and Turnip Seed,” American Farmer (April 12, 1822), 23.] Claims of greater nutrition were impressionistic in earlier in the 19th century, since a chemical theory of alimentation had not been formulated. Usually they depended on observations of the greater vital activity of a creature after ingestion compared to feeding on similar but less stimulating fare. In regions where horse racing became a major cultural pastime the attention to nutritive oats became acute. Subsequent chemical analyses (performed at the end of the 19th century) often showed landrace black oats to be particularly high in protein. [Glenn Roberts collected this about 12 years Ago in western NC]
Black Tartarian Oat [Siberian Oat]
The most widely cultivated of the old black oats, the Black Tartarian produced moderately long straw of middling quality, yielded abundantly (100 bushels per acres often reported), and carried its ears on one side of the straw only. A landrace bred for “peaty, marshy soils,” it became the standard feed grain for horses in wettish lands and in the South—in Piedmont bottoms, Carolina bays, and coastal floodplains in the 1840s. It also enjoyed some popularity in the North in areas with middling quality soil, particularly New York. This landrace from the eastern Ukraine, along with his cousin the White Tartarian Oat, was introduced to British Fields at the beginning of the 19th century and supplanted the Old English Black Oat as a fodder oat. “The grains are black or brown, thin and rather small, and turned most to one side of the panicle or ear.” [“The Oat,” Genesee Farmer (March 1838)]. Because the black oat produced as unappetizingly grayish meal, it was not used to any great extent as human food. Maintained in the USDA Small Grains Collection: https://npgsweb.ars-grin.gov/gringlobal/accessiondetail.aspx?1014942
Excelsior Oat (1869-1920s)
A white English oat distributed by the U. S. Department of Agriculture in Spring 1868 as a cereal variety worthy of broad cultivation, the Excelsior oat was “white in color, of great beauty and weight.” [“Excelsior Oats,” Massachusetts Ploughman and New England Journal of Agriculture (January 1, 1870), 1.] A crop oat in Somerset County, England, the Excelsior caught the attention of American agronomists in 1867. They purchased seed out of Bristol. Test plots of the oat planted in 1868 produced the following yield: “an average production of 40 bushels per acre, 60 bushels not being an uncommon yield.” The government agriculturalists predicted a weight per bushel 20 percent above the common crop varieties. When the USDA undertook oat breeding in 1904, Excelsior was a favorite variety to cross.
Georgian Oat (1820s-1900)
Introduced into the United States during the second decade of the 19th century, the Georgian oat “is a large grained, remarkably prolific variety introduced from Georgia near the Caspian Sea.” In the 1830s it vied with the Potato Oat. “Rather late and prolific, with short straw. Grain large, growing chiefly towards one side, and thrashed with difficulty.” [“On the Culture of Oats,” Southern Cultivator (May 1852), 134].
Hopetown Oat (1825 to 1855)
A Scottish oat that emerged as an alternative to the Potato Oat. It was less white than the Potato Oat and more prone to produce a spike on the awn. Yet it too was a heavy oat (44 lbs. a bushel), with strong straw and a large spreading head. [“Different Varieties of Oats,” Vermont Journal (March 22, 1845), 4]. It enjoyed favor in New England in the 1840s. Developed in Mungoswell, East Lothian Scotland in 1824 by Mr. Sheriff, it was thought to be a sport of the Potato Oat. It had certain advantages over its parent—it ripened earlier and did not shed grain when ripe in high winds. It was “easily distinguished from other varieties, by a small red mark on the centre of the grain.” [“Cultivation of Oats,” Michigan Farmer (April 23, 1859), 130.] Its presence in the United States, however, was relatively short lived because it provoked particularly vulnerable to blight. Seed first became widely available in the United States by H. Huxley of New York City in 1834. The Albany Agricultural Warehouse was one of the principle seed sources in the 1840s. ‘A late sort. A long, reedy, stiff sharp straw; not good fodder. Grain rather small; husk thick, but bright and prolific kind on good soil.” [“On the Culture of Oats,” Southern Cultivator (May 1852), 134]. Probably Extinct.
