alt.hn

6/30/2026 at 2:00:51 PM

My dad helped build North America's oat supply chain: Can it be remade?

 https://ambrook.com/offrange/perspective/how-we-lost-our-oats

by surprisetalk

7/3/2026 at 6:59:54 PM

Kicked dairy about a decade ago. I'm grateful for oat milk.

Also, one of the very, very many examples of strong, necessary, and useful collaboration between Canada and the United States.

Happy Fourth of July, neighbours down south. I'm eager to be buds again.

by goodroot

7/3/2026 at 7:13:57 PM

I'm not big into vegetarian substitutes but oatmilk is legitimately delicious. It's good for lattes, cereal, whatever. I guess maybe not good for baking?

by xeromal

7/3/2026 at 8:36:47 PM

The thing that gets me is that the price of oat milk is so completely divorced from what it cost to produce. It's absolutely wild that oat milk, made with one of the cheapest bulk grains, is as expensive as almond milk, made with an expensive nut.

by bardak

7/3/2026 at 10:30:23 PM

Almondmilk is mostly water and thickeners. A typical 32-oz carton uses around 12 almonds. You can tell by the protein content of all of these altmilks how cheap they actually are to make.

The only exception is soymilk which does actually have a lot of protein and also has a really long tradition. People have been making soymilk for over 2,000 years. American grocery store soymilk is quite different but you can actually go to an Asian grocery store and still find soymilk that has a single ingredient.

by culi

7/4/2026 at 7:20:11 AM

> grocery store soymilk is quite different

Here in Europe we can fin the single ingredients soy milk if you look down the shelf: the cheapest brand and groceries have no additives while the fanciest ones are full of thickeners and various sugars. I recommend the store’ brand from Carrefour, Lidl and Leclerc.

by aziaziazi

7/4/2026 at 6:52:07 PM

I will say the quality of single-ingredient soymilk varies greatly. There's definitely a skill involved. I try a lot of soymilks and the best soymilk I've ever had and the worst have both been single-ingredient

by culi

7/3/2026 at 9:51:44 PM

You can easily make it yourself.

by antonvs

7/3/2026 at 11:13:46 PM

For baking: depends on the recipe. In one recipe of a sort of muffin style bread that uses egg to rise (no baking powder, yeast, etc), oat milk makes it not rise properly and you get dense bricks instead. Other recipes have been fine. YMMV.

(Though, I quite like the non-homogenized full fat milk with bits of thick cream floating on top too. Oat milk, while pretty good, got nothing on that. Perfect on the porridge for breakfast.)

by VorpalWay

7/3/2026 at 8:07:01 PM

Yup. I don't normally eat vegan but, if I'm drinking a latte, it's gonna be oatmilk.

by SketchySeaBeast

7/3/2026 at 7:10:58 PM

I am a bit surprised that oat milk is as popular as it is, given that, nutritionally, it's a very poor substitute for dairy as it's mostly just more sugar and carbs with very little protein.

In terms of non-dairy milk, soy milk is basically the only one that gets close to the nutritional value of dairy (and a lot of the fear mongering about endocrine effects of soy are just wrong). Even almond milk usually only has a teeny amount of actual almonds in it, as it's primarily just added water and sugar.

by hn_throwaway_99

7/3/2026 at 7:28:32 PM

I drink milk because a) I prefer flat whites to espressos and b) to make my cornflakes wet. In both cases I prefer oat milk and in neither cases do I care about nutrition. I’m guessing that’s the reason.

by IrishTechie

7/3/2026 at 7:43:40 PM

Makes sense. For me it was less about the health aspects of nutrition than the fact that I just feel a lot less sated when I drink protein-devoid plant milks. Corn flakes with oat milk is basically a big bowl of sugar with a little bit of oil and some vitamins sprayed on - it's not like it's a ton better with cow's milk but I'm not craving a "second breakfast" an hour later like I do if I have a breakfast that's primarily only carbs.

