For more than 27 years, Noel Beven has been inspecting fields of Tasmanian poppies.
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In 1984 he started with Tasmanian Alkaloids, where he stayed until 2000, and worked as a field officer.
"A field officer's job is to coordinate the growing of the crops at farm level. It is the intermediary between the company and the grower," he said.
He landed the job from having a practical background and has mainly been based around the state's south during his career.
"It all started when I was contractor who was doing sowing spray and harvesting of the crop and I had experience on the ground at that level, and the company approached me to ask them to help build a grower base at that time."
In 2007, he returned to the company after concentrating on other agricultural ventures.
Since March 1, Mr Beven has been promoted to the alkaloid factory's field operations manager. He is the third person to hold this title since the company opened. He now manages a team of about 10 people.
"When the company started in the late '70s one of the problems was the lack of infrastructure on the ground and lack of practical knowledge on the ground," he said.
It is the uniqueness of a poppy that has kept him coming back to the office. It gets its uniqueness from being in a field of its own.
"It's such a wonderful farm crop to be involved with in the sense that there is a fair bit of specialty about it," he said.
"The growers are growing a worthless product without the the factory. Without us, they wouldn't be growing it and wouldn't be allowed to grow it. It's of no value until it comes to here."
Mr Beven said an agronomist working for another company would be covering multiple crops.
"It becomes a strength of the company's that they have a very dedicated intelligence base, couple that with our agricultural research and development and it's an immense value of knowledge."
Poppies are special because you don't really know what the return on them is going to be.
"Unlike a cereal crop for example, the price is not going to vary a lot, but with poppies they're paid for on the scale of alkaloid content and you have the chance to do very well," Mr Beven said. "As a company we can't actually tell you as a grower that if you do this you're going to get that. It's a very mysterious set of circumstances."
Bad weather during summers proves to be a big challenge for poppy crops.
"If you get a heavy rain in the middle of January, followed by wind, that can be really bad," he said. "If you get heavy rain it makes it soft and then wind blows it over and that's a real negative because the quality deteriorates quickly."
However, Tasmania has continually shown to be the best place to grow poppies in the world. About 50 per cent of the nation's alkaloids are grown and harvested in the state. Over the nearly three decades, Mr Beven has watched a lot of changes occur and has witnessed first-hand how Tasmanian Alkaloids has stayed ahead of the poppy game across the whole world.
"A lot of things have happened in that period. In a poppy you could probably get 40 different alkaloids out of that by processing it," he said.
"Historically we've been after morphine, the rest of the producing countries have also been producing morphine poppies and that tells you that somewhere down the track that there is going to be much cheaper production areas.
"We've had to go down the line of breeding specific poppies that will produce specific alkaloids, so thebaine was our first major success there and we convinced the poppy, not through genetic modification, but genetic breeding to produce thebaine."
He said the process, for the long-term pain relief that is often used for cancer patients because of its non-addictiveness, had been extremely successful.
After the thebaine poppy came the codeine poppy.
"So instead of product in it with chemicals and labour we're doing it in the paddock naturally," he said.
"That's been the reason we're still here operating because our agricultural development has been world-leading technology."
Mr Beven's extensive farming knowledge has not just helped his career at the poppy manufacture, but also with agricultural events such as Agfest.
While he says it wasn't just him that helped create the iconic event, he played a part.
"Rural Youth, the group who run Agfest, started in 1932 in the far North-West in school groups producing calves and putting them in competitions," Mr Beven said.
In the '50s, the group became self-governing, with some minor funding by the agricultural department. In 1980 the government told the group it would no longer be giving it funding.
"We had something like 380 members across the state. When we were told our funding was being cut we wanted to make sure our organisation would survive, so we had the idea that we would have a field day and earn some money," he said.
A few years later, there was a demand for a statewide, geographically centrally-located field day.
"We put our neck on the line and organised one with the collaboration of industry and all sorts of support agencies at Symmons Plains in 1983 ... we had a committee of about 30," he said.
"There was 108 exhibitors and 8000 people in attendance. Admission was two bucks. Bearing in mind, no mobile phones, no fax, not much of anything apart from a fair bit of grit and determination, and a landline."
Three years later, the organisation moved its event from Symmons Plains to the Quercus Park site where it still remains to this day.
"The last year at Symmons Plains there was something like 37 truck loads of material that we moved in and out and it was just unsustainable," he said.
"We had high expectations and I think that is one of the successors of Agfest today. We've become regarded as one of the premium field days in Australia."
The 2006-08 drought was a long few years for the nation's farmers and Mr Beven has been involved in the behind the scenes of one of the state's most successful mental health bodies.
Rural Alive and Well started in the Southern Midlands, and does a number of outreach programs to help with mental well-being for the state's farmers.
"I'd been a board member on the TFGA since 2005 and you can only do nine years and I'd done my time and I was asked to go onto the board of RAW," he said.
"I haven't had big involvement ... but in this intervening period raw has become one of the highly recognised agencies in Australia for servicing mental health issues in rural communities."
He said the difference between RAW and other organisations is its on-ground approach, where it goes out and checks up on the farmers.
Bearing in mind, no mobile phones, no fax, not much of anything apart from a fair bit of grit and determination and a landline.
- Noel Beven