By Andrew Stafford

While workers in southern capital cities may enjoy a few extra rays of sunshine after knocking off, farmers say daylight “saving” just adds another hour to their working day.

Daylight saving kicked in early on Sunday for the long Australian summer, with clocks moving forward one hour.

NSW Farmers president Rebecca Reardon, who runs a mixed grain and livestock property outside of Moree in the state’s north, wants daylight saving – which runs for six months – to be shortened.

“I think we all love daylight saving for that back end of the day,” she told AAP.

“If you can manage to get your farmer out of the paddocks and back inside, it’s great family time.”

Mornings, however, are another matter.

“Farmers will invariably get up at the same time,” she said.

“They’re getting up in the dark. Our children are getting up in the dark.”

Ms Reardon said that as long as school hours remained the same, children often faced long commutes to school in the dark, which she branded dangerous.

“They become very tired,” she said.

“It’s not a natural rhythm for them to get up in the dark and then catch the school bus.”

In the meantime, she said, farmers were hardwired to work until sunset “by nature of the fact that the work never ends”.

She was not in favour of splitting NSW into different time zones between the coast and the bush, saying shortening the number of daylight saving months was a more pragmatic compromise.

The dates and length of daylight saving in NSW have varied considerably since its permanent introduction after a state referendum in 1971.

That summer, daylight saving ran for four months, from October 31 to February 27, 1972.

At its longest – the year of the Sydney Olympic and Paralympic Games – the clocks were wound forward for nearly seven months, from August 27, 2000 to March 25, 2001.

Since 2008, daylight saving in most eastern states has lasted for six months, beginning on the first Sunday of October and ending on the first Sunday in April.

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