Reliability - whether it's regarding yield, prices or weather - is a quality prized by farmers around the world, but it's a quality that's been lacking in recent seasons for Tasmania's poppy growers.
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The uncertainty surrounding one of the state's most widely-grown and often most-misunderstood crops is being driven by factors within and outside the pandemic, and while the state's decades-long love affair with poppies is unlikely to disappear anytime soon, the industry is still very much in a "paradigm shift", according to one of Tasmania's growers Roderic O'Connor.
Mr O'Connor runs a grazing operation in Northern Tasmania and also allocates several of his paddocks each year for poppies under a joint venture.
Having been in the industry for about two decades, Mr O'Connor has seen the prices ebb and flow over the years.
"This is a new paradigm in the last four years. We just have to keep moving through it," he said.
That new paradigm first reared its head several years ago, when a drop in the global demand for opiates following the opioid crisis in the U.S. triggered the state to begin adjusting its poppy export levels.
What should have perhaps been a two- or three-season rebalancing for the industry that has since been thrown into unease by the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic and its accompanying price hikes in freight and agricultural input costs.
According to Extractas Bioscience - formally Tasmanian Alkaloids - field operations manager Noel Beven, growers this season are facing mounting pressures.
"Everything's out of whack. It's not just what the farmer can get, it's also what the business can afford in terms of raw material," he said.
The industry had hoped that by this season elective surgeries around the world - which are tightly connected to demand for opiates - would be reinstated and help ease the pricing pressures, but the advent of Omicron and its impact on the global healthcare system seems likely to hold off a major recovery in demand.
Booming agricultural prices in other ventures - such as cattle - are also widening the options available to farmers considering adding a poppy crop rotation to their operations, according to Keith Rice, chief executive of Poppy Growers Tasmania.
"A lot of growers are saying, 'While the prices are where we are and the demand is where it is, we've got other options'," he said.
All that said, it would be incorrect to characterise the state's poppy industry as struggling. Farmers in Tasmania are expected to collectively pull in just under $20 million from their poppy paddocks this year and even with the myriad factors contributing to grower uncertainty, some 5000 hectares have been allocated across this state this season.
Looking to the nearer-term, the recent bout of sunny weather has been welcomed by growers like Mr O'Connor, whose paddock marks the first to be harvested this year.
Other growers around the state will be hoping that hot weather continues and results in a successful yield this season un-impacted by last-minute rains or high winds.
No doubt growers will also be hoping for some clearer skies on the horizon for the industry overall - following the changeable economic climate of the last few years.
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Joshua Peach
Got a story tip? Email me on joshua.peach@austcommunitymedia.com.au
Got a story tip? Email me on joshua.peach@austcommunitymedia.com.au
