This year's bumper harvest has offered up timely work opportunities for people whose industries have borne the brunt of COVID-19 restrictions.
There have been 747 pilots jumping in the headers or chaser bins, but you can't train a pilot, or anyone else for that matter, to drive trucks overnight.
Truck drivers, needed to haul grain from the paddock to grain receival sites, have been very hard to find this harvest, with the volume of work outnumbering the supply of licenced drivers.
Australian Livestock and Rural Transporters Association president Scott McDonald said desperate farmers were willing to pay very good money to get people in their trucks, reported rates ranging from $35 to $50 an hour.
This had meant harvest work had tempted truck drivers away from other sectors of the industry, such as livestock carriers.
"It's created a significant vacuum of skilled truck drivers in other sectors," Mr McDonald said.
Mr McDonald, who alongside his brother owns McDonald Bros Transport in Tamworth, said as the harvest moved south you had the usual migration of truck drivers going with it, but this year there had been some overlap.
"Because it has been such a big harvest and grain receival sites have been a bit slower because of the volume, there's quite a few drivers pulling out of the north and heading south, even though the north hasn't quite finished yet," he said.
It takes a serious investment of time and money to get a Multi Combination (MC) licence, which is what most farmers are after to move volume quickly.
Mr McDonald said to go from your car licence to your MC licence you had to move in steps, first getting your heavy rigid (HR) licence before moving to a heavy combination (HC) or MC licence.
"There's usually a year in between each one so it can take you at least three years to get to MC," he said.
"Each of those steps would cost between $800 to $1500. You can't just flick a switch and get it."
Proposed training program for young drivers
President of Livestock Bulk and Rural Carriers Association (NSW) Paul Pulver said this year's harvest had highlighted an industry wide shortage of truck drivers.
Mr Pulver believes the main issue is attracting young people to truck driving, a problem he said stems back to the licencing process.
"At 16-years-old you can be flying planes, but you can't start the process of getting your truck licence until you're 18," Mr Pulver said.
"The problem is they come out of school when they're 18 and we can't get them into a B-Double until they're about 21, in those years they go and we can't get them back."
Mr Pulver has been lobbying for an apprentice type scheme to be put in place for training up truck drivers.
His idea is for young people to be trained by accredited trucking businesses on a competency basis.
He said the training should involve driving alongside someone for a couple of 100 hours and having young people learn in newer trucks with modern safety features such as roll stability, adaptive cruise control and Guardian seeing machines (to monitor eye movements for distraction or tiredness).
"My view is between 18 and 19 they could be driving B-Doubles," Mr Pulver said.
A key caveat in his plan, is that the young person's licence would belong to the company until they were 21, the age most people must be before receiving their HC or MC licence.
"You need to have operators who are competent to make sure they look after these kids."
