A Goulburn River frontage property, just east of Echuca, has sold for $2.3 million.
Carramar, a 555 hectare farming property at Yambuna, was sold at auction by Rodwells Ruralco Property for $2,350,000. The purchaser is an established farmer from the Yorke Peninsula of South Australia.
Selling agent Andrew Miller said that while prior offers were invited, the auction result topped his pre-auction expectations.
“With its scale, river frontage, irrigated farming and cropping or livestock potential with a little investment in managing these resources I believe the opportunity to purchase Carramar represents a real opportunity,” Mr Miller said. Then there is the substantial and prestigious six bedroom modern family home, placed in an environment which is private, peaceful and ideally located, as Echuca with all that it offers is only twenty minutes distant.
“With two local holdings to farm, and reduced family labour resources to aid him, the vendor reluctantly decided to submit Carramar for sale.”
Under previous ownership the irrigation area of up to 200 hectares was completely redesigned and laser graded for efficient water use. The layout includes a water runoff collection and a pumped recycling system as a further mark of its efficiency of water use.
The irrigation infrastructure includes two electric river pumps, one an eight inch, the other a ten inch, located on the banks of the Goulburn River.
Mr Miller said the property held an extraction licence of 5.33 megalitres per day and had low Goulburn-Murray Water delivery costs for pumping direct from the river at $400 per year.
That was a huge saving, when compared with other surface water delivery charges in the irrigation districts.
The vendor purchased the property in 2010 without water entitlements as a dry farming property.
He had either purchased temporary water rights or transferred his own to irrigate the highly productive river loams, including some grey sandy country which also held water well.
The cropping program has included a significant area of lucerne and summer pastures and had also grown a large area of maize as well.
Mr MIller said the property’s principal role had been as a ‘fodder factory’.
With an exposure of about six kilometres to the Goulburn there was a further block of about ninety acres of red gum and native forest country along the river frontage.
There was also significant farming infrastructure including two large machinery sheds, a working set of under-cover cattle yards, with a practical fencing subdivision around a central laneway design and stock trough watering system.
In addition to its proven cropping capacity Carramar could also run an opportunity cattle grazing or breeding operation.