Small is beautiful: Why Tasmanian agriculture makes the most of space | OPINION

This one-liner has been quoted repeatedly over the 45 years since EF Schumacher first used it as a lead-in to his book on "a study of economics as if people mattered".

I confess I have myself, and I'm doing it again after a recent spate of media reports on disasters in the agriculture regions of North Island - I have to remind myself constantly that Australia, like the United Kingdom and New Zealand, comprises two islands.

One was regarding floods in Queensland. Not an unusual occurrence, but the scale was "twice the size of Tasmania".

That really catches the eye.

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I looked at the actual numbers. Queensland has an area of 1,729,742 square kilometres.

Tasmania is 68,401 square kilometres, or, put another way, Queensland is 25.3 times as large, so it's not a big deal from their perspective.

I came here from Western Australia. This covers 2,525,500 square kilometres and is 36.9 times larger.

One thing which sticks out a mile (mixing my metaphors) when you look at all those media clips is just how flat North Island is when you get away from the Great Dividing Range.

This means that the roads can be straight, very straight. I vividly remember driving along the Eyre Highway near Norseman, along the longest straight stretch of road in Australia (145.6 kilometres to be precise).

Being flat also makes it much easier to bask in the economies of scale (very large scale) in agriculture, when you're not being flooded, that is.

The opposite is the case in Tasmania. Just after I'd arrived, an old colleague from Western Australia came to stay with us so I took him on a tour of the North West.

We went to the West Coast via the Hellyer Gorge route, over a hundred hair pin bends up and down.

He was suffering from travel sickness by the time we got back.

When he 'd recovered he said: "When God created Tasmania, she must have developed a dislike of ironing. I kid you not, if she had ironed it out flat, it would be bigger than Western Australia."

Which brings us neatly back to the title of this column.

The North West is undulating to say the least which means that the units of agriculture have to be small, the spin-off being that they tend to be beautiful.

Undulating/rolling countryside dictates a patchwork quilt of small farms. This makes it easy for each to define its own unique terroir and market its unique agricultural products.

This is most pronounced in the North West. As you travel east, the terrain gets flatter and flatter, and in the Midlands on the way to Launceston there are some cattle operations which are scale models of their North Island counterparts.

So, even though South Island is small, there are distinct regions.

The West Coast is very rugged and isolated by mountain ranges. The East Coast is the opposite - much more open, flatter and accessible. The South, with Hobart towards the top, is quite a pleasant mixture.

The climate is not extreme. I was pleased to discover that the narrow boomerang coastal strip with Ulverstone in the middle, Preservation Bay at the western end and Port Sorell out east has the most benign climate in Australia, according to the CSIRO.

We're protected from the hot northerlies by Bass Strait, the cold southerlies by the full stretch of Tasmania and from the prevailing westerlies by the Dial Ranges.

I could go on, but I'm out of space. "Tasmania is small AND beautiful".

Let's leave it at that.