By Sandra Hall
RACHEL’S FARM ★★★★
(PG) 87 minutes
In actor-director Rachel Ward’s new documentary, her husband, Bryan Brown, speaks of her strength of will with a mixture of fond admiration and wry amusement – sentiments echoed by their daughter Matilda. When her mother embraces a new passion, she says, there are no compromises. She gives her all.
Rachel Ward’s efforts to transform her Nambucca Valley property with regenerative farming is captured in the documentary Rachel’s Farm.
Since the Black Summer bushfires of 2019, Ward’s overriding passion has been regenerative farming. The fires were the worst ever experienced in the Nambucca Valley, where Brown, Ward and their family have had a small farm for more than 30 years. Their house was saved but many of their neighbours were not as lucky and surrounding forests were consumed, along with their fencing.
These losses thrust Ward into a state of complete frustration. The effects of global warming became an obsession compounded by the birth of her grandchild and fears for his future: “The more joy I felt,” she says, “the more I was swallowed by despair.”
It was at this point that her neighbour and farm manager, Mick Green, came to her with a plan. Conventional farming methods were no longer working for them, he told her. The property’s soil was dry and degraded from over-use and the chemicals they were using were making it worse. Would she work with him to change things?
So began her education in sustainability – a story that could have been as dull and earnest as it sounds, but Ward is an engaging guide who doesn’t mind letting you in on the moments when her abilities fail to measure up to her ambitions. It takes a long time for Green to agree to her driving their tractor and when she offers to step in to replace his former right-hand man, who’s been farmhand and trusted ecological adviser, his dismay and apprehension are plain to see.
Nonetheless, they strike up a great collaborative relationship as they work towards their goal – becoming certified as regenerative farmers eligible to sell their produce at the farm gate and trade carbon on the carbon market.
It’s an agonisingly slow and pernickety exercise, requiring thorough knowledge of the habits of worms, dung beetles and buffalo flies. They also learn that cattle – long maligned over the environmental cost of their belching and farting – can have a beneficial effect on the land. If the herds are moved often enough, their trampling keeps the earth damp and friable. To this end, the property is divided into smaller paddocks, the electric fences are re-done and the water sources re-arranged. And there’s another breakthrough when Ward and Green decide to alter the contours of the land so that it can collect and hold rainwater in the right places.
Along the way, experts are brought in to explain the details, but the tone never takes off into abstraction. Clarity is the thing. It’s a hugely valuable adventure infused with Ward’s insatiable curiosity and staunch refusal to give up, no matter what.
Rachel’s Farm is released in cinemas on August 3.
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