Oats have been a tremendous success, but there are a number of factors that went along with oats being removed from the Canadian Wheat Board.
Going backwards, in 1988 there was a total drought in the oat-growing region in the United States. It forced the American millers to look elsewhere for oats. They came to Canada and they went to Europe; they went to Scandinavia. We're still living with that legacy.
The marketing of oats was removed from the responsibility of the Canadian Wheat Board. But shortly after that, for transportation rate concerns, transportation policy was changed to allow oats to be shipped directly from the gathering point on the prairies to the mills, rather than having to go through Thunder Bay.
One of the biggest issues with the success of oats in Canada has been the American Farm Bill program, which threw all the support in that program behind wheat, soybeans, and corn. Basically the American farmers, because of that farm policy, abandoned oat production.
If you eat oats as a human in North America, there's a 95% chance that they were grown within 100 miles either side of a line between Emerson, Manitoba, and Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. We are the suppliers of human consumption oats to North America.