Oats (Latin name: Avena sativa?L.) is a plant of the gramineae family, which is known as sparrow oats and wild oats in the Compendium of Materia Medica. Oats are not easy to peel, so it is called skin oats, is a low sugar, high nutrition, high energy food. Oats are sweet and flat in nature. It can benefit the spleen, nourish the heart and astringent sweat.

China's northeastern, northern, northwestern, southwestern and Guangdong, Guangxi and central China and other provinces and regions are mostly cultivated. The grain is used to grind flour for consumption or as fodder with high nutritional value. The type specimens are taken from Europe.

Oat (Avena sativa L). Avena sativa L. is a worldwide cultivated crop, distributed in 42 countries on five continents, but the centralized production area is the temperate region of the northern hemisphere.

North latitude 41 ° ~ 43 ° is recognized as the world's golden growth of oats latitude zone, where the altitude of 1,000 meters above sea level in the plateau area, the average annual temperature of 2.5 ° C, sunshine up to an average of 16 hours, is the growth of oats in the best natural environment.

Oats have a long history of cultivation in China, spreading over various mountainous areas, plateaus and northern alpine cold zones. In the past years, the planting area was 18 million mu, including more than 16 million mu of naked oats, accounting for 92% of the sown area of oats. Mainly planted in Inner Mongolia, Hebei, Henan, Shanxi, Gansu, Shaanxi, Yunnan, Sichuan, Ningxia, Guizhou, Qinghai and other provinces, autonomous regions, of which the first four provinces, autonomous regions, planting area of about 90% of the country's total area.

Growing oats have 210 counties, but the concentrated production area is the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region of the Yinshan North and South, Hebei Province, Yinshan and Yanshan areas, Shanxi Province, Shuozhou Xishan mountainous areas, Taihang Mountain and Lvliang mountainous areas, Shanxi, Gansu, Ningxia and Qingdao of the Liupan Mountains, Helan Mountains and Qilian Mountains, Yunnan, Guizhou, Sichuan, large and small Liangshan high-altitude areas. In recent years, the national sowing area dropped to 15 million mu, but due to the continuous promotion of new varieties and cultivation technology level, the average mu yield from 50 kg to 75 kg.