‘Free radical’: Filmmaker farmer Rachel Ward on vaccines, RFK Jr and her new paddock-to-plate project

Rachel Ward is a former actor and filmmaker turned cattle producer, who has launched a new project this week called Farmthru. I spoke to her on Wednesday.

Fitz: Rachel, when we ran into each other at the airport on Monday, I was bowled over by your enthusiasm for your new project, and I want to get to it – but we need to pay the rent first and get a bit of celebrity gossip in at the top, to bring the mob in.

RW: [Laughing.] Go on.

Fitz: Thirty-five years ago, I went in search of the famous Olympic swimmer Shane Gould, and found her in deepest darkest WA, on her knees in the laundry of her subsistence farm, cleaning out sheep poo. She was unhappy about it. You seem to be the reverse of her. You grew up in bloody Downton Abbey and couldn’t spit over your shoulder without hitting a duke or duchess in the eye. You starred in films with Burt Reynolds, Steve Martin and Bryan Brown, among many others. You were an international model voted one of the “10 Most Beautiful Women in the World”. You were a successful director and filmmaker. And yet now most days, you are wrist-deep in cow poo on your farm near Nambucca Heads and loving it.

RW: Yes, yes, I am! I found my place. I wish I’d found it earlier, but I absolutely adore living a rural life. And I really enjoy farming. I find it incredibly challenging. I’m not good at it. It’s the whole learning experience in your later age, which really keeps you alive. It keeps me very fit and healthy because I’m always out in the paddocks, running up and down, fixing fences, getting on and off the tractor, and…

Fitz: Hang on, we need to pay more rent! One more celebrity gossip moment. I note that way back when, you went out with David Kennedy, the son of Bobby Kennedy?

RW: Oh yes, he was a sweet man. Very troubled and full of pain – he was the one who really suffered from his father’s assassination. He was addicted to heroin.

Fitz: So what was RFK Jr – now the US health secretary – like? You must have met him – pass the wine, please, Jackie O – at your Kennedy gatherings at Cape Cod?

RW: Fabulous, fabulous! Love him. I’m a big fan of RFK Jr, and love him to this day.

Fitz: Rachel! He’s barking mad!

RW: No, I don’t agree. What he’s doing to clean up vaccine schedule is brilliant. I don’t think he’s barking mad at all. I don’t think he was good with women, but I think he’s incredibly brave. It’s now law that you cannot give a whole collection of vaccines to young babies, you have to have them all broken up now, right? You don’t agree that’s where autism came from?

Fitz: I certainly do not! Don’t tell me you do??

RW: Well, where else is it coming from? What’s wrong with really looking at where it’s come from?

Fitz: I think if we go down your rabbit hole, you and I’ll be shouting at each other within two minutes. Let’s not. But at least tell me you’re not an anti-vaxx nutter?

RW: [Long silence.] I was vaccinated, but I certainly question the whole way it was done. I question the necessity of the lockdowns and all of that. And I’m definitely in tune with the people who question it all, and still protest against it.

Fitz: OK, the rent is paid. On to your farm at Nambucca Heads, and the fabulous documentary on it, Rachel’s Farm, that my editor insisted I watch. That was a revelation to me. What was it that made you move full-time to the farm in the first place?

RW: I was kind of restless in Sydney, and as a filmmaker because there was so much downtime when you couldn’t get employment, or were waiting for actors to get back to you. It was frustrating.

Fitz: On the doco, your fine eldest daughter at one point gets teary, and says, “I’m going to get into trouble for saying this, but I’m so glad Mum’s found this farm because she was so very, very unhappy, and now she’s happy.” What was she referring to? Just how unhappy were you?

RW: Pretty bad. I sort of had a breakdown. I was lost. I got to a stage in life where I was full of energy, had lots more to contribute, and just came up against a brick wall in the entertainment industry. My children had left home, and I thought, where do I go from here? I could see no way forward. I was so disempowered in the entertainment industry and I was thwarted. I didn’t know where to move forward.

Fitz: And then?

RW: And then I saw this TED talk with the Zimbabwean ecologist Allan Savory, and I read Charlie Massey’s Call of the Reed Warbler: A New Agriculture, A New Earth and they were both about the power of regenerative farming. It was all about not taking from the land, but giving to the land, to make it fertile again without chemicals and reaping the rewards, with a healthier life, healthier cattle and a healthier planet. I was suddenly empowered in three really important ways. I can change the way I raise cattle on the farm that [my husband] Bryan [Brown, the actor] and I had bought. I’m a filmmaker, so I can make a film about it. And I realised that, as a consumer, I could harness the power of the purse, and only buy food from ecologically sound sources.

Fitz: And so was born your devotion to regenerative farming?

RW: Yes, my whole thing is to raise the cattle in tune with nature, so that they both improve the ecosystem around them and benefit from it. It’s about using your cattle as tools to fertilise your land. So you have to keep the grass in a state of growth always, to let it recover, and move them often. It’s also about holding the water on your land, and growing your diverse grasses so that your roots grow deep. It’s also about pursuing farming agricultural practices that can actually help with climate change and suck carbon into the soil if it’s done right – while also treating the animals well, so they don’t suffer.

