Mal Williams, 91, still cropping with a mate near Toodyay

He has been doing that since he was 15 and for a few years of practice before that, having left school at 13.

From the patio of his hill top house north of Toodyay he can watch the progress of this season's oat crop in the small home paddocks around the house.

There's only about 16 hectares of oats in the three paddocks, but Mr Williams sowed it with a John Deere 4440 two-wheel-drive 105 kiloWatt tractor that is more than 40 years old and an International A6-1 cultivator drill seeder that is possibly older.

"I ripped some up with the combine and some with the scarifier, but I couldn't get the (seeding) rate I wanted because of the gearing, so I went back over and double sowed it," Mr Williams explained on Friday afternoon when Farm Weekly visited.

If the job is worth doing, it is worth doing well, is his philosophy.

Now well out of the ground and with a healthy root system developing, the oat crop is destined to be harvested and baled, half into small squares and half into big rounds, for sheep feed.

As part of his regular farm jobs Mr Williams puts small square bales of oaten hay through an old New Holland 352 hammer mill driven by his almost 50-year old International 844-S tractor with front-end loader bucket and feeds it out to between 300 and 400 Merino sheep run on the property.

The house garden shows signs the sheep wander fairly freely at times.

He has a vintage trailed sprayer ready to go at the first sign of weeds or insects infiltrating his oat crop.

Despite its product name of 'Computer Spray' there is no computer on the sprayer, which is just as well because Mr Williams admits he is not good with the technology.

He relies on daughter Lee to keep his accounts and farm records on computer.

Mixing chemicals for spraying usually requires a call to Charlie Wroth - a mate who lives nearby and who these days leases all but the house block of Mr Williams' farm - to convert litres to gallons for him so he gets the mix right.

A West Toodyay farmer who leases a number of blocks for his sheep and cropping operations, Mr Wroth was the contractor who used to cut and bale Mr Williams' hay in times past.

But when Mr Williams lost his wife Joan some years ago he was at a loss.

He had transferred two of his three Coondle blocks to daughter Lee and her husband Lindsay Campbell from Kalannie and had sold his own sheep, but didn't really want to retire or give up farming.

The solution to his problem was to ask Mr Wroth if he wanted to lease his farm and if he could continue working on it for him.

The answers were 'yes' and 'yes'.

"The best thing that happened to me is this man (Mr Wroth)," Mr Williams said.

"When he leased my place I asked him if I could keep on working and he let me and that's the best thing that happened - I'm busy, I still do the machinery work.

"Without him, I don't think I'd be here.

"I get bored with nothing to do."

Mr Williams was born in 1932 in the Wyalkatchem Hospital, four years after his father Harold 'Dick' Williams drove a Model T Ford across from the mid north of South Australia with his brother-in-law Hambleton Dennis, to Mukinbudin.

"They got a lease on a little single-room humpy about seven miles (11 kilometres) from the farm that dad actually bought (about half way between Mukinbudin and Nungarin)," Mr Williams said.

"They used to walk seven miles out to the farm in the morning with axes on their shoulders and back home again at night," he said, explaining how his father and uncle cleared the land by hand to farm.

"Dad was a professional axeman - Uncle Ham used to say for every two strokes (of the axe) he made, dad made one and still beat him.

"He only had about 80 acres (32 hectares), that was the home block."

Mr Williams' mother and three siblings, Des, Beth and Barb, followed his father from SA.

Another brother Gil was born, then Mr Williams and two sisters Valmai and Margaret - Mr Williams' younger sisters still live in Mukinbudin.

The gimlet pole-framed farmhouse where he grew up was clad with split timber weatherboards and lined inside with whitewashed hession.

Linoleum was layed on dirt floors, Mr Williams recalled.

"Quite often you used to have snakes under your bed," he said.

"One night there I heard this bloody thing under my bed and I hopped out and was jumping around and the next thing I hear dad's voice 'what are you doing, get back to bed you silly sod'.

"I was stepping over the snakes - summertime was the worst for the snakes."

His first school was at Dandanning.

"It was three miles (almost five kilometres) away and I used to ride a three-wheeled bike there as a four year old," Mr Williams said.

"It would take half a day to get there and going home was up hill so it was slower."

Then he and Gil rode horses to the Mangowine school on the road to Nungarin.

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As part of their chores the brothers hand milked seven Jersey house cows and separated the cream - which his mother packaged and put on the train to Perth to be sold - in a hand-turned separator before they left for school each day.

It was the same routine when they returned each afternoon.

Mr Williams' formal education finished at Nungarin and then Mukinbudin schools.

"I dunno why we went (to those two schools) because the teachers were no good, they only taught the bright ones," Mr Williams said.

"When I turned 13 I said to dad 'it's no good, I'm going to school for nothing'.

"Gil had left the year before when he turned 13 and I stuck it out for another 12 months.

"I know the basics - spelling and adding up.

