Trump Tariffed Canada's Oats. He Forgot America Doesn't Grow Its Own Anymore.

By The Decision Room

Community Score: 50% | 54.6K views | 2w

0 community ratings: null thumbs up, null thumbs down

Look in your cupboard. The Cheerios, the Quaker oats, the Nature Valley bars, the oat milk in the fridge. Almost all of it started on a farm in Canada. Around 90% of the oats Americans actually eat — the food-grade oats in cereal, snack bars, and oat milk — are imported, and the overwhelming majority come from Canada. The US is the world's #1 oat importer; Canada is the #1 exporter. The most ordinary thing imaginable, a bowl of cereal, runs on a crop the United States quietly stopped growing for itself. And here's what makes it different from steel or canola: there's no easy domestic substitute. As one industry analyst put it, "you can't make a Cheerio out of barley." Nearly all the oats still grown in the US are feed grade. The food-grade oats — roughly 80 million bushels a year — are almost entirely Canadian. America didn't get its oats stolen. It walked away from them. In 1970 it grew twice what Canada did; today Canada grows about 3x more, because corn ($604/acre) and soybeans (

Tags: cheerios canada, quaker oats, canada us trade war, america depends on canada, trump tariffs canada, mark carney, canada leverage us, us food imports, james wren, decision room, us canada relations, trump, cbc, latest news, mark carney speech, trade war, the decision room, ctv news canada, canada, news