ISSUE 76, OATS, Part 2: Oat Fever
Oat Fever
Oat fever began with a story. The best kind of story—about a farmer who chanced upon the magic seed. Every grower can plug into a tale of the lucky score. Luck can happen to anyone. So much more interesting than a narrative of some experimentalist who hybridized something worthwhile out of a hundred crosses.
“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].
Big numbers fertilized oat fever. There are always big numbers feeding ag bubbles and commodity crazes. Yield numbers. Profit numbers. 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.
Wonder oats need a wonderful name. Something redolent of the clean northern climes where white oats thrive—something domestic, yet exotic—something to stand in distinction to the black oats favored in more southerly parts of the United States. Rumsdell thought one up. Since it came from nowhere in particular, he was free to imagine the best sort of nativity. The Norway Oat.
Rumsdell got bank backing, lawyers to draw up seed contracts, and hired a wood engraver to make an advertising image (See below). Since Ramsdell reported that the stalks grew 6 feet tall, the image means either than Ramsdell in top hat was about 4’ 8” tall or that the grain grew substantially taller than initially 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.
Why did not one mention in the advertising that the quality of the oat straw was rough and that livestock did not prefer it?
And those numbers? Turns out you had to have really rich loamy dark soil with good moisture, and, well, even with that it wasn’t anywhere close to six times the production of “ordinary oats.”
And what of D. W. Ramsdell. The fever broke before he could make a truly gargantuan killing off oat seed—but in 1877 he found a variety of corn that produced “five ears on a stalk” and . . .