by hn_throwaway_99

7/3/2026 at 10:33:02 PM

Soy milk actually has as much protein as dairy and less sugar. It has even more protein if you get the traditional kind. You can often find soymilk with a single ingredient at an Asian grocery store.

by culi

7/3/2026 at 7:53:01 PM

Soy milk is wildly superior to oat milk - I say as a vegan attempting to hit my nutrition targets. Oat milk is essentially flavoured water

by allthetime

7/3/2026 at 9:15:04 PM

I'd even say it's superior to cow milk altogether.

by PowerElectronix

7/3/2026 at 11:19:23 PM

Not if it causes contact allergies with your mouth, as soy milk does for me. Same with coconut milk. I have to stick to oat, almond or animal milk. (Goat milk tastes pretty good too by the way.)

And non-homogenized full fat milk is delicious.

by VorpalWay

7/3/2026 at 10:02:55 PM

I drank cow’s milk for taste, not for health or nutritional reasons. It’s the same for oat milk.

by antonvs

7/3/2026 at 7:27:56 PM

> and a lot of the fear mongering about endocrine effects of soy are just wrong

Farmed cow's milk contains enough oestrogens, progestogens, etc. that academics have argued (e.g. in the 00s) over the extent to which cow milk consumption affects human health. The macho crowd seem to think that it's implicitly obvious that the juice of a bean is more feminising than the mammary secretions of calved female mammals, from a lineage selectively bred to have massive udders. I don't understand this, but I do find it very funny. (From a distance. I like having teeth.)

That said, if there were a significant and obvious effect on humans from dairy (or substitutes), academics probably wouldn't have argued about it for so long.

by wizzwizz4

7/3/2026 at 10:20:22 PM

The problem is not that milk is a mammary secretion. After all, boys and girls both drink mother’s milk!

The problem is dairy practices that keep cows pregnant for 9 months out of the year, every year, and milk them for 10-11 months out of the year, every year. !!

When you operate a dairy on a more natural rhythm you don’t get the elevated pregnancy hormones in the milk.

This is one of the reasons why goat milk is healthier, because they don’t do the same to goats.

Source: I’m a farmer

by hammock

7/3/2026 at 10:07:00 PM

> The macho crowd seem to think that it's implicitly obvious that the juice of a bean is more feminising

I’m not sure that’s true. But they’ve heard that soy milk has phytoestrogens in it, and that Asians tend to be smaller than Americans. From there it’s just math: 1+1 = 11

by antonvs

7/3/2026 at 9:20:35 PM

[flagged]

by tomaow

7/3/2026 at 6:03:19 PM

> Demand for oats increased in the 1980s when researchers announced that beta glucan, a type of fiber in oats, can lower cholesterol.

I'm skeptical that this was a factor, because in total only 5% of oats are used for human consumption. 95% is used for animal feed: https://oklahoma.agclassroom.org/resources/agricultural-fact...

I doubt it was that much different back then. This relates to the "Oat Mafia" that the article responds to:

https://www.nature.org/en-us/what-we-do/our-priorities/provi...

While I support their efforts to shift their industry toward human-consumption-grade vs animal feed-grade oats and more sustainable agricultural practices, they will have to also learn how to shape tastes (literally). I'm not sure that Americans are willing to shift their consumption from oat-fed animals toward oat-derived products. Realistically, they should plan on a generational scale project.

As this article indicates, the oat-consumption health fad has come and gone before (in the 1980s)- but it didn't make a significant shift in Americans' meat consumption. Arguably the only thing that will is higher prices of meat - which are now here, but for different reasons (drought, war-spiked energy and fertilizer costs, and now screw-worm).

by danans

7/3/2026 at 9:04:57 PM

> My dad realized that instead of paying the high rail rates past Thunder Bay, oats could instead be loaded into a Great Lakes freighter designed to haul iron ore pellets (like the ill-fated Edmund Fitzgerald). Lake freighters typically unloaded their cargo in Thunder Bay and had to sail empty to pick up more iron ore on the U.S. side of the border. If you could fill them with oats in Thunder Bay, deliver the oats to Duluth, Minnesota, and then load the oats on U.S. rail lines, you could substantially cut shipping costs.

