Rich-Lister Perich family process big dairy deal
Australian Fresh Milk Holdings, backed by the Rich-Lister Perich family and one of China’s biggest agriculture players, has finalised its $40 million acquisition of the Torrumbarry aggregation in northern Victoria, significantly bolstering what is already the nation’s largest dairying outfit.
The acquisition comprises four linked properties held by different owners across more than 4000 hectares. It brings a heifer operation into the AFMH portfolio along with annual water entitlements of more than 6700 megalitres.
The Torrumbarry Estate, on the Murray Valley Highway near Echuca, is just an hour’s drive from Coomboona dairy farm, near Shepparton, the former Harvey Norman-owned property that AFMH took over after it went into receivership.
The purchase will support growth at both Coomboona and Moxey Farms, also operated by AFMH, by supplying 3600 milking cows to their operations in 2021.
The AHFM platform was put together five years ago when two of the country’s biggest dairy farming families – the Perichs, through their Leppington Pastoral Company, and the Moxeys, who operate the largest single-site dairy farm at Gooloogong in NSW – joined forces with New Hope Group, one of the largest suppliers of meat, egg and dairy products in China.
The fourth partner is ASX-listed Freedom Foods – majority controlled by the Perich family’s investment arm – which has a 10 per cent stake.
“The Torrumbarry Aggregation takes pressure off existing dairy operations by having a separate purpose-built young stock facility which is also scalable,” a Freedom Foods spokeswoman told The Australian Financial Review.
“This site also helps drought-proof the existing Moxey and Coomboona farms with its large water entitlement. Almost half of the land is also irrigatable.”
The Torrumbarry deal was brokered by CBRE’s Peter Ryan, Danny Thomas and Jarrod Ryan. The property dates back to the colonial period when a sprawling pastoral run was first put together in the early 1840s.
The name Torrumbarry may derive from the name of an Aboriginal woman who accompanied the exploration party of the NSW surveyor general, Major Thomas Mitchell, who journeyed through western Victoria in 1836.
Passing through several owners, it came under the control of W. L. Baillieu, the financier and Victorian politician, who bought it in 1917. The family held it for the next 60 years.
Its new owner is the largest raw dairy milk producer in Australia. By 2021 its combined operations will generate more than 190 million litres of milk as its herd rises past 13,000 milking cows.
Freedom Foods receives 5 per cent of its milk from Coomboona, which is about 20 kilometres north of its Shepparton operations. By the 2024 financial year, around 17 per cent of Freedom’s milk will be sourced from AFMH.
The platform created through AFMH gives its partners access to a growing pool of milk, including diversification into the Victorian dairy regions.
That greater scale, backed by New Hope’s investment muscle and its distribution links, will also further enable the export of dairy products to China.
With a global footprint and revenue rising to $27 billion, New Hope’s first Australian investment was in late 2013 when it bought a controlling stake in Queensland’s Kilcoy abattoir.
