- From Field to Miller
Today's many varieties of oats have evolved through the centuries from wild grass. Best quality oats are grown on light, fertile soil and will grow in most regions with a temperate climate and a rainfall of over 60cm (24ins) a year. The main oat-producing areas are the USA, Canada, USSR, West Germany, France, Australia, Scandinavia, United Kingdom.
Mornflake Oats are produced from grain grown on Farms throughout England, Scotland and Wales and many of them are grown specially under Contract on the same Farms, year after year after year.
The oat grain is grown and ripened in the fields and goes straight from the field to the oat miller. You can recognise a field of oats by the way the grains appear in clusters called panicles on graceful nodding stems. An oat plant grows to around 90cm (3 feet) high and each stem carries about twenty to twenty five oat grains. Each panicle carries two or three grains and each grain is covered by its husk that protects it all the way to the mill.
 To the farmer, these grains can be the seed for the following year's crop. To the oat miller the grains, subjected to his milling techniques, are the raw material for a great variety of oat cereal products.
For what appears to be a simple cereal the actual processing requirements are quite complicated and involve the obvious cleaning and sorting through to the less obvious drying, kilning, hulling, polishing, cutting, cleaning again, grading, steaming and flaking.
These various processes will go towards producing a range of unique oat products which are extremely versatile and very healthy for us all to eat.
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