The fun part about the “upper” Great Lakes is that some ships were built on it that can go through the Soo Locks, but not the Welland Canal. So they’re just stuck there moving ore (and I guess oats).

https://saultstemarie.com/the-ultimate-list-of-1000-foot-fre...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Paul_R._Tregurtha

by Scoundreller

7/3/2026 at 9:19:17 PM

I don't drink oat milk, but man I love oats. Oatmeal is so good. Oatmeal cookies, oat crumble, goo balls, muesli, overnight oats, rolled, steel-cut, all of it. I make oatmeal sourdough bread that's like a meal in a slice, literally just put leftover oatmeal in the dough.

Just waving the flag for team-oat here. Thanks Canadian oat farmers!

by chickensong

7/3/2026 at 10:56:37 PM

I’m with you. For beer drinkers, there’s also oatmeal stout - try Samuel Smith’s version, which is widely available and very good.

Plus I cook oatmeal using oat milk.

by antonvs

7/4/2026 at 12:11:19 AM

How could I forget oatmeal stout, I love it also! Nice one!

by chickensong

7/3/2026 at 11:13:46 PM

I'm not a huge stout fan but Sam Smith's is pretty outstanding.

by garettmd

7/3/2026 at 8:15:29 PM

The almond/coconut cream substitutes are my favorite but most coffee shops don’t stock them. Bought my own espresso machine because I got tired of dairy after effects when indulging in cold brews from coffee shops. Straight espressos are safer in that respect.

I eat steel cut oats every day but can’t really do oat milk. Not enough texture or flavor. I’d rather use Ripple in my oats for that little bit of extra.

Straight dairy tastes too weird to me now.

by browningstreet

7/4/2026 at 12:50:14 AM

+1 coconut cream

Before switching to daily steel cut oats, I made "oat milk" for my daily smoothie.

Rolled oats, water, and an enzyme (banana, honey, yogurt), quick frappé, let it sit in the fridge overnight. Add the rest of smoothie ingredients in the morning.

(I love almonds, but they don't love me.)

by specialist

7/3/2026 at 6:16:26 PM

This is one of those little things I’ve had trouble putting my finger on: the US eats surprisingly few oats. The U.K. eats more than three times as much on average. Which is probably one of the reasons I find US cuisine slightly uncanny valley.

Southern Europe doesn’t really consume much either, but most US food is closer to Northern European food.

by moomin

7/3/2026 at 7:27:52 PM

[flagged]

by joe_mamba

7/3/2026 at 4:57:36 PM

USDA[0] says that the US produces 1 million metric tons of oats per year, or 4% of global production. Sure, that is not the best, but clearly still in the game.

[0] https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/production/0452000

by 3eb7988a1663

7/3/2026 at 5:12:09 PM

[flagged]

by fleahunter

7/3/2026 at 6:51:37 PM

As long as corn and soybeans are subsidized via crop insurance, and propped up by biofuel mandates, oats will not be a popular crop in the US.

Canada doesn't do any such subsidies so oats make a lot of sense. In fact, some years it's our most profitable crop, even outstripping canola.

by ikidd

6/30/2026 at 2:19:26 PM

In many ways, it's a story about far more than just oats.

US Ag policy is so, so screwed up. But with more entrenched interests than the US has Congressmen, and probably 10X that number of full-time lobbyists - good luck trying to fix it.

by bell-cot

7/3/2026 at 6:22:43 PM

> In many ways, it's a story about far more than just oats.

Sure, and the story is about how Americans look at how they became the richest large country on the planet and endlessly ruminate on how they can have their cake and eat it too.

