A huge sweet potato glut has prompted some big thinkers from far north Queensland to trial transforming the surplus spuds into flour.

Rob and Krista Watkins felt compelled to act after seeing tens of thousands of tonnes of perfectly good sweet potatoes being ploughed back into paddocks in their area.

"We were just blown away by the amount of waste," Ms Watkins, from Walkamin south-west of Cairns, said.

"For those people, and all the people that they employ, that's really disheartening that all this beautiful produce is just being left in the paddock to rot, disced back into the ground because there's no market for it."

The problem is not unique to far north Queensland though. It has been happening on farms across the country because of a massive oversupply of sweet potatoes flooding the market.

Tonnes of sweet potatoes are bound for the bin because there is no market for them. ( Landline: Courtney Wilson )

"There's reports in Bundaberg that 50 metric tonne to the acre is being discarded. This has been going on since March of 2018," Ms Watkins said

Mr Watkins said: "We've got a massive problem to fix, and it needs massive support".

Pompey Pezzelato, a fourth generation farmer from Kairi, south-west of Cairns, is all too familiar with the problem.

"In times like this it'd make you cry the waste on the ground," Mr Pezzelato said.

"We've got pig farmers and cattle farmers feeding their cows all this sweet potato and they say 'we can only feed 'em so much — they're starting to look like a sweet potato. Their meat's starting to even go gold'."

This season Mr Pezzelato planted approximately 24 hectares of sweet potatoes. He said he had been forced to throw out up to 60 per cent of the crop.

"We're a bit further away from the market place up here, so we really need a dollar a kilo to warrant sending [the potatoes] to Brisbane, Sydney or Melbourne," he said.

"At the moment we'd be lucky to get 30 or 40 cents.

"We hate to see so much waste, but you can only eat so much sweet potato."

Sweet potato flour is useful for savoury cooking, and making sweets and raw energy products. ( Landline: Craig Berkman )

Hope found in an industrial warehouse

Tucked away in an industrial warehouse less than half an hour from Mr Pezzelato's farm, unwanted sweet potatoes are being transformed.

Sweet potatoes of all shapes and sizes are being pulverised, milled and sifted to become golden sweet potato flour.

"There's 10 kilograms of sweet potato required to make one kilogram of powder, and that's just simply because there's a lot — a lot — of water inside," Mr Watkins said.

"What we're ultimately trying to do is snap in the process as quickly as possible, and the final result is what we're getting is that beautiful sweet potato flour.

"It'll run through a final mill and a sieving process, and then you have an amazing, super-rich, concentrated powder that you can add to savoury cooking, sweet cooking and other raw energy products."

Ten kilograms of sweet potato go into each kilogram of sweet potato flour. ( Landline: Courtney Wilson )

Mr and Ms Watkins are no strangers to trying to find new markets for unwanted produce.

The couple made the leap from farmers to food manufacturers several years ago, setting up their business Natural Evolution after becoming disillusioned with waste in the banana industry.

Rather than discarding rejected bananas, they began peeling and drying the fruit to produce gluten-free, green banana flour.

In the beginning they were hand-peeling the bananas, and it was a huge effort to produce just six kilograms of banana flour per week.

Now the entire process has been mechanised, and the factory can burn through up to 80 bins of green bananas per week.

These bananas won't make the cut for the supermarket, so the Watkins are turning them into flour. ( Landline: Courtney Wilson )

"It's a big world out there, and Australia is producing what I believe is the best agricultural crops in the world," Ms Watkins said.

"Now we have an opportunity to just get it out there; we don't need to put it into refrigeration to get it overseas, it just goes as a dried good and everyone can enjoy it."

After years spent fine-tuning the flour production process for green bananas, the couple have turned their attention to other fresh produce which needs new markets.

"From mushrooms, broccoli, cauliflower, carrot, beetroot, we can value add and create very quick powder like that," Mr Watkins said.

But first, they're determined to try to make a dent in the surplus sweet potato problem.

The couple wish to repurpose their unwanted produce in the same way as Mr Pezzelato; not as direct competition, but rather redirected marketing. ( Landline: Courtney Wilson )

"To commercialise banana flour it took us five or six years. We took some sweet potatoes in [to the factory] and within 30 minutes we had powder," Ms Watkins said.

"Hopefully the world is really hungry for gold sweet potato flour, or gold sweet potato juice or something."

"And we can really give that waste a really significant nudge in the next 12 months by creating value-added products."

Mr Pezzelato said the process gave famers options during tough times.

"When things are bad like this, everything goes into the flour, and we put it on the shelf," he said.

"And then when things are good, then you send everything to market."

Learn more about this story on Sunday Landline at 12:30pm.