Member Profile – Frida’s Field

Frida’s Field is a paddock-to-plate eatery set on a 120 acre farm just 10 minutes from Bangalow in the Byron Bay Hinterland. It’s owned and operated by Edward Rawlings and Jeanie Wylie, who live on-site with their three young children.

Their three long lunches per week are carefully curated by award- winning chef Alastair Waddell to celebrate the seasons, their ecological farming practices, and the amazing produce of the Northern Rivers region.

Rawlings and Wylie are striving to transform their property from a blank canvas into a productive farm using regenerative farming techniques. They manage a small herd of around 50 Angus-Wagyu cattle, a food forest orchard and a quarter acre organic market garden. By bringing customers onto their farm to enjoy bountiful long lunches, they are able to keep reinvesting in expanding their ecological farming system and its integration with the farm restaurant.

There’s also a self-contained onsite cottage, a renovated coach-house from the 1890s, that’s available to book for a stay. It has its own chef’s kitchen, stunning farm views, and big windows that let in plenty of sun.

Frida’s Field is part of the growing regenerative agriculture movement, and uses farming practices that actively reverse environmental degradation while producing food that is more natural, flavourful and nutritious. In addition to their organic market garden and agroforestry food forest, they run a small herd of Angus-Wagyu cattle which they breed and manage with holistic principles.

Their 120 acres is divided into 16 smaller paddocks that they rotate the cattle through every few days. This process of resting and grazing the pasture improves the organic matter in the soil which actively removes carbon from the atmosphere. The cattle’s natural behaviour (plant biting, saliva, urination, defecation, trampling) interacts with the pasture and its supporting soil, adding plant litter and manure which earthworms and microorganisms decompose.

The process of decomposition releases nutrients which strengthens the pasture and builds humus which stores plant nutrients, holds moisture and improves soil structure, thereby acting as a carbon sink.