Born in Suffolk, he started his lengthy career as a thatcher, then went into building houses and was a highly-successful developer. He fought back from near bankruptcy after the property crash in the early 1970s and re-estabished his fortunes by building up the Anti-Waste business, which was later sold in a multi-million deal.

He built up a major farming operation spanning almost 1,800 acres at Manor Farm, Bridgham, near Thetford, which became a major supplier of beef cattle to leading retailers .

An exhibitor at the Royal Norfolk Show for many years through the 1990s and 2000s. He competed in the heavy horse classes and in 1993 won his first breed championship and the Lord Waveney Tankard for best Suffolk horse.
Later, he also took part, again with his Suffolks, in the heavy horse turnouts in 2000.

Mr Rackham may be best known in the wider farming communty for his incredible collection of tractors, which started with a 1951 International Farmall, costing £250. At one stage he had more than 600 at Roudham and his collection, which was largely dispersed from around 2015 for more than £2m. It included more than 70 tractors bought from John Moffat’s Hunday collection of Ferguson tractors, which made a total of £520,000.

In a brief autobiography, he recalled that at the age of 14 he won a place to study at the new Norfolk College of Agriculture at Easton while running a business buying and selling livestock.
It went so well that he didn’t go back to college for his final year and by the time, he was 20 years old, his annual turnover had topped £100,000.

In the 1980s, he started two new Thetford-based companies., Waste Recycling Ltd and Anti-Waste Ltd. “Ten years after we placed the first eight bottle banks with Breckland District Council, Waste Recycling was operating near on 2,000 glass collection bins around the eastern region for 23 different councils, serviced by five lorries working in shifts, said Mr Rackham. Anti-Waste, with its collection of landfill sites, was thriving. We were processing 150,000 tonnes of waste a year,” he added.
In 1994, they were bought together under the umbrella of Waste Recycling Group plc (WRG) which was floated on the London stock market . Then in 2003, the business was taken in a £503m deal.

Mr Rackham, who came from generations of thatchers, was also a countryman at heart. He was a Master of the Suffolk Hunt in the 1970s and supported the Dunston Harriers and also rode with the West Norfolk Hunt.