Oats: Interesting Facts About the Grain

Oats are rightly described as healthy, healing, and valuable supplier of minerals. We have summarized everything worth knowing about the miracle grain for you. Oats help you lose weight and provide your body with important nutrients.

Oats: The better grain

When you say oats, you probably mean seed oats. This is cultivated, processed, and eaten as a crop. Compared to other types of grain, oats perform very well overall and were named medicinal plant of the year.

• Oats belong to the plant genus Avena, a subspecies of grasses. About 20-25 different plant species belong to this genus of plants. Avena sativa is one of them and refers to the seed oats we use.
• The positive properties of seed oats were recognized and used as early as the early Bronze Age. However, targeted research, breeding, and use only took place later. Eating oats helps lower cholesterol and blood sugar levels. Oats are therefore also used in the manufacture of medicines and animal feed.
• Healthy ingredients such as biotin, zinc, iron, magnesium, and vitamins B1 and B6 help oats reach the top of the grain health charts. Oats are also a good source of energy, fiber, and protein. It is not without reason that the seed oat was chosen as the medicinal plant of the year. This was done in 2017 by the interdisciplinary study group on the history of the development of medicinal plants at the Institute for the History of Medicine at the University of Würzburg.

Growing and processing oats: you should know that

Not only the special positive properties but also the easy-care cultivation make the oat a perfect all-rounder. Fertilizing with liquid manure, for example, helps to increase yields, but you should also use nitrification inhibitors to ensure an optimal pH value.

• You should already sow the seed oats at the beginning of March in order to achieve ideal plant growth.
• Temperatures of around 4 degrees Celsius do not cause any problems for oat growth. High levels of rainfall tend to be beneficial, especially during the germination phase.
• Light soils, i.e. soils with a high proportion of sand, are ideal for growing oats. This is especially the case with clay soils. Oats are also suitable for recultivating fallow land.
• In crop rotation, we recommend sowing oats after planting potatoes, maize, or rye. However, you should only grow the oats every 3 years. A sowing depth of three to four centimeters is optimal for the oat seeds. The principle “less is more” applies to the sowing quantity.
• After the harvest, the grain is cleaned and dried. The cereal grains can then be processed further, for example by grinding, rolling, squeezing, or by crushing. We recommend the careful further processing of the oat grains with a flake crusher.
• The products obtained from the cultivated seed oats are very diverse. The best-known products include, for example, straw, pasta, oatmeal, oatmeal, oatmeal, but also oat-based drinks and various chemicals.