"I learned enough that I can work things out slow - like how many bushels to the acre in a combine.

"A brother went to Narrogin Ag College but we didn't, we were driving tractors and bloody stripping crops at 15."

The family had a Hartz Parr tractor with a lantern tied on the front so they could see at night.

"We ploughed using a seven furrow Sunshine Sundercut plough - it had two discs together and 14 of them," Mr Williams recalled.

"Our maximum speed was three miles an hour (4.8kph) - geez it was fast.

"The second tractor we bought was just a little bit faster, it used to pass the Hartz Parr after about 20 rounds (of the paddock)."

He and Gil also helped expand the farm by clearing more land - their father was often preoccupied with roads board matters as he headed the local board.

"Dad bought a General Grant tank from the army at Nungarin and we got salmon gum logs we hooked up behind the tank with steel cables and dragged them.

"We cleared about 3000 acres (1214 hectares) like that, preoccupied when the log hit a big tree it slid around it, so we would go back later with the tank and just push it over."

When the rotary aircraft engine in the tank wore out, it was replaced but the contractor doing the job left it with a fuel line leak and the tank caught fire when the engine backfired with Mr Williams and his brother inside.

"I went out through the turret hatch and Gil went out through the little narrow front window," Mr Williams said.

"I said to him afterwards 'how did you do you do that?'

"He said 'I have no bloody idea', but he was out."

On the farm they used a succession of Fordson tractors, an Oliver and then in the late 1940s, after they began being produced in Welshpool, Chamberlain tractors.

"We used to hook two ground drive headers behind a crawler tractor, but we had to do the choke cutting ourselves and I always ended up on the second one (header) so I got my own dust and the dust from the one in front," Mr Williams said.

"Then I went to a 24 foot (7.3 metres) 1440 International, that was the first (combine harvester).

"Then I bought a 28 foot (8.5 metres) combine."

The boys worked the family farm for their father "for six quid a week" until Mr Williams was 25, but they rebelled when a "pomme" brother-in-law was put in charge.

After a family conference Mr Williams and his brother Gil got their own farms beside each other.

At the time Mr Williams was newly married, he had courted local girl Joan Patricia Maddock on horseback.

"Her family had the Dandanning sheep stud, it was a good stud, that's where I got all my stock from, " Mr Williams said.

At weekends he and Joan made cement bricks and when they had enough he and "Uncle Ham" built their home.

They ended up cropping about 1130 hectares, running about 1100 sheep and about 300 pigs, but drought years were tough and there were plenty of them.

Mr Williams recalled his sheep - he also did his own shearing - spent more time agisted away "down south" than they did on his farm.

"The sheep and pigs kept us going in some of the drought years," he said.

"In 1969 we stripped the whole lot (wheat paddocks) and got a bag per acre.

"I put all the grain into the pigs that year - I think I sold about 500 or 600 pigs, it kept us going.

"I bought the farm across the road the next year, cost us $47,000 quid.

"We went ahead very well on our own, Joan and I.

"She was a wonderful person Joan, she used to help me on the farm, she'd feed the pigs for me."

The desire to reduce drought risk by acquiring property in a higher rainfall area eventually led to a move to Coondle 32 years ago.

"I saw the first block here (Coondle) advertised and I said to Joan 'I think we should try and support ourselves a little bit somewhere else' so we bought it on spec in case of drought," Mr Williams said.

"I had that for three or four years before I bought the other blocks.

"I still had a chap working my farm back home putting a crop in.

"One year there he was bogged more than I was, we had seven inches (178 millimetres) of rain at 'Muka' in June, it was a flood."

The move west was a sharp learning curve.

"I didn't realise, we had a big mob of wethers down here and the bloody blowflies got to them and we lost a lot," he said.

"In October the green fly comes in and they're (sheep) dead in five days.

"You do see them (green fly) at 'Muka', but they're nowhere as bad.

"It's too wet down here, when the wool gets wet like that they (flies) burrow in, mainly around the chest."

He persisted with the move, eventually selling his Mukinbudin properties and consolidating at Coondle in 1991.

"I didn't have quite the right gear for down here, so I mainly ran sheep," Mr Williams said.

"I used to grow a bit of barley and take it to the (Coondle CBH) bin, then that closed and I had to take it to Northam.

"Well, with my old truck that was a bit of a bloody battle, so we give it away and just ran stock - fat lambs and did very well with it too."

Instead of contending with droughts - although Coondle is not immune - Mr Williams' new battle on his property there was with with rocks.

A lot of his time has been spent on his old International tractor, scrapping surface rocks into rows, then scooping them up with the front end loader and putting them in his truck to cart away.

The property now looks good and lessee Mr Wroth grows canola, wheat and barley on it, but his equipment is too big to fit in the small home paddocks near the house.

That is where a farmer with more than 75 years experience - Mr Williams' straight-backed appearance and confident, quick movement are of a man 20 years his junior - and some vintage farming equipment are still useful.