Why your humble bowl of oatmeal could help feed a growing planet

I’d go so far as to say we should all be eating oatmeal for breakfast, pretty much every day. Buy the big canister of rolled oats, which makes 30 servings and is often on sale at my local market for about $3 — which means oatmeal is 10 cents a bowl. You can get the steel-cut kind if you prefer; they’re nutritionally similar, but they cost more and take longer to cook. There are other oat-based products, of course. If you don’t want to turn whole oats into breakfast, you can let General Mills do it for you in the form of Cheerios. It’ll cost you, of course, and you lose some nutritional value, but your toddler will probably thank you. Then there are cookies. Muesli. Granola. Bread.Oats check all the boxes. They’ll feed you cheaply and nutritiously. They have a long shelf life, and, with just a modicum of effort, they taste good.But there’s another dimension to oats, and it might matter even more than your cheap, nutritious breakfast. Oats have an important job in fixing what ails our agricultural system. Just about everyone who works in agriculture says they believe that our current system, based disproportionately on corn and soy, would work better if we grew a more diverse suite of crops.I know that oatmeal cookies are more compelling than crop rotations, but, in the long run, more good can come of the rotations.Tim Griffin, director of the agriculture, food and environment program at Tufts’ Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, spelled out the good, starting with productivity: “For each crop in the rotation, you’re better off growing them following something other than themselves.” A recent paper put a number on the yield penalty farmers pay for following corn with corn (4.3 percent) or soy with soy (10.3 percent). Rotations also help control pests and disease, because insects and pathogens that attack corn will pack up and move along when they find a field planted with soy (and vice versa).And then there’s soil health. Griffin cautions against making too many soil health claims for rotations: “Different rotations result in different microbial communities, but we don’t know how to interpret it.” But if one of your rotations is a legume (soybeans or alfalfa), that crop will increase your soil’s nitrogen content. If you add in a cover crop, your soil benefits from not being left bare.The biggest bang for the rotation buck comes when you go from one crop to two, but yields also generally increase when more are added in. A recent experiment at Iowa State found that a three- or four-crop rotation (corn and soy plus oats, or oats and alfalfa), including a cover crop, increased corn yields 2 to 4 percent and soy 10 to 17 percent over the two-crop rotation.These benefits are well-known and noncontroversial. So why do corn and soy dominate the farm landscape, particularly in the Midwest? Like everything in farming, the full answer is complex and nuanced. But the overriding reason is straightforward: Farmers gotta survive.I asked a passel of farmers about barriers to including another crop — like, say, that newest superfood — into a standard corn/soy rotation (although wheat is the most commonly planted third crop in those rotations). The answers were all about markets. It was Patti Edwardson, an Iowa farmer, who first talked to me about the difficulty with oats. She’s trying different strategies to improve her farm’s soil, including shifting to an organic system and increasing crop diversity. “The real problem is the price anyone (whether she is a miller, processor or neighbor who has horses) pays for the grain,” she said in an email. If you can’t make money growing oats, you just can’t grow oats.Even if you can make money, that money has to be competitive with what you can make planting corn or soy. At average Iowa yields and prices current as I write, an acre of corn would gross $804 and an acre of soy, $587. Oats? $183. (Expenses aren’t the same, but they don’t come anywhere close to making up the difference.)