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

 

 

#Canada#Oats

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 ($544) pay far better than oats ($111). One sensible decision at a time, the fields, the mills, and the supply chain disappeared — and you can't rebuild them in a year. 

 

So when 2025's tariffs hit, the math got ugly: a tariff on Canadian oats is paid by US importers and passed to families at the checkout, on a product with no real domestic alternative. Trump told farmers to "grow it here" — but no tariff makes oats out-earn corn. 

 

The honest other side: oats are a small slice of the US food supply (wheat food use is ~23x bigger), the dollars are modest, and Canada depends on the US too — over 90% of Canadian oat exports go south. This is mutual dependence, not a chokehold. But it's a perfect, relatable portrait of the whole pattern: the cheap, boring things America let drift north and can't easily bring home. 

 

America didn't lose its oats in a fight. It set them down, on purpose — and the only one still growing the breakfast is the neighbor up north.

 

 

Source:     The Decision Room