But when Chris Mulcahy of Mulcahy & Co financial services was asked to investigate buying Banongill Station 45km west of Ballarat, he wasn't new to brokering just such a deal.

Mr Mulcahy had previously been involved in the purchase of the Demeter Farming Australia portfolio, a suite of 10 cropping and grazing properties spread over 5200-hectares between Skipton, Beaufort and Ararat.

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Offered in 2016 by British-based alternative investment manager Altima Partners LLP, that deal was worth close to $30 million, and saw off strong interest from overseas buyers keen to snap up Australian farming property.

The company director says he was approached by a couple of Western District farmers with the idea of making a bid for the 1858 property, which has a magnificent homestead and National Trust-listed gardens.

"Banongill wasn't for sale," Mr Mulcahy told The Courier, "but a couple of farmers had seen what we'd done with Demeter and came to me with a proposal, and so I started the process."

The 8200ha of Banongill is "good to average" country, better suited to livestock than to cropping, Mr Mulcahy said.

"But what is happening is diversified farmers - crop and livestock farmers - are buying new land when they can, so they can return good land to cropping, rather than using it for stock," he says

"So the idea is to use Banongill for stock, rather than cropping. This is happening more and more, despite the price of land having increased considerably. It is getting difficult to buy land, and more of it is being put up as an 'expression of interest' in order to draw out those high prices."

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Nevertheless, Mr Mulcahy says, Victorian farmers are coming off a couple of good years, which is a positive sign overall, and with interest rates at lending at somewhere between 1 and 2 per cent, these kind of acquisitions will most likely continue.

"There's a lot of potential out there for this kind of large-scale purchase, because farmers of course usually have substantial equity in their properties. They've made a lot of investment increasing the scale of what they can do, in buying new machinery and so on.

"Banongill will be divided up among the consortium. Some of those farmers have properties which abut Banongill, and so it will be broken up into smaller lots of 1000 to 5000 acres, subdivided.

The subdivision is sad in some respects, says Mr Mulcahy, but he agrees it's part of the history of the district to see property sizes rise and fall.

Speaking of history, one of the things the consortium talked about from the start was the preservation of the Banongill homestead and gardens as a working property.

"We didn't want it left on a small holding," Mr Mulcahy said.

"It will remain on a 2000-acre farming block."

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