OatFrontiers

Adapting oats to final Frontier

What we do

Northern periphery areas (NPA) represent the final frontier where cereal cultivation can still be expanded in Northern Europe. The current growing conditions within the NPA are however also challenging to cereal production for several reasons. The project’s objective is to increase possibilities for oat cultivation within the NPA region. Oat is selected because it has well recognized positive health effects and its consumption for food is increasing and oat is also a resilient crop. The project will gather and test a set of 400 oats that have unseen diversity coming from four separate sources including modern oat cultivars, landraces and crosses with wild oat relatives.

Our objectives

Our aim is to promote oat production in Northern Scandinavia, Iceland and Western Ireland. The project aims to pilot uniquely diverse pre-breeding material in order to establish pipelines to develop oat cultivars resilient enough to provide high quality products in future climates within the NPA.

The objective is to use modern genetics to evaluate uniquely diverse plant material, understand how different environments and breeding impact oats, and to pick material and methods for future actions needed to provide oat cultivars for NPA.

Conduction of field-based agronomic oat research and farm trials to select cultivars adapted to the climatic conditions within the NPA territory, provide phenotypic data to facilitate genetic analyses and demonstrate oat cultivation within the NPA.

The objective is to draw from other project activities and the results of these activities, to reach stakeholders connected to cereal production in the NPA region, as well as for the project partners to co-create relevant knowledge and outputs with the stakeholders.