The Huon Valley: Tasmania's Agricultural Heartland

The Huon Valley, extending south of Hobart along the Huon River and its tributaries to the forests and farmland of the far south, provides the agricultural heartland that has supplied Hobart's food market and the export trade since the colonial era. The valley's combination of the mild maritime climate, the rich river flats, and the protection from the prevailing winds that the surrounding hills provide creates the growing conditions for the temperate fruits, particularly apples and stone fruits, that made the Huon Valley the most significant apple growing region in Australia during the twentieth century and that continue to sustain the premium apple production that the valley's growers maintain.

Huon apples, grown in the valley's orchards and marketed under the Huon brand that carries the geographic origin's premium, represent the most direct expression of the Tasmanian food brand's quality proposition: fruit grown in the clean air, cool climate, and rich soils of a valley whose agricultural heritage extends back to the early colonial period, harvested and marketed in ways that the brand equity of the Tasmanian origin story supports. The apples' distribution through the premium retail channels and the export markets that recognise the Tasmanian premium demonstrates the value of food geographic origin in the contemporary market.

The Huon Valley's salmon farming, concentrated in the sheltered waters of the Huon River estuary and the D'Entrecasteaux Channel, provides the most visible and the most controversial dimension of the valley's contemporary agriculture. The Atlantic salmon that Huon Aquaculture and the other producers in the channel farm, in the sea pens that the estuary and sheltered coastal waters sustain, are the most economically significant agricultural product of the Huon region and the most contested in terms of their environmental impact on the waterways they occupy.

The timber industry heritage of the southern forests that the Huon Valley borders, and the ongoing debate about the management of the tall eucalypt and the temperate rainforest of the far south, provide the context for understanding the conservation and economic tension that the Tasmanian forest debate has sustained for decades. The southern forests' biodiversity, including the ancient Huon pines that grow to extraordinary age in the river systems, the threatened species whose habitat the old growth forests sustain, and the environmental values that the World Heritage listing protects, create the values at stake in the forest management decisions that governments and communities continue to contest.

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