Susie Daly was a city-dwelling bank employee when she met her husband, but she decided to give farming a go and together they started farming potatoes above Marion Bay.

Mrs Daly shared her story during the Tasmanian Farmers and Graziers Association Inspire event, telling the audience how she often wondered if she had what it took to be a farmer during the first five years of her marriage.

“We started growing potatoes because my husband was a sheep farmer and that was when wool was not good,” she said.

“We crawled along the ground and picked them up in buckets. We didn’t own a tractor; we borrowed a tractor from a neighbour.”

Their business took off when they won a contract with Woolworths, but had to rebuild it after the 2013 Dunalley bushfires destroyed their farm and processing facility.

The Daly family’s story is one of innovation, with new products developed to deal with potato wastage.

Mrs Daly thought of ways to value add on their base product, so instead of simply growing potatoes, they also started producing potato vodka and gourmet potato products.

Since then the vodka distillery has extended to include gin and limoncello and the potatoes have also become gourmet salads, roasts and bakes that are stocked in Woolworths stores in Tasmania, Victoria and NSW.

“[The distillery] takes us to Salamanca each week and we’re just about to open a cellar door. It’s a totally different thing to working in a day-to-day farm operation,” Mrs Daly said.

And the gourmet potato products continue to grow.

“I’ve not got nine major lines in supermakets. The hardest thing is to actually get into the supermarkets because they won’t let you in unless you’ve got all the ‘i’s’ dotted.”

“Every farm needs to be able to utilise its whole crop. It costs me as much to grow the waste potatoes as it does to grow the normal potatoes,” she said.

As well as value adding, Mrs Daly is a born marketer and encouraged her audience to spread the word on the benefits of whatever they produced.

She rattled off a list of health benefits for potatoes: they contain vitamins C and K, magnesium, niacin, fibre and have more potassium than bananas, as well as being lower in fat than rice and pasta, stimulate brain function and can prevent heart disease.

“In fact you can actually live on potatoes alone.”