New Brunswick Oats [Excelsior Oat] (1867-1885)
One of the oat varieties that came on the market in the wake of the Civil War, the New Brunswick oat rivaled the Norway and Excelsior varieties in terms of weight (41-42 lbs a bushel), and ripened a week earlier than most other oat varieties on the market. Its one great liability was a tendency to lodge, since its straw was not as robust as many other varieties making it vulnerable to blow downs. Extinct.
Norway Oat (1864-1890)
The subject of an outbreak of speculative oat fever in the late 1860s, the Norway Oat was a volunteer that appeared in the back patch of a New England farmer during the American Civil War. “In Spring of 1864, D. W. Ramsdell, an enterprising Vermont farmer, found a single oat in a package of peas received from the United States Agriculture Department, and as it seemed unusually plump and vigorous, he planted it in his garden. Its germination of numerous stalks, their surprising growth and size, their ability to ripen as soon as the common oats, and above all their truly wonderful yield of two thousand seven hundred and eighty-five grains, being from four to six times that of the old kind and being far superior in quality and weight, induced him to carefully preserve them for further experiment.” [A Helping Hand for Town and Country (Cincinnati, 1870), 110]. . In 1867 newspapers reported that someone offered $50 for a single bushel of Ramsdell’s seed oats. A bushel could sow an acre. And acre could yield 84 bushels.
The numbers stoked an oat craze. So did Ramsdell’s choice of a name: Norway Oat. Because the northern United States was the region most intensively concerned with oat cultivation, Ramsdell reasoned that a nice northern European name would suggest productivity. Since his oat had come from nowhere in particular, he felt at liberty to choose its place of nativity. Rumsdell got bank backing, lawyers to draw up seed contracts, and hired a wood engraver to make an advertising image that suggested the plants grew substantially taller than the 5 feet usually reported.
All the advertisements warned against counterfeit seed. Such warnings accomplished two things: it hindered those who purchased from Ramsdell with intentions of setting up their own seed operations by suggesting a kind of relative illegitimacy compared with Ramsdell, and it accounted for any variability in yield numbers. “Must have been fake seed.” From 1868 until 1870, newsprint fueled the growing heat of oat fever. At first one heard the testimonies of the true believers who bought seed and saw splendor in their fields. The papers were indifferent to tales of failed crops. But two growing cycles had produced sufficient variability in the numbers to provoke doubt. Were Norway Oats a Humbug? At any rate, so many farmers had bought into the Norway Oat promise that in 1870 an oat glut occurred in parts of the Midwest. Nothing tempers dreams of grain riches than an oversupply that prompted price drops.
There were other issues: the oat straw was rough and that livestock did not prefer it; the yield numbers were nowhere near six times that of ordinary white or black oats—even with splendid soil. As a black oat, it was not much favored for human consumption. By 1872 Oat fever had broken. By 1880 the Norway Oat was grown only here in there in the American hinterlands. It still, however, survives in the USDA Small Grains Repository:
https://npgsweb.ars-grin.gov/gringlobal/accessiondetail.aspx?1014419
Poland Oat [Frieseland Oat, Dutch Oat] 1760-1890
A landrace thick husked white oat that won a broad following in 19th-century America because it ripened 10 days earlier than the old white oat, the Poland oat had two strains—that with single awnless grains (invariably called Poland) and that with differently figured paired grains (sometimes called the Dutch Oat), described thusly “large white grain, mostly double,--the large one awned—the awns more or less twisted.” [“Experiments with Oats,” The Cultivator (April 1856), 11]. One of the heavier white grained oats, it ranged from 40 to 42 lb. per bushel on average. There were other virtues frequently noted. On good soil each seed tillered abundantly, generating as many as 16 stalks, and produced seed heads about 23 inches in length. Seed counts suggested that as many from 2,000 to 5,000 individual grains could be obtained from one planted seed depending on the quality of soil and rainfall. [“The Poland Oats,” The American Farmer (December 22, 1820), 312.] A widely reprinted news notice of an experiment by George Farley of Cumberland County, Virginia, that produced 4,816 grain from one seed did much to popularize the variety after 1820.
