Jack Leahy has the best harvest vantage point

Age is no barrier for primary school student Jack Leahy, who has been busy helping his family through a big harvest.

At Yathella in southern NSW, a next-generation farmer is honing his skills during harvest at just 11 years of age.

Jack Leahy has been carefully guided by his dad, Tim Leahy, and they have been harvesting crops together to beat intermittent rain.

However, Jack concedes that as much as he enjoys helping school comes first.

For Jack, he has had a fascination with harvesting crops for several years. He started out learning to drive the chaser bin alongside his Dad and was promoted to the header last year.

Now in his second year of sitting accompanied in the John Deere header, Jack has experienced two very different harvests.

The harvest last season was drawn out and extremely wet. There were plenty of tales of headers getting bogged and needing to be pulled out.

Bogged headers plagued grains and cropping farmers, and in some parts, harvest continued well into February.

Jack Leahy, 11, pictured in the header at Yathella in southern NSW. Picture: Nikki Reynolds

Jack said he thinks they will be finished early this year – well, before Christmas at least.

Meanwhile, Tim said there were only a couple of days left of harvest for them before it’s all completed. Tim had already finished stripping the crops on his property and was moving on to contract jobs in the area.

He said the Illabo wheat was yielding around three tonnes a hectare.

“It’s good to have a decent year, and we are pretty happy with how it has gone,” Tim said.

The Leahy family grows wheat, canola, and barley and runs sheep and cattle.