Castle & Cooke Acquires 2nd Farm Business in a Week
For the second time in a week, Castle & Cooke Inc. has agreed to buy the California agricultural operations of an oil and gas producer eager to pull out of farming and get back to its primary business. The parent of Dole Food Co. said Friday that it will pay Denver-based Apache Corp. $68 million and assume $24 million in farming debt.
The deal will give the Westwood-based food and real estate holding company one of the state’s largest independent processors of almonds and pistachios, T. M. Duche Nut Co., as well as 7,000 acres of San Joaquin Valley farmland producing citrus, olives, figs and other tree crops. Castle & Cooke also will acquire S&J; Ranch, a farm-management company, and two citrus packing houses--San Joaquin Citrus and Earlibest Orange Assn.
David H. Murdock, Castle & Cooke’s chairman and chief executive, said the company is “particularly interested” in expanding overseas markets for its U.S.-grown food products. Almonds are California’s leading agricultural export.
Robert W. Fisher, president of Dole, said that, coupled with Wednesday’s announced purchase of most of Houston-based Tenneco’s California farming business, the Apache deal will expand Dole’s annual sales to more than $2.1 billion. Export sales, mainly to Pacific Rim nations, will generate at least $800 million a year, he said.
The week’s purchases swell Castle & Cooke’s presence in California’s $14-billion agricultural economy to about $700 million, Fisher estimated.
Raymond Plank, Apache’s chairman and chief executive, said the sale will provide fresh capital to step up its development drilling in Oklahoma’s Anadarko Basin and to embark on exploration of foreign sites in a quest for additional oil reserves.