Introduced in England sometime in the 1730s, the Poland Oat was a variety that made its way to British America in the late colonial period. Its popularity began to wane in the United States in the 1840s because it was “supposed to be peculiarly liable to injury from shaking” and the deficiency of its straw when compared to other varieties. [“Oats,” American Farmer, and Spirit of the Agricultural Journals of the Day (March 4, 1840), 323]. Still, wherever the preference was given for the heaviest oat with the lightest husk (the “miller’s preference”), the Poland enjoyed repute.
Potato Oats at Clemson Pee Dee Station, Dr. Rick Boyles
Potato Oat [Barley Oat, Bohemian Oat, Canadian Oat] 1788-1890
A sport white oat found in a potato field in Cumberland, UK, in 1788, the potato oat became a dominant crop oat in the English speaking world during the first half of the 19th century. Agronomists by the late 1860s reckoned that hundreds of millions of bushels of Potato oats had been produced all descended from a single plant. [“The Potato Oat,” Lake Superior Miner (July 18, 1868), 4]. “The grain is white, short, and very heavy; straw very slender, liable to lodge; and the grain is rather apt to be shaken off by the winds, or in harvesting: (“Different Varieties of Oats,” Vermont Journal (March 22, 1833)] Though the straw was slender, it was sufficiently short to avoid the worst effects in storms and its quality was deemed good. The potato oat was high in protein, productive (70-75 grains per head--50 bushels an acre in most circumstances—46 lbs weight per bushel), and well loved by livestock, although the skin was so hard in some Reporter (May 2, 1849), 1]. Because the oat lacked an awn, it was easy to process. Four bushels of seed were needed per acre to produce a crop.
Extensive cultivation revealed faults. It did not grow well on clay soils. Because it shelled badly when reaped ripe, it had to be harvested green. [“Oats-Varieties,” Maine Farmer (May 12, 1859) 1]. But its decline as a crop oat when oat varieties that that over 80 grains per panicle were developed. While other oat varieties supplanted it in American fields at the end of the nineteenth century, an improved strain of potato oat—Taylor’s-- remained in cultivation in Scotland well into the twentieth century. The USDA Small Grains Repository maintains several lines: https://npgsweb.ars-grin.gov/gringlobal/accessiondetail.aspx?1017284
Red Oat [Rustproof Oat]
A favorite winter cover crop in the South, the September sown Red Oat came into the region in 1849 when a soldier returning from the Mexican War brought seeds of a red rust-resistant oat found in the Mexican highlands. Established in Georgia and the Carolinas, the straw of the red oat proved small, tender, and delicious to livestock. [“The Red Oat,” Raleigh Observer (June 14, 1877), 2]. In areas of the South that had become exhausted from cotton cultivation, the red oat was recommended, since on poor lands it could generate 20 bushels with ease. But the feature of greatest consequence possessed by the oat was its resistance to oat crown rust (Puccinia coronata), perhaps the most damaging crop disease afflicting oats globally. Not only did the red oat not succumb in southern regions greatly infected by this pathogen, it prospered. In the 20th century it became a great resource for oat breeders wishing to impart resistance in larger yielding oat crops. [Franklin Arthur Coffman, Oat History, Identification and Classification USDA Agricultural Research Service Bulletin 1516 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1977), 58]. So it has remained a fixture in germplasm banks around the world. Fulghum oats were a seed selected improvement of the Red Oat, enhancing height, earliness and productivity. J. A. Fulghum of Warrington, Georgia, released this improved oat in 1892.
