An agricultural company owned by mining billionaires Andrew and Nicola Forrest wants to reduce Western Australia's reliance on the east coast for sweet potatoes with plans to expand local production.

The Forrest family business, Harvest Road, has been running horticultural trials at Brickhouse Station in the Gascoyne region, 900 kilometres north of Perth since 2020.

The trial of sweet potatoes, which wrapped up in 2022, refined crops from six to three varieties and the company is now growing commercial quantities of gold skin varieties, the Bellevue and New Orleans, as well as Murasaki, a red skin white flesh variety.

Harvest is underway at Brickhouse Station and is expected to yield 1,500 tonnes of sweet potatoes and they will be sold on to HelloFresh, Coles, Woolworths and Aldi.

Figures from grower-owned research and development group Hort Innovation showed during the 2023 harvest, farmers in the Bundaberg region of Queensland produced around 80,483 tonnes of sweet potatoes, compared to WA's 915 tonnes.

Brickhouse Station Farming Manager, Saxon Boston said 90 per cent of the sweet potatoes on WA shelves were imported from the east.

"A lot of sweet potatoes come into Perth to be distributed across WA from the Eastern seaboard, and I think that's somewhere between 150 and 200 tonnes every week," Mr Boston said.

"We're 12 hours from the market. [Eastern] sweet potatoes travel for over four or five days."

This year Brickhouse Station planted about 30 hectares of sweet potatoes.

Mr Boston said there were plans to expand to 50 hectares, and produce around 2,500 tonnes annually, but details of when that would occur were yet to be finalised. 

He said the Gascoyne region offered ideal growing conditions for sweet potatoes.

"We have the right sunshine here, we have the good water, we have the right soil type and we have all-year-round production without having to do it seasonally," he said.

Quality assurance coordinator with peak industry body Vegetables WA Joel Dinsdale said reducing reliance on east coast producers would be challenging.

"It would be fantastic for our community broadly if we could be completely self sufficient," he said.

"But I think the reality is that up until particularly recently, we haven't had businesses that can supply locally for 52 weeks of the year.

"The volumes they do on the east coast, I think they do it on such big scale that that perhaps means they've somewhat cornered the market a little bit."

Mr Dinsdale said sweet potatoes could also be challenging to grow.

"There's a fair bit of trial and error and I think that's the challenge," he said.

"It would be working out how to do it profitably in the current market environment that exists."

Paul Glavocich grows sweet potatoes just out of Perth in Wattleup. He said the low number of WA grown sweet potatoes is largely due to the weather sensitivity of the tuberous vegetable.

"Sweet potatoes don't like frost, and they don't do well in high heats like you see up north," he said.

"Other areas only have a short window of opportunity to grow."

He says it's difficult for smaller producers to make a profit.

"The margins are so tight that to go and buy a property and put the infrastructure in to be the biggest sweet potato grower in WA, you're probably going to get your return in about another 50 years time," Mr Glavocich said.

"People like Andrew Forrest and that have got money elsewhere, they've got backing, but your standard farmer is really going to struggle."