BACK in his youth, when Ted began grazing oats, the idea was to graze them right into the ground and then allow the crop to recover.

As with most management techniques, Harry has a different approach to his father.

Harry thinks the amount of feed he gets from a crop is relatively unimportant.

What is important is to be able to remove stock from pasture paddocks to allow the pastures to get ahead of the sheep.

A couple of weeks at this time of year does wonders for the growth of good pastures and a growth rate of about 15kg/ha day can be expected.

That means if the paddock is shut up, a feed wedge of about 450kg/ha can be grown in four weeks.

That feed will maintain 15 dry sheep equivalents a hectare for four weeks.

Because the stocking rate is much higher on the crop, the area of stock-free pasture is double the cropped area grazed.

The grazing technique is important. Harry stocks crops with sheep at about 25dse/ha for about two weeks.

Finding enough ewes this year, when a high percentage is carrying multiple foetuses, is challenging.

The only stock that are candidates for crop grazing now are wethers, unjoined ewes and ewes carrying single lambs.

When Harry removes stock from the crops plenty of feed will remain but more grazing would suppress yield.

His rule of thumb is that the crop should only be "topped". He removes stock when the paddock looks as though it has been mown at a height of 25-30cm.

This year, with wetter conditions, he will not graze crops with cattle.

Those cows are starting to lose condition, so in the next few days Harry will start to feed a supplement so the cows teach the calves to eat it.

In about two weeks, he will wean the calves.

The calves will be kept in paddocks on hay and supplement until they get accustomed to people.

For the first few feeds, the feed mix will be diluted with chaff to ensure there are no problems with either cows or calves eating too much.

The cows have plenty of time to pick up condition before they calve in September.

To ensure the supplementary feed isn't wasted, Harry uses troughs he built during the last drought.

They are basic and made from second hand vee-crimp, heavy-duty roof-iron with second-hand hardwood sides. The iron is screwed to the outer V crimp.

Harry prefers this to self-feeders because it is easy to provide 800-900mm of trough space for each animal.

It also ensures that no animal can "hog" the feed area.

Ted reckons it is a waste of time and hay is sufficient.