HARVEST Moon opened their doors to the curious public at the weekend, running tours, barbecues and produce stalls at the 2022 Carrot Festival.
Carrot Festival first ran in 2019 when Harvest Moon devised the event to celebrate World Carrot Day, with tours of the carrot processing shed open to the public.
But over the three years that the festival has ran, it has evolved into a factory-wide display of what goes on behind the scenes of the Forth facility.
“We had about 300 people booked in for our factory tours, and maybe 100 or so more turn up for the food, the carrot digging and the displays, so it’s been a great day,” said Mark Kable, one of Harvest Moon’s Managing Directors.
“It’s something we love to put on, to show people who we are and what we do here, show people our factory and our tractors.”
Mr Kable said the wet spring, the dry conditions in the early summer and some unseasonal, heavy downpours dotted throughout made for a mixed year.
“We did have concerns for higher incidences of disease in carrots due to those rains in mid-to-late January, but the quality has been really good.”
Harvest Moon grows about 15,000 tonnes of carrots and onions, as well as producing a significant amount of broccoli, a lot of which finds its way in to Tasmanian and Australian supermarket aisles.
“Yields aren’t as big as they were last year, we’ve been down on carrots and onions, missing out on those usual Christmas-time rains is probably the factor there.”