Opioid industry harvesting
• Winnaleah’s James Radford driving the poppy harvester at North Scottsdale.
By Taylor Clyne,
February 09, 2022
The first crops of the North-East poppies are being harvested with conditions favourable, and yields looking dense for what has been a reasonably good season despite the slash in global demand.
This year the region has grown a couple hundred hectares all up across 24 paddocks on 18 growers’ farms, down significantly on previous years.
Keith Rice of Poppy Growers Tasmania said that was a decrease of about 40 percent.
“The poppy industry is quite cyclical, it’s always up and down and we’re in a bit of a lull at the moment,” he said.
“Covid has hit us hard with elective surgeries being put on hold and there is no morphine contract in the North-East this year, we have only grown codeine and thebaine varieties here.
“The paddocks up here don’t have scale and the price of the contract wasn’t all that favourable for smaller hectares, so a lot of the morphine contract has gone to the Midlands with bigger acreages.”
Demand for the product is down globally with world stocks high and only being allowed to carry a maximum of 12 months inventory at any one time.
Tasmania makes up more than 50 percent of the world’s supply due to the island home being the perfect climate and quite secure.
At its peak in 2012/2013 Tasmania grew 30,000 hectares of poppies to less than 7,000 hectares this year.
“Productivity has increased dramatically over the years though so it’s important to take that into account but realistically we’d like to see the Tasmanian market sit at around 12,000 hectares each year, so we’re about half that at the moment,” Mr Rice said.
“The world has become much more competitive; we were right up there with our technology and plant breeding, but the world is catching up with us now – particularly Spain and France.
Mr Rice said he’s expecting the market to swing upwards again soon.
“Everything suggests that it will pick up again, our product is pain management treating trauma and cancer patients, those in palliative care and elective surgeries.
“Once they’ve been taken off hold due to Covid we will see the need increase and that will flow through to our farmers.
“That being said we are very proud of this industry and Tasmania is a leading contributor in the science and technology of a natural plant that’s producing a world class product.”
The harvest is expected to take close to three weeks with Sun Farmer likely to start talking hectares for the 2022/2023 season in May.