https://npgsweb.ars-grin.gov/gringlobal/accessiondetail.aspx?1026247
Skinless Oat [Naked Oat, Hulless Oat, Peel Oat, Pellowes]
An ancient European landrace, the Skinless Oat was called the Peelcorn in the 18th century and was thought to be the original “bread corn” of the British Isles by some agricultural historians. It is mentioned in John Gerard’s famous English herbal of 1597. [“Skinless Oats,” The Genesee Farmer (Feb. 4 1832), 33]. Its principal virtue was its field hardiness, its great liability, a tendency to shed grain before fully ripe. It was, perhaps, the least productive variety of oat in terms of grain in general cultivation in nineteenth-century America; yet it generated ample straw. During the 1830s it was imported by several American cultivators, each time with a specious origin tale—among its origins China and Siberia were cited locales.It does grow in China, but it appears in notices from the 18th century onward in Anglo-America. Its great attraction was its ease in milling, for the husk separated easily from the grain, like wheat. It produced about 30 bushels per acres and had an unfortunate susceptibility to smut. Yet it provided to be very high in protein when chemical analyses began being performed.
White Shonen Oat
A German crop oat meant for human consumption, the White Shonen oat was imported into the United States by the U. S. Department of Agriculture immediately after the Civil War. Michigan State Agricultural College did the initial test grow outs and found that it had a productivity rivalling the Excelsior and Potato Oats, but did not mature early. [“Seed Division,” Report of the Commissioner of Agriculture for the Year 1868 (Washington, D. C., Government Printing Office 1869, 647].
White Tartarian Oat [Early White Siberian, White Russian]
Like the Black Tartarian Oat, the White Tartarian oat formed a unilateral or “side” panicle. Resistant to stem rust, and late maturing, it came to the United States in the 1830s imported from Europe where it was in cultivation, particularly in France. [The myth that it was brought by Russians into the Dakotas after 1848 is entirely without foundation, and the strain is named and praised in the U. S. Senate’s volume of Public Documents for 1843.] “It will produce large crops on light soils. The grains are not awned, and have thin husk. The weight is about 32 pounds a bushel.” {“Experiments with Oats,” The Cultivator (April 1856), 110]. Extensively planted in the northern parts of the United States and Canada in the latter decades of the 19th century, the variety resisted lodging, an important virtue in the face of prairie winds. “”The straw is fine and pliable, and makes an excellent dry fodder for cattle and horses, the saccharine matter in the joints being very sensible to the taste.” [Henry Stephens, The Farmer’s Guide to Scientific and Practical Agriculture (New York: Leonard Scott, 1851), 449]. it was an important parent stock for many 20th century selections and hybrids. .
Winter Turf Oat [Virginia Grey] 1760-1930
Sown in October, this landrace oat was famed for tillering profusely and yielding substantial crops. The greyish to brown longish grains, however, were not favored for human consumption, so the variety was largely used as pasturage and feed for horses and cattle. [“On the Culture of Oats,” Southern Cultivator (May 1852), 134]. It was present in colonial Virginia by 1764, for in that year George Washington reported in his diary that he was undertaking fall planting for a winter crop of oats. The only winter oat grown in North American before the arrival of the Red Oat in 1849 was the Winter Grey or Turf oat. The most hardy of the landrace oats cultivated in North America, its maturity was quite late. H. B. Huffstetter of Indiana reported in 1902, “Winter oats produce the finest quality grain, weighing from thirty-six to forty-two pounds to the measured bushel. They are very full of kernel and much better than ordinary spring oats for feed.” [“Winter Turf Oats,” Colman’s Rural World (Aug 27, 1902), 8]. There was extensive experimental interest in the variety in the period from 1890 to 1910 when it ceased being primarily a southern cultivar. In the 20th century, it became an important genetic resource in breeding the 20th century winter oat varieties. The USDA maintains the variety.