Fitz: And so these two scientists are part of an entire movement which maintains – whatever the previously noted problems of cows’ emissions exacerbating climate change through their mass burps and farts – that is more than countered by their potential to make the land healthier, to store more carbon?

RW: Factory farming and feedlots are the problem, if any. Aside from living cruel caged lives, they don’t earn their keep. Cattle on regenerative farms, fed and finished on grass, pull more carbon with their grazing management than they emit with their burps. Surely common sense knows it’s absurd to blame emissions on cattle when we have a world full of belching cars, planes and manufacturing. Clearly it’s invested business interests which put the blame on cattle burps. But yes, it can get very complicated.

Fitz: Complicated? Complicated, my dear Rachel? At one point in the doco, we see you attending a lecture given by climate scientist Walter Jehne, where he says “and we’ve got our sun hitting these water molecules. They will photo-oxidise these water molecules and turn into hydro, hydroxyl-(something-something). They turn into free radicals.” Do you understand all that? And are you the free radical in question?

RW: [Laughing.] I think I’ve always been a free radical.

Fitz: Quite. But you were also one in need of an international certificate which confirms your farm now has an EOV, an Environmental Outcomes Verification, which you’ve now got, which says we consumers can now be confident that you’re using good land practices, and raising healthy cattle. Which is where your new thang, “Farmthru” comes from. Tell us about it…

RW: Farmthru came from me recognising that there was a missing link in the chain. We have people wanting to know where their food comes from, and wanting to know what is in it. And we have lots of farmers doing the right thing, farming beautifully, and looking after their land and animals. But there was no connection! So Farmthru is the connection, the link for that. So, from this week, you can be in Sydney and order meat with a guarantee that it’s come straight from regenerative or organic farms. If you want to live by your values, looking after the planet, you need to eat by your values.

Fitz: Barnaby was right! Not content with ruining the planet, you greenies are now going to be selling us roasts for $100 a pop, aren’t you?!

RW: [Laughs.] I wear the “greenie” badge with pride. Our future isn’t looking very rosy right now. It would have been even worse without us greenies getting under Barnaby’s nose!

Fitz: Is there a depot in Sydney where we can get your meat?

RW: Yeah, the first one is in Brookvale. It’s selling in bulk, in five-kilogram and 10-kilogram boxes of beef or chicken, so you get it at a reasonable price – with pork and lamb coming soon – although meat should not be as cheap as it is. I mean, it’s cheap in the supermarkets because the farmers are the ones who are getting absolutely nothing. Small farms in the country, which are the lifeblood of our rural communities, are going, which means our rural communities are going. Do we want that? We have to really think about this. You know, small farms are not viable any more. I’ve got elderly friends who are trying to sell their farms without success. They can’t sell their farms because land is too expensive for young people interested in rural life, and their own children, recognising there’s no money in small family farms, want out. So we’re losing our young farmers without gaining new ones. The average age of farmers right now is 60 years old! It is not sustainable.

Fitz: So is there a link where people can go to save the planet and support regenerative farming communities?

RW: Yes, you can go to Farmthru.com.au. You pre-order, and then just drive up and get loaded with the boxes of frozen meat: snap-frozen, the minute it’s processed, so it’s absolutely fresh. Hopefully, it will take off and give an opportunity to all these farmers that are taking on regenerative farming and organic farming to give them an outlet in the city. Consumers can then get their meat direct – paddock to plate.

Fitz: OK, as one now devoted to changing the world and taking on climate change, do you have a comment on the National Party abandoning a commitment to net zero by 2050?

RW: No. I think there’s a lot of directions with net zero that are misguided, but I don’t want governments having more control over us, and be able to dictate how we live our lives, and I don’t want governments controlling the way I live my life.

Fitz: Well, free radical Rachel, someone has to! How often do you get to Sydney?

RW: About a week a year. But Bryan comes up to see me.

Fitz: Well, let him stay in the house! Don’t make the poor bastard stay in the humpy. He’s a film star, you know, and deserves a bit of RESPECT from you bloody hippies!

RW: [Laughing.] Does he keep telling you he stays in the humpy?

Fitz: No, it’s on the doco. You make up a bed together, so he can sleep in the humpy.

RW: Yes, he has to go stay in the humpy. He’s very long-suffering about it because he’s so not interested in farming, but he does love being here, and he does like sitting on his verandah. But get him out to do anything, he’s a bloody liability.

Fitz: Good luck with it.

RW: Thank you, I am totally loving it. I’m completely switched on and engaged by the beauty of my land and what I’m doing with it. I’m a very aesthetic person. I love beauty, and I just I can sit on my verandah in the evening for hours, and just watch the light shifting, and watch the cattle moving around, and watch the birds on the dam. That rocks my boat.

Peter FitzSimons is a columnist and author.

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