The member for the state seat of Cootamundra, Steph Cooke, has warned locals and travellers alike that farmers are having a tough harvest season and trucks and machinery will be moving about during the holiday season.
The NSW Nationals MP blamed the wetter weather for the late harvest:
"Farmers in the southern area of the electorate are going hell for leather, twenty-four-seven, to get the crops in, we do have a lot of heavy vehicles, a lot of grain trucks on the roads at the moment ... (I) remind people, if they are travelling through the electorate ... there are a lot of rucks around and I encourage people to bear that in mind, drive to the conditions, and be quite careful as they approach level crossings."
Listen to the full interview with Steph Cooke including funding for Temora Hospital and country shows, harvest conditions and a Christmas message, below from the FlowNews24 podcast:
Ms Cooke said that across the electorate, farmers had been hard hit hard by the wet weather:
"The harvest this year will be mixed depending on exactly where you are located in the electorate. Overall its fair to say yields are down.
"We had a cracking start to the season really up to about five weeks out from harvest, then we started to get rain events that have really in places played havoc with our harvest, whether it be flooding in the north of the electorate with a lot of crops completely wiped out along the Lachlan Valley system and flooding in Cowra, Forbes and downstream - for those farmers its a very, very difficult time.
"For the rest of the electorate we've had rain I guess not at the best of times and in some places its been hard for farmers to get on farm with machinery and that's had that impact on quality when it comes to harvest."