Run of the mill oats are liable to be damaged by quite an aggressive de-hulling process & so have to be heat treated to denature oils in the grains that would otherwise become rancid when exposed to air. Naked oats retain all those quality oils & the flavour that comes with them
⁣Naked oats were eaten in preference to hulled oats for millennia and are still enjoyed all over the world - especially in Scandinavia. But because hulled oats make a single balanced ration for horses (who, unlike us, need and can digest the chaff) naked oats largely disappeared
⁣Horses are no longer a ubiquitous part of our lives, but naked oats haven’t made a come-back because they are badly suited to industrial food systems; they need to be stored and handled carefully and in small quantities to avoid damage to the grains.⁣
We hope all that’s about to change and that naked oats will be back on our plates and in our fields! The Turners at Little Bytham are growing a few acres of this delicious, nutritious crop organically and we already have a little non-organic available on our website. ⁣
It’s incredible exciting for us, we’ve effectively been waiting for this harvest for almost 5 years, but securing naked oat seed has proved incredibly complicated and difficult; naked oats are already grown in the UK but exclusively for high-end animal feed...
*We have, of course, tried to grow rice but with little success. @col_gordon & others seem to be getting better results in Scotland(?!) than we had in Suffolk.
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