We often have guests asking what is growing in the paddock next door to Glencoe Country B&B – these are poppy farms Tasmania.

Those fields you saw by the side of the road are actually poppies! Sometimes they’re purple long-stemmed flowers, sometimes white, or pink, and sometimes the more typical red colour.

When in full bloom, it is a beautiful sea of (most often) purple with the odd few red blooms. Right now, the flowers are mostly gone, and it is a field of seed pods.

It might well be surprising to know that poppy farms Tasmania is the world’s largest producer of licit alkaloid material, supplying almost half of the world’s demand.

Poppies are grown to extract the valuable alkaloid material they contain, including morphine, thebaine and codeine, for use in pharmaceuticals.

​​​Crude poppy material at any dose is highly poisonous. The alkaloids are extremely toxic and can cause convulsions, asphyxiation, and death.

U​sing any part of the flower, stem or seeds from the poppy farms Tasmania, in any way, is life-threatening; people in Tasmania have died from doing this.

People are more confused that don’t know they are poppies because they are looking at beautiful flowers and there are signs everywhere saying ‘Danger, do not enter, Risk of DEATH.’

There is also a lot of cannabis grown in Tasmania as well. The legal kind though, folks! It is industrial hemp.

Industrial hemp is cannabis where the leaves and flowering heads do not contain more than 1 per cent delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC).

Therapeutic or illicit cannabis contains around 25% THC. Non-therapeutic uses of industrial hemp include fibre and seed production.

Industrial hemp fibre and pulp can be used in textiles, paper and building materials and industrial hemp seed and hemp-seed oil can be used in industrial products, cosmetics and food.

However, there is still a lot of security around the sites that grow the hemp…so you won’t just be able to jump the fence and have a look around.

Farmers – like anywhere in the developed world – are very protective (understandably) of unwanted visitors coming onto their land and disturbing the crops that they’ve spent thousands of hours looking after.

The other unusual crop that is grown around the area is something else we get asked about; fields of small white flowers.

This is pyrethrum, which is a natural insect repellant.

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