Our almond operations have undertaken a shift in direction over recent years with a focus on establishing and managing investor owned orchards.

The company’s origins are as an almond grower around the township of Robinvale in North West Victoria. Our initial orchards were planted at Boundary Bend in the mid-1970’s with further expansion from 1980 to 1988 making the company Australia’s largest almond grower, farming approximately 1,870 acres. Today we remain a significant almond grower with total company orchards of 3,368 acres.

By the mid-1990’s the company was operating at world’s best practice in crop yields and an investment in new processing capacity positioned us to expand our growing and processing activities.

In 1998 the company embarked on a strategy to expand the acreage under management and the tonnage produced and sold by developing new almond orchards on behalf of external investors. This changed the income stream of the business from the revenue from our almond crop to a fee based recurring income stream from orchard development, farm management, harvesting, processing and marketing.

This second phase of the company’s development started with plantings of around five hundred acres per annum. This has accelerated in recent years and we now manage over 35,000 acres of third party orchards, with this year’s plantings exceeding 11,800 acres.

Almonds are now established as a main stream horticultural investment in Australia and, together with our strategic alliance partner Timbercorp Limited, we are planning to further expand into the foreseeable future.