Oats declined as an American crop among farmers because there were more lucrative uses for the land. Literally it wasn't some grand conspiracy or external force, but simply that the crop preferred different climates and without needing it as a feedstock you could make more money growing soy or corn or countless other things.

But endlessly there are these sorts of "the children yearn for the mines" sorts of stories where Americans view anyone else producing literally anything as somehow unjustly depriving Americans. The rest of the world settled on putting the center of technology and arts and media and finance in the US, to hugely lucrative benefits for the US, with liberal free trade and IP protections and patent monopolies and a very healthy profit for Americans, but oh no someone else is making that low value crop and that needs to be undone.

"Data from the Ag Census cited by NAMA offer a compelling reason for the switch away from oats. Returns per acre are far higher for corn ($604) and soybeans ($544) than for oats ($111)."

Americans have some romance with the notion of "millions and millions of human beings screwing in little, little screws to make iPhones". It's bizarre stuff.

by llm_nerd

7/3/2026 at 6:48:36 PM

> Americans have some romance with the notion of "millions and millions of human beings screwing in little, little screws to make iPhones". It's bizarre stuff.

Screwing in little, little screws to make stuff used to be a pretty decent job in the US. Most people can be trained for assembly work, which really isn't the case for tech, arts, media etc.

Most of that work is super repetitive and some of it is dangerous and etc, etc. Lots of reasons not to like doing it, but having it available as an option was pretty nice. That's why there's romantic feelings.

by toast0

7/3/2026 at 7:03:31 PM

> Screwing in little, little screws to make stuff used to be a pretty decent job in the US

Sure, I get the "romance about the past" notion, but it will never, ever be a decent job again. The clock isn't turning back, and the perverse thing is that in pursuing that "make it the 50s again" political agenda, Americans guaranteed your oligarchs are going to take ever more of the pie.

That isn't because Canada grows a low value crop. It's because people like Musk, Bezos and others are completely running away with the country while people vote against themselves chasing an absolute myth.

Fun fact -- the US goods trade deficit is literally the worst it has been in history, and every indication is it's going entirely in the wrong direction. But hey, at least Trump got a lot of bribes and you got your first trillionaire.

by llm_nerd

7/3/2026 at 8:56:35 PM

> Sure, I get the "romance about the past" notion, but it will never, ever be a decent job again.

That is a political thing. Pay the masses more money and they can afford domestically made products again.

It's not that difficult. Henry Ford figured that one out a century ago - when people had ample money, they could afford to consume. But when all money a company makes has to go to the stock markets because numbers must go up, there is no money left to redistribute to workers.

by mschuster91

7/4/2026 at 2:15:13 AM

American workers already lead the world in earnning and spending. There is a tiny list of much smaller countries that earn more, but they spend less.

There is no option to Simply pay the masses more. A company paying Americans a healthy salary for putting in screws would rapidly go out of business.to one that imports from China. If you block imports, you just get more expensive and less stuff.

Also, the entire Henry Ford story is entirely bullshit (look it up). Ford raised wages in the 1910s because there was a labor crisis and it was brutal work, so they couldn't keep employees. The average factory worker would quit after 3 months which was extremely disruptive.

Also, the economics of the story make no sense. Even if the workers spent their entire pay bump at Ford every year, Ford would still be losing money on the idea. If a $300 raise was spent to buy a $300 car, the company only profits maybe $30 on the sale, so they are still in the hole -$270 on the raise.

Workers would have to somehow spend more than their raise on cars every year.

by s1artibartfast

7/4/2026 at 8:05:03 AM

> American workers already lead the world in earnning and spending.

Tech workers yes, the wide masses scrape by, barely making rent. The problem with using averages is that ultra high extremes massively contort the statistic - a trap that the Biden/Harris admin didn't recognize until it was too late and they lost to Trump as a result.

