AACo has sold the central Queensland cattle station ‘Meteor Downs’ to the Swiss mining company, Xstrata.\u00a0 Meteor Downs is 17,000 ha 40km SE of Springsure (between Emerald & Roma), and it was purchased\u00a0in 1990 to run the AACo’s Brahman and Santa Gertrudis studs.\u00a0 In recent years it has been running Wagyu cattle, and growing\u00a0forage crops for the on-site feedlot.\u00a0 Meteor Downs\u00a0is a well respected property with a\u00a0relatively reliable rainfall and good soil and it is situated relatively close to some other AACo-owned properties.\u00a0 Previous owners of Meteor Downs include James\u00a0‘hungry’ Tyson, British Tobacco\u00a0and Nelson Bunker Hunt (Waxahachie Pty Ltd).\u00a0<\/p>\n
The $21.6 million from the sale of Meteor Downs will be used on other AACo cattle stations and put towards the meatworks the AACo is planning to build in Darwin.\u00a0 The sale price is a ‘mining’ price – well above the\u00a0property’s value\u00a0as an agricultural business, especially considering Meteor Downs is being sold to Xstrata bare of stock and plant (which are to be transferred to other AACo properties).\u00a0 It’s an excellent outcome for the AACo (who would have been powerless to stop the mining on their land anyway, and\u00a0forced into a ‘mining agreement’), but a tragedy for the pastoral industry and for future generations.\u00a0 Although Meteor Downs will presumably continue to\u00a0run at least some cattle because Mount Isa Mines (MIM) developed a pastoral company called Colinta Holdings, in charge of running cattle on some of the pastoral properties purchased by MIM.\u00a0 Ownership of Colinta Holdings transferred to Xstrata when the Switzerland-based company purchased MIM a few years ago.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Properties owned and run by Brisbane-based Colinta Holdings include the NT cattle station McCarthur River, the site of an Xstrata zinc mine\u00a0(Cape Crawford – near Borroloola).\u00a0\u00a0Queensland cattle stations owned by Colinta include Haslington (Mt Isa; apparently also spelt ‘Haslingden’), Mt Luce\u00a0(north of Bowen at Abbot Point, Australia’s most northerly coal port – it handles coal from central Qld mines and the terminal is run by Xstrata); plus Collinsville (central Qld) properties Kerale, Heidelberg, Havilah and\u00a0Byerwen.\u00a0 Colinta Holdings also owns farms in NSW, presumably all in the Singleton coal mining region of the Hunter Valley:\u00a0Bobadeen, Reedy Valley, Magoolah and Singleton.\u00a0 Colinta Holdings also owned one of the largest\u00a0cattle stations\u00a0in the Richmond\/Maxwelton region for many years, Saxby Downs, but it was sold to Alister McClymont’s\u00a0 AJM Pastoral Company in 2008.\u00a0 Colinta would certainly own other properties in areas where mines are being developed, eg around Wandoan,\u00a0however these are not listed on the company website –\u00a0Charbray.com<\/a>.\u00a0 Along with the most common northern breed, Brahmans, Colinta properties run Charbray and Charolais cattle.\u00a0 Running these more unusual breeds in northern Australia would be a handy way of discouraging\u00a0any from accidentally ending up hanging in the coolrooms of neighbouring properties.\u00a0 There is an old saying that ‘cattle from next door always taste sweeter’ – and cattle owned by large companies, especially mining companies, are usually viewed as extra tasty by nearby residents.<\/p>\n Gary Johncock was the manager of Colinta Holdings for many years, and presumably still is (there’s very little publicly available\/easily\u00a0located \u00a0information on Colinta Holdings).<\/p>\n Xstrata obviously wouldn’t be running a pastoral arm purely for income reasons in fact I would have thought running a sideline pastoral business would have been more of an annoyance than anything.\u00a0 Presumably the primary reason must be as a PR excercise – so\u00a0local landowners\u00a0can’t complain to the government\u00a0that good pastoral land, owned by the mining giant, is being unused.<\/p>\n Coal mined from Meteor Downs will be taken by rail to Gladstone port.<\/p>\n As the central Queensland bumper stickers say ‘you can’t eat coal’.\u00a0 In the last 2 weeks I’ve driven the 1800 km \u00a0from Townsville to Tamworth and back, and passed\u00a0several of the Australian Agricultural Company’s purchases over the last two decades:\u00a0 Meteor Downs Station (Springsure) and the Wylarah aggregation\u00a0(near Surat; consisting of 6 properties – Wylarah, Cadny Downs, Talaverah, Newington, Borah and Didgeridoo), and not far from the turnoffs to Goonoo Farm (south of Comet) and Glentana (west of Springsure).\u00a0 It is exceedingly depressing to see so much of Australia’s very best food growing land stretching from the Emerald region down into northern NSW, being dug up by mining companies (mostly overseas owned).\u00a0 And mining doesn’t even mean good quality buildings are built in nearby towns any more – if\u00a0mining ceased overnight, there would be absolutely no local evidence of the many millions of dollars worth of minerals that had been dug up and\u00a0shipped away – other than potholed roads,\u00a0gaping holes in the ground and rusting equipment.<\/p>\n It’s heartbreaking to see good agricultural land decimated, Australia has so relatively little of it.\u00a0 Future generations will not thank those responsible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" AACo has sold the central Queensland cattle station ‘Meteor Downs’ to the Swiss mining company, Xstrata.\u00a0 Meteor Downs is 17,000 ha 40km SE of Springsure (between Emerald & Roma), and it was purchased\u00a0in 1990 to run the AACo’s Brahman and Santa Gertrudis studs.\u00a0 In recent years it has been running Wagyu cattle, and growing\u00a0forage crops […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,5,6,7,8,11],"tags":[82,100,158,161,166,176,178,179,220],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1695"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1695"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1695\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1702,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1695\/revisions\/1702"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1695"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1695"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1695"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}