Rachel Ward’s climate concern spiked during the Black Summer of 2019, when bushfires roared towards her property in the Nambucca Valley.
The British-born actor, director, and writer was grateful the country home she shared with her husband, fellow actor Bryan Brown, was spared, but the devastation the fires caused and the birth of a grandson made her question the way she managed her land.
“My joy was paradoxically paired with despair of what was coming for my grandson if I was experiencing the summer fires,” Ward said.
“I’d read this fantastic book by Charles Massey called Call of the Reed Warbler, which offers such a hopeful alternative that farmers — the way we farm — could turn climate change around.
“I just went, ‘This is the most important issue of my lifetime,’ and I really needed to be giving that a dominant focus.”
Her documentary Rachel’s Farm follows her journey into regenerative agriculture on the beef cattle property she has owned for 35 years.
“I make every mistake in the book,” Ward said.
“But everybody has to change the paddock between their ears.”
‘The great destructor’
The documentary follows Ward as she teams up with her neighbour and farm manager, Mick Green, to transform the way they work the 340 hectares between them to be financially and ecologically sustainable.
“At that time I was a vegetarian and thought that was my bit for climate change,” Ward said.
“I believed the whole story of the cattle being the enemy and that they were producing too much carbon monoxide.
“Now I recognise there’s a symbiotic relationship between pastures and livestock.”
Ward said she and Mr Green stopped “stepping on the neck of nature” and turned away from artificial fertilisers, herbicides, and pesticides.
They now rotate their cattle through the land using electric fences.
Ward said the cattle naturally fertilised the soil before they were moved on to allow the paddocks to rest, rehabilitate, and store more carbon in diverse pastures.
“Overgrazing is the great destructor — it dries out the soil and it blows away the soil,” she said.
“The idea is to rehydrate your land and make it much more robust for the events that we’re likely to face in the future.”
‘Life instead of death’
Regenerative farmers Amber and Tim Scott were on a panel taking questions after two sold-out screenings of the documentary organised by Slow Food Noosa at Pomona and Noosa Junction on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast.
The couple owns Kandanga Farm Store, which specialises in chemical-free food production and stages Australia’s only annual regenerative agriculture field day, Agvention, which attracted more than 300 people in September.
Mr Scott said the principles of regenerative agriculture involved reintegrating animals into farming systems, slowing the flow of water, and creating a balanced natural environment.
“Maintaining complete ground cover, having live roots in the soil all the time, promoting life instead of death, which is what conventional agriculture has become about, to some degree,” he said.
Ms Scott said the regenerative ag movement was small but growing.
“Because we’re farmers ourselves, we know what it’s like — we often feel quite alone,” she said.
“Coming to places like this, people say it’s like they find their tribe — they’re around like-minded people and someone’s not going to look at them like a freak if they say they want to let the weeds grow.”
Ward said it was important for retailers and consumers to do their part to support the growth of the movement.
“We have to go outside the corporate food chain, we have to find ways of … buying locally, going to our markets, finding people who are doing regional boxes and organic vegetables,” she said.
“Because once the retailers understand that there is a greater and greater appetite for healthy foods, they will be on board.”
Key stories of the day for Australian primary producers, delivered each weekday afternoon.
