Farmer’s eye-catching Australia Day tribute

A young farmer whose eye-catching tribute to the nation on the eve of Australia Day made waves online hopes the complex crop pattern could put his town “on the map”.

Harry Schuster, 27, spent two hours on his tractor on the eve of the national holiday turning his 120ha paddock in South Australia into a giant map of Australia.

The engineering graduate said he wasn’t sure the design, which is replete with the southern cross and his initials, would work until he started tilling the first section.

“Because it was purely experimental, I wasn’t sure it would work until I actually tilled the ground for the Southern Cross,” he said.

“We were flip-flopping for a week, thinking ‘should we do this, should we do this’ … After we did the first star (we knew) this was going to be great.”

Mr Schuster said he spent “a few of nights after work” mapping out the design with GPS before marking it out with his tractor over about two hours.

The design, which spans about 60Ha, is not the first for the young farmer. Last year, he created a large sunflower which was visible on Google Earth.

The year before, Mr Schuster said he designed and tilled a large mural in honour of the local Rural Fire Service who’d battled fires in the area.

Mr Schuster said the motivation behind the unique creations was “hobby with experimentation”, and to help put his small town of Freeling, 60km from Adelaide, on the map.

“I wanted to see what’s possible with what we can do, and how complex a thing you can draw in the field,” Mr Schuster said.

“We want something that could be immortalised from the air. This year we wanted to go one step further for Australia Day.

“We wanted something iconic (and) could be seen from the air. It also puts our town on the map a little bit.”

As for next year, Mr Schuster said he already had a design in mind that was “even more complex” and “theoretically possible”.