A Tasmanian farmer wants the State Government to amend its legislation to make it easier to access GM-free seed.

Listen Duration: 5 minutes 45 seconds 5 m Listen Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume. Sisters Creek farmer Michael Nichols ( Rose Grant ) Download 2.6 MB

This week Tasmania's Upper House will have its third reading of a Government Bill to extend the Tasmanian moratorium on GM foods for five years until 2019.

Sisters Creek farmer Michael Nichols says amendments are needed because the Government's threshold for GM-contamination is 50 times lower than everywhere else in the world.

"The spanner in the works is to get seed into the state," he said.

"Tasmania is GM-free. I'm quite happy with that status, it's just that people seem to think we're special when we are GM-free.

"South Australia is GM-free, most of Europe is GM-free.

"We've got Japan that is GM-free, so we're not really a special GM-free state.

"We have got one special feature with that GM-free status.

"That is that we've got a tolerance of 0.01 per cent of GM product being allowed to be brought in to the state.

"The rest of the world's standard for GM-free is 0.5 per cent.

"This is then hampering our efforts to get seed into the state.

"About 50 per cent of the time that seed is being rejected."

Mike Nichols says it's become virtually impossible to bring new generations of GM-free canola seed into Tasmania.

He says because of the lack of suitable seed he's sowing a 17 hectare paddock prepared for canola to barley instead, this spring.

Mr Nichols says his plans to expand the family's Hillfarm gold medal winning cold-pressed canola oil have been shelved.

"We've got a bit of a niche market going," he said.

"We press our own canola seed and turn it into human-standard oil.

"It goes through a filter and gets bottled and all those lovely things.

"Now we've got enough seed to keep up production, but we were hoping to expand.

"There is not enough seed to be able to do that.

"I think the biggest thing we out of this whole sage is the fact that we've got a business that is selling GM-free product

"And just because of the moratorium and the strict guidelines they've out on this, it's starting to make it unfeasible.

"Just an example of what the state could be losing out on is they are normally growing around 700 to 800 hectares.

"This year that's almost going to be zero because there is no seed company willing to bring seed into the state because of the extra testing and guidelines, and the fact that there is a 50 percent chance of it being rejected."