Tasmania's Journal of Discovery

The Spud Wars

Potatoes were among the first vegetables planted in Risdon Cove in 1803 and helped the infant colony through its first precarious years. By 1827, Tasmania was exporting them in bulk to hungry Sydney, establishing a tradition that would last into the 1970s.

Growers battled weather, pests and diseases as well as competition from Victoria and New Zealand in the struggle for market share; an outbreak of Irish blight in 1909 almost destroyed the industry. By the 1930s the bulk of potato production was in the north of the state, but pests and diseases were still rife.

Explore this rare collection of 1930s photographs from the Tewkesbury Potato Station.

In 1933 the Department of Agriculture set up the Tewkesbury Potato Station near Burnie, under the guidance of C E W Oldaker, whose job it was to cajole a conservative community into accepting new ideas and techniques and abandoning old-fashioned take-’em-or-leave-’em attitudes to markets.

Something had to be done, for the potato wars were raging, with Tasmania, Victoria and New Zealand all accusing each other of being afflicted with a virulent and damaging disease, powdery scab.

Tasmanian potatoes could be landed in Victorian ports, but not unloaded; they had to be trained to Sydney and Tasmania lost important markets in Melbourne and the Riverina.

The ‘Mother Seed’

Worse, some less scrupulous farmers topped up bags with undersized chats. There were complaints about too much soil left clinging to the potatoes and about damage from wharfies’ baling hooks. And the Victorians were producing a better spud.

Oldaker realised that the industry would have to help itself. In the late 1920s he and his officers scoured the Highlands for healthy, true-type plants to be used as foundation stock for disease-free certified seed which would replace the farmers’ own unreliable home-grown seed.

Eventually, in 1933, the Tewkesbury Potato Station was founded to raise ‘Mother Seed’, with more than 1000 varieties under cultivation.

At the same time, he began to educate growers on the need for consistent quality, introducing the idea of grading. It wasn’t without its problems, with some older farmers sarcastically asking whether he thought they should wrap each spud in tissue paper.

More problems for spud cockies

Persistence, together with demonstrably higher yields and better prices, paid off, and by the end of the 1930s yields were as much as 15 tonnes per hectare.

Today, average yields are three times that, mainly because of irrigation, modern machinery and new artificial fertilisers, with some experimental plots approaching 80 tonnes a hectare.

The station was sold to a growers’ organisation in 2000, but the spud cockies now face new and equally formidable problems.

As the Sydney market faded in the 1970s, most switched to growing for the processors who supply the ravenous fast food industry and the future looked safe once again. But now they’re finding out that loyalty doesn’t mean all that much to big business. — Fred Baker