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Truckloads of Midwestern oats will be sold at a loss this year in the Midwest as farmers cannot find a viable market for their crop in a part of the country dominated by corn and soybeans.
“It's absolutely maddening,” Cannon Falls farmer Shea-Lynn Ramthun said. “But that is agriculture, especially in the last few years.”
On top of the lack of a viable market, tariffs are increasing farmers’ input costs and depressing prices and access to global markets.
In the Midwest, corn and soybeans are propped up by federal subsidies and crop insurance. However, some farmers like Ramthun, in southern Minnesota and northern Iowa have started growing oats, a crop that has not been common in the area for decades. They’ve dubbed themselves the “Oat Mafia.”
Ramthun is also a soil health organizer with the Land Stewardship Project. She says there are added soil and water quality environmental benefits to planting oats. For example, oat plants absorb excess soil nitrates, preventing those nitrates from leaching into waterways, which is a big problem in southern Minnesota and northern Iowa.
“[Oats] will take the nitrates in the groundwater below the standard level that's acceptable and actually bring it to zero or close to zero,” Ramthun said.
Ramthun said farmers tried to get Quaker Oats and Minnesota-based General Mills interested in their crop this year but were unsuccessful.
“They source a lot of their oats from Canada,” University of Minnesota Agronomy Professor Kevin Smith said. “I think both companies would be interested in sourcing more oats locally, but that's something that just has to work its way through the system.”
Smith said the northern climate is favorable for planting oats.
“It's certainly a crop that can be grown in this region, and the economics really depend on the markets and those are pretty complicated these days,” Smith said.
Landon Plagge farms near the northern Iowa town of Lattimer and has started the Green Acres Oat Mill in Albert Lea, Minn., to create a local market for oats.
“We need to move beyond being just commodity producers, and we have to do it at scale, and we also have to do things that are better for the environment,” Plagge said as he walked through Green Acres Milling, still under construction at the cross section of Interstates 90 and 35 — a potential thoroughfare for farmers bringing in their crops.
The mill will process 4 million bushels of oats annually, requiring 40,000 acres. Plagge said consumers will be able to trace oats back to the farms in Minnesota and Iowa.
Green Acres Milling received $1.5 million from the Minnesota Department of Agriculture through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Resilient Food Systems Infrastructure Program. State officials say the program is meant to “build resilience across the middle of the supply chain and strengthen local and regional food systems.”
“There's a lot of organizations out there that just talk about doing things, talk about doing good things for the environment. But then that’s all it is — talk,” Plagge said. “This is an actual ecosystem change.”
The plan is to have the mill ready for harvest in 2026 so local farmers have a market for oats among the sea of corn and beans.
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