Mr Rice said that the beginning and middle of the season "clearly had some challenges", to the extent that some farmers lost crops, either to hammering rain or to the wet ground in which crops could not perform.

"One fellow down through the Midlands said that the rain caused his crop to nearly explode out of the ground, it hit it that hard," Mr Rice said.

"Early July was all right as was August, but through September and October, conditions were bad again.

"The conventional belief is that anything sowed late would not perform and it astonished everybody that the late crops grew and continued to grow out through December and January.

"It grew to the stage that it was four weeks late - harvest didn't start until very late January - but ended up a good, average season in terms of weight and alkaloid content.

"We got all the crop off by the end of February, bar one or two stragglers - it was a fantastic effort and you just couldn't have ordered better harvesting conditions, they were perfect."

Mr Rice said that with nearly 22,000 hectares of the 24,000 hectares of drilled poppied actually harvested, total crop losses were around the 5 per cent average.

The crop could be expected to return between $75 million and $85 million to the Tasmanian economy this year, he said.

Mr Rice said that the proposal from Vienna was for a 24,500 poppy crop from Australia next year.

"Until now, `Australian' has meant `Tasmanian', so now we'll have to see how the federal government responds to Victoria's attempts to move from poppy trials to commercial crops," he said.