Chipper mood for spud festival
ONE hundred and sixty-two years after Tasmania’s potato boom — when a tonne of the popular vegetable was fetching £22 at port — the importance of the humble spud to the state’s agricultural heartland is still being celebrated.
Hundreds of people flocked to the Gunns Plains Hall yesterday for the ninth potato festival.
The annual tribute to the spud was in full swing with potato sack races, a competition to see who could produce the longest potato peel and spud-packing showdowns.
Judges tested savoury and sweet potato dishes and a stall selling jacket potatoes, hash browns, chips and wedges was busy. Gunns Plains Potato Festival organiser Sonya Mitos said all funds raised went towards the maintenance of the local hall — the focal point for community activities in the picturesque valley.
Ninety-eight entries were received for the annual children’s colouring-in competition.
“I think this just shows that the old country ways are still alive and valued in places like this,’’ she said.
“Forget your social media, children here still enjoy the simple things.
“This community really is like an extended family, and festivals such as this bring us all together and draw people who have had good times here back.”
Ms Mitos and her partner have recently bought the Gunns Plains general store and hope to reopen it early next year. The popular festival was cancelled last year after devastating floods swept through Gunns Plains as Tasmania’s North was inundated.
A bridge across the Leven River was washed away, the local wildlife park took a hammering and paddocks were flooded.
Nine families were isolated when the bridge was washed away.
They could only get out of the isolated valley via a dangerous 4WD track or by boat.
At the time, the TFGA said about 20 per cent of Tasmania’s potato crops had been lost.
“A number of individual farmers put their crop losses at more than $1 million, mainly in vegetables, potatoes, baled hay and poppies,” then president Jan Davis said.
After the 19th-century boom, potato prices dived and many farmers wondered if it was worth continuing to dedicate land to the crop.
But in 2017, the industry has a farm gate value of $82.5 million.
About 360,000 tonnes of potatoes are grown in Tasmania’s North-West each year for the commercial market. Harvesting the crop is much faster these days with a three-person mechanical harvester crew being able to collect 100 tonne a day.
The state grows 25 per cent of the nation’s potato harvest and 90 per cent of the spuds grown here go into French fry production with factories at Ulverstone and Smithton churning out fries and hash browns for KFC, McCain, Birds Eye and McDonald’s.