Mother Jones - May 01, 2018

72 MOTHER JONES |^ MAY  JUNE 2018

CRISTINA SPANÒ

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

OATS AND

DREAMS

How a milk trend could stoke an

agricultural revolution

by tom philpott

in late 2016, the Swedish company Oatly set up

production in North America and began shop-

ping its oat-derived “milk” to New York City’s latte

cognoscenti. By the next autumn, oat milk had

conquered the city’s “most esteemed coffee bars”

at a “practically unheard of ” rate, according to the

coffee trade magazine Sprudge.

Chic cafés peddling a grainy Scandinavian-

inspired formula may sound too twee for words.

But the market for dairy alternatives is growing

quickly in the United States, where negative per-

ceptions of cow’s milk have created a thirst for

substitutes made from coconut, peas, and hemp.

Oat milk offers another benefit. If consumption

approaches levels now enjoyed by industry leader

almond milk, those urban hipsters may be the

vanguard of a soil revolution.

Oat milk has three times the protein of its almond-

based rival and at least twice the fiber, though it’s

higher in carbs. When it comes to each drink’s envi-

ronmental footprint, there’s no comparison. As I first

reported in 2014, in California, home to 80 percent

of the world’s production of almonds, nut trees are

swallowing up land once devoted to crops that could

be fallowed during droughts. California’s almond

crop commands more than three times as much

of the state’s annual water supply as Los Angeles.

As droughts become more frequent, few ecologists

would argue for extra almond groves.

Oats, however, thrive all over the world and

come with ecological benefits. They would be

especially helpful in the Upper Midwest, where

most prime farmland is currently devoted to just

two crops: corn and soybeans. As a result of this

unholy duopoly, insect, weed, and fungal pests

have flourished, prompting farmers to use a slew of

pesticides and fertilizers. Corn and soybeans don’t

emerge until late spring and are harvested in the

early fall; when the ground is bare in between, it is

vulnerable to erosion, which washes away topsoil.

Simply rotating in oats—along with a legume

like red clover, a cover crop that remains after the

oats are harvested—would change all that, explains Matt Liebman, an

agronomist at Iowa State University. Since 2002, he has been running

test plots near Ames that compare a conventional two-year corn-soy

rotation with a three-year corn, soy, and oat and red clover scheme.

His research shows that adding a third crop like oats disrupts weed

patterns, resulting in a startling 96 percent drop in herbicide use. Red

clover grabs nitrogen from the air and deposits it into the soil, provid-

ing natural fertilizer. All together, three-year plots require 86 percent

less added fertilizer to yield slightly more corn and soybeans—while

dramatically reducing erosion and chemical runoff.

Back in 1950, Iowa farmers led the nation in oat production, planting

6.6 million acres, more than a quarter of the state’s cropland. But demand

for oats has plummeted, a change that has helped trigger the erosion of

one of the world’s largest stores of fertile topsoil.

Oat milk could begin to turn this around. Jessie VanderPoel, a

buyer for Grain Millers, which supplies oats to Oatly’s US operation,

says an oat milk boom alone wouldn’t be enough incentive for farm-

ers to add the grain to their rotations. That would require tweaking

subsidies that help keep farmers wedded to corn and soybeans, and

adding oats to the feed of chickens, cows, and pigs—a massive un-

tapped market. Still, an oat milk boom “would be huge” in getting

such a transition started, she says. If the beverage went the way of

almond milk, it could incentivize Iowa’s farmers to sow double the

acreage of oats they do now. Subbing oats for just 10 percent of the

corn currently fed to the state’s livestock would require more diverse

crop rotations on 3.6 million acres, enough to virtually eliminate soil

erosion on the state’s most vulnerable farmland.

For now, annual oat milk sales are paltry. But almond milk, too, was

obscure until trendsetting baristas started foaming it into lattes. Sales

surged 250 percent between 2011 and 2016, and almond milk now ac-

counts for 64 percent of the $2.1 billion alt-milk market. Oat milk may

be on the same path: Oatly is sold at more than 1,000 locations nation-

wide. In February, Blue Bottle Coffee, a chain majority- owned by Nestlé,

replaced soy milk with oat milk at all its stores.

I don’t drink much milk, plant-based or otherwise, but I recently

took one for the team and tried some made from oats. It was creamy,

lightly sweet, and pleasantly grainy. If this is what an agricultural

revolution in the heartland tastes like, sign me up.