The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has quietly put its four Australian rural properties on the market, with the prime irrigation and mixed-farming portfolio in southern NSW expected to sell for more than $120 million.
The sale of showpiece Kooba Station at Darlington Point, 45km south of Griffith, Bringagee and Benerembah stations at Carrathool, and Booberoi station further north at Euabalong, represents one of the biggest sales of prime irrigated farmland in Australia for decades.
Together the farms make up one of the largest rural holdings in the NSW Riverina.
The four Mormon-owned properties, totalling 47,000ha, are all highly productive mixed cropping farms on the banks of the Murrumbidgee and Lachlan rivers, making them desirable targets for large overseas pension funds, investors or foreign governments to buy.
Ren Fairbanks, AgReserves’ rural manager based at Kooba Station, said yesterday he had been authorised by church leaders to acknowledge that its Australian rural estate was for sale after 17 years.
“As part of a realignment of company operations and assets, Ag Reserves Australia is seeking a buyer for 47,000ha of NSW (comprising) Kooba station, Bringagee, Benerembah and Booberoi,” the prepared statement said. “We are in contact with organisations known to us that might have an interest in (such) mixed cropping operations.”
The farmland is being sold directly by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, rather than through the usual major rural property agents who market such high-value farm assets globally.
The properties come complete with a mixture of river water entitlements and groundwater (bore) extraction rights believed to exceed 70,000 megalitres of irrigation water a year.
The water asset is enough to irrigate 7000ha of cotton or grapes, and about 5000ha of rice, adding enormously to the estimated value of the farmland.
With water rights currently valued at between $1000-$2000 a megalitre depending on its surety of delivery, the water value alone of the river country estate could be as high as $70m.
The four properties, which stretch from the cropping fields and irrigation rivers at the heart of the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area up to low lying hills, grow rice, wheat, corn, beans, olives and a mixture of other horticultural and grain crops.
Sheep for prime lamb production and high-value Wagyu cattle are also farmed by the Mormon Church’s AgReserves Australia company, which runs the four estates as a joint enterprise. It is understood several large farming neighbours have considered buying the large aggregate, but found it hard to make the production figures add up given the cost and the large amounts of water involved.
They expect much of its irrigated fields would be turned over to high-value cotton and nut production, with Italian giant Ferrero Rocher last year investing $70m to grow hazelnuts at nearby Narrandera, also on the banks of the Murrumbidgee River.
The magnificent aggregate of stations was bought by the Mormon Church in 1997 for $70m from the former wool broking empire of G.H. Michell & Sons.
The move added to the church’s global portfolio of farms in the US, Canada, Argentina and Mexico, designed to ensure the controversial Utah-based religion could supply enough food to feed its 15 million worshippers worldwide for at least three months — a key tenet of the religion.
Tim Jelbart, of Colliers International, said news of the big sale had quietly filtered through the ranks of international rural property experts in the past few days.
“It’s a prized group of properties; you would have to think they will be bought by a global fund, corporate agriculture or an international investor,” Mr Jelbart said yesterday.
“Nuts and cotton certainly seem the most likely future uses of the irrigated country, but the Waygu beef cattle have also been a good money-spinner for them in the past few years.”
Mr Jelbart said another outcome would be for a global water trading company, such as Blue Skies Water, to buy the AgReserves portfolio for divestment.
Such an outcome would see some of the massive water entitlements linked to the Mormon estate sold or held to traded annually by the buyer.