August 19, 2021

By Lynda Kiernan-Stone, Global AgInvesting Media

Hewitt Cattle Australia, a joint partner of Canadian pension fund – Public Sector Pension Investment Board (PSP Investments) – has acquired the historic Tubbo Station in the Riverina region of New South Wales for an amount that was described by listing agent Col Medway as “above the A$40 million (US$28.6 million) guide price”.

Offered by LAWD through an expressions of interest initiative, and sold on a walk-in, walk-out basis, Tubbo Station includes a solar farm (which earns $559,810 (US$400,199) per year through a long-term lease), equipment, a plant, and 19,402 head of sheep. 

This deal for Tubbo Station will serve as a natural expansion of Hewitt’s certified organic sheep and lamb assets in New South Wales that include Tandou Station (127,337 hectares – 314,656.5 acres), Packsaddle (40,878 hectares – 101,011 acres), and Warilba (1,696 hectares – 4,191 acres).

It was May of last year when Hewitt Cattle Australia made the decision to divest its Mt. Cooper aggregation in Northern Queensland as part of its strategic decision to shift its focus on organic production. 

By then, Hewitt had already begun extending its reach into organic beef. In November 2017 Global AgInvesting shared that the company had acquired a stake in Arcadian Organic Natural Beef Co., one of the largest organic meat companies in Australia, through a deal valued at approximately A$50 million (US$35.7 million). Under the terms of the deal, Hewitt also acquired two cattle stations – the 28,340-hectare (70,029-acre) Oakwood Station in western Queensland, and the 1,740-hectare (4,299-acre) Warilba Station in western New South Wales.

Tubbo Station was originally established by a Scottish squatter named John Peter, who by 1866 was in control of 20 runs totaling more than 300,000 hectares (741,316 acres). Twenty-one years later, upon Peter’s death in 1887, the Tubbo Run was acquired by an investment company that was shearing 121,847 sheep, making the enterprise the third-largest wool clipping business in New South Wales.

Over the years, the station avoided encroachment due to government reach or settlement. Held by the UK Pritchard-Gordon family for the past decade (the family acquired the station in 2011 when the Price family’s Four Arrows Group sold it as five distinct parcels for more than A$30 million – US$24.1 million), Tubbo Station remains a highly-valued sheep and cattle station with the family seeing to a host of improvements, including fencing, water infrastructure, and lanes, while in its possession. 

Today,  the 14,875-hectare (36,757-acre) station, which can run 39,000 dry sheep equivalents and has water sourced from 18 bores and dams as well as 20 kilometers of frontage on the Murrumbidgee River, is home to a self-replacing Merino sheep flock producing both lambs and wool. Since 2011 the station has run 8,450 breeding ewes and 450 breeding cows, however, the cattle are not included in the sale. 

“It is an extremely high quality, large scale property in a region in which we are interested in investing in,” said Michael Hewitt, CEO, Hewitt Cattle Australia. “We had been looking to expand into that region for a while but it’s difficult to find properties of that quality and scale that suited our operation. We remained very diligent in terms of our investment principals and that has proven to be a valuable decision.”

– Lynda Kiernan-Stone is editor with GAI Media, and is managing editor and daily contributor for Global AgInvesting’s AgInvesting Weekly News and  Agtech Intel News, as well as HighQuest Group’s Oilseed & Grain News. She can be reached at lkiernan-stone@globalaginvesting.com.