American billionaire Ray Dalio sells famous Australian sheep stations for $209 million

American billionaire Ray Dalio and his longtime Australian partners, the Bell family, have sold a group of farms in New South Wales for 300 million Australian dollars, about $209 million, as they wind up an agricultural business they started more than three decades ago.

The six properties around Deniliquin, in the southern Riverina region, include the Boonoke and Wanganella Merino studs, two of the best-known names in Australian wool. The buyers are pastoralists Ian and Camilla Shippen, whose company Banyandah Pastoral is one of Australia’s biggest family-owned woolgrowers. The sale settled on Oct. 9, the Australian Financial Review reported.

The farms were held by Australian Food & Agriculture Co., which Dalio co-owns with the family behind stockbroker Bell Potter and Alastair Provan, a former chairman of Bell Financial Group. Bell Group Holdings, owned by members of the Bell family and Provan, holds about two-thirds of the company. Dalio has a significant stake.

A slow sell-down

The deal is the second big sale from the portfolio in less than a year. In December 2025, the owners sold the Netherway and Wingadee properties near Coonamble, about 45,000 hectares of cropping and grazing land, for about A$200 million to Cleveland Agriculture, run by Malcolm Harris and his family.

That leaves the company’s Hay portfolio, about 57,600 hectares made up of Burrabogie, Mulberrygong, Kolora and Wahwoon. It includes about 11,000 hectares of irrigated cropping land and 54,693 megalitres of water entitlements, and remains on the market.

The owners first put the business up for sale in 2023, when it held about 225,000 hectares across 13 properties, as the Bell family began planning the estate of co-founder Colin Bell, who died in 2022. In 2024 they agreed to sell the whole portfolio for A$780 million to Agriculture & Natural Solutions Acquisition Corp., a Nasdaq-listed blank-check company. That deal collapsed in April 2025, and the owners switched to selling the farms in pieces.

The business had returned to profit by then. In 2024 it earned A$12.2 million on revenue of A$141 million, after losing A$15.8 million the year before.

Dalio’s Australian farms

Dalio, 77, invested in Australian agriculture more than 30 years ago after a friend in London introduced him to Colin Bell. Bell founded the company in 1993 with the purchase of Burrabogie Station, and with his brothers Andrew and Lewis built it into one of the largest farming groups in New South Wales, producing wool, beef, cotton, rice and grain.

The Bells bought the Boonoke and Wanganella properties, part of the historic F.S. Falkiner & Sons sheep empire, in 2000 for a reported A$40 million. A covenant on the properties requires the two studs to be sold together and their flocks kept intact.

The Shippens are among the most active buyers of farmland in southeastern Australia. They paid A$16 million for the Rhyola and Inverness properties in the southern Riverina in 2022 and A$37 million for Mt Fyans in western Victoria in 2018.

Dalio founded Bridgewater Associates from his New York apartment in 1975 and built it into the world’s biggest hedge fund. He handed control of the firm to its board in 2022 and has since focused on investing his own fortune, writing and philanthropy.