As for the Ford story - I am aware that the story isn't as black and white [1]. Key thing is, what he did to retain labor was considered revolutionary for the time, and something that I do not expect to see a repeat of today, despite claims of a "labor shortage" everywhere.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1d90hf/til_t...

by mschuster91

7/4/2026 at 2:12:32 PM

the Ford story isnt in between, it is very clear.

Nowhere in that source article does it say anything about "encouraging more lesiure use of automobiles". This is more magical thinking.

Higher pay to secure workers is universally understood today, from fastfood restruants to AI companies. However, OpenAI is not paying employees tens of millions in hopes that they spend more than that buying OpenAI credits on the weekend. Similarly, openai doesnt give them weekends in hopes that they get free advertising of their product.

Labor shortage is always relative to the price one is willing to pay. Where is this strawman coming from?

by s1artibartfast

7/4/2026 at 2:42:42 PM

> Higher pay to secure workers is universally understood today, from fastfood restruants to AI companies.

Yeah... and guess what, restaurants are struggling to find people able to afford eating out. The AI companies are finding out that companies aren't willing to pay actually realistic, unsubsidized prices for tokens.

A healthy economy needs the ability of people to spend, or it will go into a self-destructive spiral.

by mschuster91

7/4/2026 at 4:34:38 PM

Yeah, and those restruant owners know they would have applications out the door if they payed $100/hr.

That isnt secret knowledge reddit figured out and owners/managers cant comprehend.

by s1artibartfast

7/4/2026 at 8:05:32 PM

The problem is they can't because otherwise even less people would come and dine.

That's the central issue. Too much is too fucked up and especially, too much wealth is either tied up in the 1%'s assets or in pension funds, which leads back to my introduction comment:

> That is a political thing.

Normally, the government would need to step in on a large scale to fix that, but as we all know, the current government is utterly braindead and the competition will have their hands full with fixing the mess for too long to even think about the reforms needed.

by mschuster91

7/4/2026 at 8:29:51 PM

that problem has nothing to do with the 1% or pension funds tho.

You cant fix the problem of low skill labor being inefficient by raising wages for that work.

I dont want to pay someone $1000 to cut my lawn with scissiors when I can buy a lawnmower for $200. raising their wage doesnt solve that.

Same for putting screws in an iphone. You cant have both the cheap iphone and the high paid worker.

A government mandate doesnt solve this.

by s1artibartfast

7/4/2026 at 11:03:26 AM

According to the BLS, 10x more people are employed in the manufacturing sector than the information sector, and average hourly pay is $36/hr. What are you talking about? Manufacturing employment was also much higher in the 1980s and 1990s than the 1950s - the decline didn't really start until the 2000s.

by Amezarak

7/3/2026 at 7:28:09 PM

Look, my fathers and their five fathers were all tech/EECS/radio guys; I learned PCB and soldering and schematics informally.

If I had my druthers, I would've trained early and diligently for a lifelong career in Electronics Assembly, because that should have been a solid and stable industry/job market.

But I did not, and it is not, in these United States. Pity.

by ButlerianJihad

7/3/2026 at 7:01:36 PM

> Returns per acre are far higher for corn ($604) and soybeans ($544) than for oats ($111).

How much of that difference is "natural", and how much is the Federal Gov't spending $billions to make it so?

https://www.fsa.usda.gov/news-events/news/04-08-2026/usda-an...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_policy_of_the_Uni...

by bell-cot

7/3/2026 at 7:05:13 PM

Why didn't you just research and actually provide the answer? Because you would find, quite quickly, that it's less than 1/10th of the difference, so instead just post some vague hand-wavy "but what if..." kind of open question.

