Webster spin-off Kooba Pty Ltd sells Riverina cotton farms for $63 million

An Australian family with significant farming interests in NSW and Victoria has snapped up almost 20,000 hectares and a huge water portfolio.

An Australian farming family has paid more than $60m for an aggregation of cotton properties in the NSW Riverina.

The Weekly Times can reveal that JHW Paterson and Son, which already has significant farming interests in Victoria’s Western District and the Riverina, has purchased Kooba Pty Ltd’s South Farm, Glenmea, Pevensey and Yang Yang properties totaling almost 20,000 hectares west of Hay.

The aggregation was listed for sale in February.

The deal, which includes 17,000 megalitres of supplementary water, is said to be worth about $63 million.

Kooba Pty Ltd is a spin-off of the 2020 sale of the ASX-listed farming giant Webster Limited to Canada’s PSP Investments, which remains a minority shareholder in the company. Its directors include former Webster directors Chris Corrigan and David Fitzsimons and PSP Investments ag boss Marc Drouin.

Mr Corrigan told The Weekly Times the sale of Kooba’s Hay properties was to fund an expansion of its almond business on existing farms near Darlington Point.

He said the almond development currently comprised about 1000 hectares of trees with the plan to grow that to 3000 hectares over the next five years “which obviously requires significant capital”.

Mr Corrigan said the sale of the Hay aggregation to the Paterson family, whose existing farming operations border it, “made sense to both parties”. “I think it was a fair price and I think they will do well out of it,” Mr Corrigan said.

JHW Paterson’s James Paterson said the Kooba offering represented a good opportunity for the family business to expand its cotton portfolio. It has about 3500 hectares of cotton planted on its Hells Gate and Berwinnia properties between Hay and Balranald. “This purchase connects a lot of our land,” Mr Paterson said. “It has been really good timing for us. We’ve seen great increases in land values on our properties in the Western District, and our water in particular. It gave us the opportunity to have a crack.”

JHW Paterson operates across about 10,120 hectares in the Western District with farms at Anakie, Cavendish, Darlington, Hawkesdale and Macarthur. Prior to the Kooba purchase it already had about 40,500 hectares in the western Riverina.

LAWD handled the sale.