THURLOW Estate Farms is owned by the prominent 20th Century meat production and processing family conglomerate, the Vestey Group, which is still a big player in the global food supply chain.
Vestey brothers William and Edmund's JH Dewhurst butchery business, established in the 1890s, grew into a food behemoth which pioneered refrigerated storage and shipped and processed meat, eggs, dairy products and fruit from as far afield as South America, Australia, Russia and China.
At their zenith the Vesteys also owned 300 retail shops in Britain and 250,000 head of cattle on several continents.
The Thurlow Estate Farms business pays an annual rent to the family owners - a sum which last year roughly equated to the amount Thurlow received in European Union farming subsidies.
Although focused on cropping, the 8000-hectare estate includes some tenant farms with cattle.
The Vestey family's land assets also span the grand 2000ha Stowell Park Estate in Gloucestershire and a 240,000ha beef, grain and sugar cane holding in Brazil.
In Australia the family's once huge footprint in livestock and food processing sectors has shrunk to mostly a wine focus, including South Australian vineyard The Lane, and Coombe Farm Estate in Victoria's Yarra Valley, where the current Lord Sam Vestey and his brother Mark spent some of their childhood.
The property was the childhood home of their great grandmother and opera diva Dame Nellie Melba, whose granddaughter Pamela Anderson married Lord William Vestey who subsequently died in action in the Second World War leaving two young heirs to a sizable share of the Vestey empire.
That empire in Australia once included the Top End's famed Wave Hill Station where the aboriginal land rights movement was ignited in 1966 after native stockmen and other staff walked off demanding fairer wages and conditions.
Vestey Group also owned a Darwin meatworks until the 1920s and the huge Melbourne-based William Angliss butcher shop, meat processing and canning business which grew rapidly early last century to include the big Riverstone meatworks in NSW and Queensland's Redbank and Lakes Creek abattoirs.
Angliss merged into Vestey's global operations in 1934, and was renamed in recent years as Vestey Foods International, one of the seven divisions in Vestey Foods Group.
Vestey Foods Group sources, processes and distributes fresh, chilled and frozen meat, fish, seafood, dairy, fruit, vegetables and specialist meals in 70 countries, including buying beef and most of its global lamb needs in Australia and New Zealand.
Andrew Marshall travelled to Europe as a guest of Syngenta
Andrew Marshall
National agribusiness writer for Fairfax Agricultural Media.
National agribusiness writer for Fairfax Agricultural Media.