And of course oats were subsidized as well. The US agricultural industry is basically soviet russia, and the entire system is hugely backstopped by the government, and an endless recipient of government welfare.

by llm_nerd

7/3/2026 at 9:56:58 PM

People like to eat, if they don't, there is no government

by downrightmike

7/4/2026 at 10:57:25 AM

> The rest of the world settled on putting the center of technology and arts and media and finance in the US, to hugely lucrative benefits for the US, with liberal free trade and IP protections and patent monopolies and a very healthy profit for Americans,

The US is still the world's #2 manufacturer and it's still one of the biggest parts of the economy; 10x more people are employed in manufacturing than in the information sector. Moreover, manufacturing has been in a steep decline since the 1990s. The "romance" is people remembering well-paying jobs for people who are not interested in or cannot do tech, arts, media, or finance.

Centering your economy on those things deliberately would also be very foolish. Besides the fact you end up with a few urban cores with the rest of the country hollowed out (like the UK has seen), they are all things that are very easy to shift to other countries if there's a small cultural wind change - Hollywood especially is not in a great position in terms of "enduring global market titan."

At any rate it's absurd to say it's over and people should just give up on something that to this day employs so many people.

by Amezarak

7/3/2026 at 6:01:19 PM

I thought this was a fantastic read! In a time when I get nauseated by all the AI posts, the section about how the author's father rejiggered the supply chain to import oats from Canada was an excellent example of hacking to get a better solution and perfect content for Hacker News IMO:

> Connecting Canada’s oat supply with U.S. mills was where my dad entered the story.

> In a business that measured volume in millions of tons, squeezing even a few cents out of the supply chain could be extremely profitable. My dad, a gifted mechanic, excelled at finding creative ways to move oats cheaper than the other guy. For example, Canadian rail lines could deliver oats cheaply to Thunder Bay, Ontario, but rail freight across the border into the U.S. was expensive. My dad realized that instead of paying the high rail rates past Thunder Bay, oats could instead be loaded into a Great Lakes freighter designed to haul iron ore pellets (like the ill-fated Edmund Fitzgerald). Lake freighters typically unloaded their cargo in Thunder Bay and had to sail empty to pick up more iron ore on the U.S. side of the border. If you could fill them with oats in Thunder Bay, deliver the oats to Duluth, Minnesota, and then load the oats on U.S. rail lines, you could substantially cut shipping costs.

> The problem was that Duluth’s elevators were built as a one-way spigot to ship grain out. Moving grain from a freighter into the elevator required a McGyver-esque solution. The grain company cut a hole in the side of the massive elevator bin so the lake freighters could pour oats into them, reversing the flow of grain from export to import. These kinds of fixes were how my dad made his living, and it’s how a supply chain was built.

by hn_throwaway_99

7/4/2026 at 4:41:58 AM

PSA: In the US, always buy organic oats because non-organic are typically laden with unknowable amounts of glyphosate residues as it is sprayed with it as a desiccant near harvest time to reduce harvesting costs. The root cause is America's sick agri corp industry imposes undeclared substances of varying toxicity on consumers without their consent because of a lack of regulation based on monitoring, enforcement, and the precautionary principle.

by burnt-resistor

7/3/2026 at 6:16:23 PM

[flagged]

by tokioyoyo

7/3/2026 at 6:54:17 PM

[flagged]

by hn_throwaway_99

7/3/2026 at 6:56:12 PM

I realize you were provoked and FWIW your GP comment did not sound like genai to me (and we do a lot of pattern matching these days). Still, please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

by dang

7/3/2026 at 7:04:31 PM

Fair, but FWIW my fuck you comment was intended to be tongue-in-cheek and more of an attempt to show that I am actually a human.

by hn_throwaway_99

7/3/2026 at 8:43:12 PM

That makes sense! Of course the vast subtle spectrum of fuck you gets mostly truncated in this medium...

by dang

7/3/2026 at 9:10:00 PM

Agreed, agreed. Thanks very much for all you do for HN dang!

by hn_throwaway_99

7/3/2026 at 9:20:31 PM

[flagged]

by tomaow

7/3/2026 at 9:29:58 PM

Why don’t you go elsewhere?

by sbayg

7/3/2026 at 9:16:29 PM

[flagged]

by tomvow