Our reputation of pure waters, clear skies and lush paddocks have catapulted our produce onto the world stage.

Our Tasmanian brand is so valuable that it is at the forefront of producers marketing their exports to international buyers.

Earlier this week, we heard that Mt Direction Olives, in the Tamar Valley, has capitalised on the Chinese market’s insatiable thirst for Tassie produce, by incorporating a QR code onto its olive oil packaging.

Scanning the QR code takes the buyer into the rollicking rows of the olive oil farm, where they are introduced to the product through a video.

“It talks about the grove, then follows up with footage from the shed with processing and oil going into tanks,” Mt Direction Olives co-owner Sean Ahern told Fairfax Media.

In 2015, we heard how overseas companies are exploiting the Tasmanian name to their own advantage, when Asian-grown cherries were being sold as “Tasmanian-grown”.

At the time, a Tasmanian cherry industry grower called us the Louis Vuitton of the Chinese cherry industry, “because everyone wants to copy us”.

While it can be flattering to be copied, we need to ensure that we are best protecting what is a very important asset.

That means protecting place-of-origin branding and copyrighting, to ensure we’ve got quality control over what bears the Tasmanian name.

But it also means looking at our own practices, and making sure we’re taking care of one of our backbone industries.

This week we’ve heard key stakeholders call for a public inquiry into the blueberry rust outbreaks that impacted and severely threatened the livelihood of our blueberry industries.

The outbreak hit in 2014, and then again in 2016.

“Growers believe that [Primary Industries minister Jeremy Rockliff] and the department have been deficient in their response… and that the industry is far too important for this type of poor approach,” Tasmanian Farmers and Graziers Association chief executive Peter Skillern said.

An inquiry into blueberry rust is the tip of what we need to look into when it comes to protecting our bio security.

We have a lot to protect, and it’s definitely worth the investment.