Evergreen Farms at Emerald for sale for $60m-plus

One of the country’s biggest horticulture farms has been listed for sale, as the spring property selling season takes off.

Evergreen Farms at Emerald is for sale.

One of Australia’s biggest irrigated horticulture farms has hit the market with expectations of $60m-plus.

Major table grape and lychee grower Evergreen Farms, covering 3793ha at Emerald in central Queensland, is the latest high-profile offering in a spring already littered with multimillion-dollar listings as vendors move to capitalise on unprecedented demand for rural property.

Evergreen Farms comprises 206ha of established table grapes, 194ha of trellised country (not planted), 25ha of lychees and 353ha of land suitable for intensive cropping with drip irrigation infrastructure already installed.

There is also grazing land, which is currently agisted out for cattle production.

The property boasts significant water allocation of 6434 megalitres, has 800 megalitres of water storages and access to the Nogoa River. There’s also high-quality infrastructure including cold storage and accommodation.

Offers are being sought by LAWD’s Danny Thomas and Simon Cudmore on an expressions of interest basis closing on October 14.

“It is incredibly rare for landholdings of such scale, underpinned by significant water entitlements as well as high-quality operational infrastructure to be presented to the market,” LAWD said.

Evergreen Farms was offered for sale in 2016 with expectations of about $70 million. At the time it was 5077ha in size across two properties with 403ha of table grapes, 29ha planted to lychees and 353ha of developed country.

It was then described as one of Australia’s largest horticultural operations, supplying Menindee seedless, Flame seedless and Crimson seedless grapes to wholesale agents that then supplied Coles, Woolworths, Aldi and IGA, as well as fresh food markets.

The Evergreen Farms listing comes in the same week that LAWD negotiated the sale of the Lawson Grains portfolio of 105,000ha in NSW and Western Australia. The portfolio, offered by Macquarie Agriculture – the nation’s second-biggest farmland investor – sold to Canada’s Alberta Investment Management Corporation and its Sydney-based global forestry investment manager New Forests.

Other major properties on the market include US private equity firm Proterra Investment Partners’ 22,500ha Corinella Group of almost 50 properties in Victoria and South Australia, which is on the market for $350 million, billionaire mining magnate Gina Rinehart’s $300 million portfolio of seven cattle stations and a feedlot for sale in the Northern Territory and Western Australia and European-backed THF Finance’s portfolio of five properties covering 21,900 hectares, west of Rockhampton in Queensland.

There’s also the 1.3 million-hectare Walhallow and Amungee Mungee stations in the Northern Territory, listed by billionaire retail king Brett Blundy for $230 million, the 15,000-hectare Shenhua aggregation on the NSW Liverpool Plains, which is expected to fetch more than $122 million, and the Bartter family’s 26,945-hectare Ballandry Station near Griffith, with a price tag of about $80 million.