[beauzero]

He probably was buying them at a feed store. It used to be much much cheaper to buy steel cut oats and big bags of wheat berries as livestock feed. We ate them as kids in the 70s and 80s. We ground the wheat with a hand mill. Not sure if its cheaper now. Soy and corn are primary feed stock produced these days.

[bluGill]

Depending on the time when you did this, those feed store oats may have been handled in a way that wasn't as safe. Regulations change all the time (and differ by country), but often livestock feed is held the looser handling regulations.