CONSOLIDATED Pastoral Company, Australia’s largest privately-owned beef producer, has completed its acquisition of Bunda Station in the Northern Territory’s Victoria River District.

The purchase brings CPC’s northern Australian property portfolio to 20 stations across Queensland, Western Australia and the NT, running more than 375,000 head of cattle.

Troy Setter

Together, the stations vertically-integrate with two joint-venture feedlots in Indonesia.

Originally forming part of the famed Inverway Station in 1894, Bunda has been owned by the Underwood family since 1956.

The 178,800ha breeding and growing property currently runs more than 13,000 Brahman and Charbray-infused cattle, including a 2000 head purebred Brahman stud.

Bunda Station has considerable development potential to run additional cattle that CPC plans to develop, the company’s chief executive officer Troy Setter said.

“Bunda is a high-quality station with some of the best blacksoil plains in the Victoria River District,” Mr Setter said.

“The acquisition is consistent with CPC’s strategy of selectively bolting-on stations that have efficient scale and enable us to increase our cattle breeding and growing capacity, increasing flexibility in the way that the company’s cattle are bred, grown and marketed,” he said.

CPC has owned neighbouring property Kirkimbie for the past 28 years creating a 4000sq km aggregation in the territory’s renowned VRD district.

“it gives us great confidence in the opportunity to apply our operational expertise at Bunda to further improve productivity and extract synergies and optimise performance from the merger of the two stations,” Mr Setter said.

“This acquisition strengthens our portfolio in the north of Australia, the gateway to the rapidly expanding Asian markets,” he said.

“CPC and our owner, Terra Firma, see considerable opportunities across the beef value chain. We will continue to look at value-adding acquisitions which will allow us to expand grazing capacity as we continue to transform CPC from a farm-gate producer to a vertically integrated, customer-focussed business.”