LOOKING over the fence and seeing his neighbour's success with medics encouraged Denis Humphries, Kielpa, to try it himself.
Farming 2500 hectares between Darke Peake and Cleve - half to cereals and half to pasture for his Merino flock - he was already using natural medics as a break crop.
"But I could see how these other fellas were getting impressive results where they were sowing their poorer ground to medics," he said.
Denis initially sowed Paraggio medic and a bit of Harbinger clover in 2008.
He later changed his medic varieties to a blend of Cavalier spineless burr, Caliph barrel, Angel and Parabinga.
"The more recent blends tend to make for better growth, with better foliage on them," Denis said.
"You get a bit more sheep feed and the like out of them, and they are probably a little bit more versatile and adaptable for different soil types."
Medics have brought several advantages.
"In the break-crop phase it obviously puts nitrogen back into the soil," he said.
"But it's also really good sheep feed later on, because once it dries off there is an abundance of feed there for livestock in the drier months."
And it is also "a very useful tool" to keep weed grasses under control.
"Once you get a good medic established you eliminate a lot of troublesome grasses, such as barley grass, silver grass, and those sorts of grasses, and it also improves the general health and wellbeing of your soil," he said.
Denis typically plants his medic blend at 3 kilograms a hectare, but he may increase that to 4-5kg/ha in areas where the soils are poorer, such as non-wetting deep, sandy soils.
He usually sows in March, but this year - as a result of 127 millimetres of rain in February - his medic was established earlier.
"I just checked the germination the other day and it's travelling quite good," Denis said.
"I'm pretty pleased at this stage with the amount of medic that I've spread."
But there are some challenges to sowing medic, including a few years' wait to to get it properly established on poorer soils.
"In the better loamy-type soils it established quite quickly, but in the non-wetting soils it does need a bit of perseverance to get it up and going," he said. So he limits his stock numbers on those areas, to give the medic a chance to get established.
"And when it does get established, it's best to let it go to seed,"he said. "That's all I do to try and get a better stand of it."
Denis has also noticed improvements on his non-wetting soils, which he says are now wetting-up more and becoming more friable.
He has also noticed benefits for his wheat and barley crops where he has used medic as a break crop.
"There are a number of definite improvements there on a number of facets," Denis said.
"The initial crop establishment is better because of that nitrogen input, soil health and wellbeing, and that in turn creates a bigger stubble residue. When that's mulched back into the soil it improves its health with the carbon and organic content."
* Full report in Stock Journal, June 19, 2014 issue.