The South Australian Farmers’ Co-operative Union, comprising 5 directors, 94 farmer shareholders and paid-up capital of just under £3,000, was formally launched in Jamestown in early October 1888.
At the time of the release of its silver jubilee annual report in September 1913, the Union was handling more than one-quarter of the state’s wheat crop – regular representation in London had been secured in 1906 and the Union had shipped its first load of grain overseas in May 1908.
Always ambitious, the Union in February 1920 bought 4.93 acres/c.1.99 hectares, costing £8,097, at the southern corner of London Road and Railway Terrace, Mile End South with a view to establishing a factory there. The site’s proximity to Adelaide and the Mile End rail yards made it especially advantageous.
The site became the centre of the Union’s dairy produce activities. The main building covered around 2.2 acres/c.0.89 hectares and included office accommodation, sales rooms and facilities for milk, butter, cheese and dried fruit preparation.
Among the then state of the art machinery and appointments were 5, 1,000 gallon pasteurisers, 2, 1,000 lb Simplex churns (for butter making) – the plant was capable of producing up to 40 tons of butter per week – and, within the main building, a 0.47 acre/c. 0.2 hectare, 350,000 cubic feet capacity 15 chamber refrigeration section (complete with 7 miles of ammonia piping).
The plant was also a distribution centre for apples, dried fruit, eggs, honey, pears and poultry as well as bacon, ham and other smallgoods.
The main building offered garaging for trucks and stabling for around 40 horses.
One of the first large shipments from the Mile End South dairy produce factory was in October 1922 when, after delivery to the centre in several refrigerated trucks, 75,000 dozen eggs were railed to Port Adelaide in 15 chilled cars, then loaded into the refrigerated chambers of the London-bound steamer Leitrim.
In the 1924 - 25 financial year, the Union handled at Mile End South more than 2,000 tons of butter and cheese, 1.04 million dozen eggs, more than 1 million gallons of milk and large quantities of bacon, honey and sundries. In 1926 the Union began exporting Mile End South-processed honey, mainly to the United Kingdom.
On the eastern part of the Scotland Road site, the Union built an egg handling floor to prepare product for the local and export trade.
At its annual general meeting in September 1967, the Union changed its name to the ‘Southern Farmers’ Co-operative Limited’, the change formally taking effect on 12 October 1967. The Farmers’ Union brand name,however, continued to be used extensively.
The Union by this time was South Australia’s largest handler of fresh milk (ahead of AMSCOL) and eggs, as well as being the state’s leading manufacturer of butter and cheese. It was also South Australia’s largest overseas exporter of eggs, around 1,200 cases of eggs, each containing 30 dozen eggs, being packed per day for export. The Union was Australia’s leading individual exporter of cheese.
The huge growth in Adelaide’s population after 1945 brought a similar increase in demand for city and suburban milk.
A range of changes were made at the Mile End South plant to boost output. In September 1946 a then cutting edge APV pasteurising plant was installed, while in early 1954 a £19,000 upgrade of the plant led both to the speedier receipt of milk and to production line changes allowing for the introduction of narrow necked bottles and foil tops. By the mid-1950s the Mile End South site employed around 500 workers.
In September 1959 Australia’s first automatic milk bottling line, costing £45,619 and capable of bottling 18,000 pint bottles per hour, was introduced at Mile End South.
In the late 1950s, the Union was manufacturing almost 3,000 tons of butter and 2,500 tons of cheese annually, almost 3 times the quantity being produced 30 years earlier. Much of it was produced at Mile End South.
In 1962 a new pasteurising plant, treating 4,000 gallons of milk per hour, was installed. In May 1967 the Mile End South site was transformed again with the installation of a $500,000 bottling plant capable of turning out 24,000 bottles per hour.
The old bottling plant of 1959 was reassembled in another part of the factory so that the site’s total bottling capacity was 42,000 bottles an hour; Farmers Union executives maintained that the innovations made the Mile End South facility ‘the most modern milk bottling plant in Australia’.
By now around 90% of Adelaide’s milk – city milk sales amounted to almost 8 million gallons per year – was sold in bottles. In late 1968 an automated milk storage tank cleaning process was introduced at Mile End South, saving labour and cleaning costs.
Although all distribution remained based at Mile End South the process had been accelerated by the introduction of specially insulated vans and 18 refrigerated suburban depots – by August 1980 the number of depots had risen to 24, supplying dairy products to more than 300 South Australian milk vendors. And it was not only milk sales that were booming: in the late 1960s the Mile End South plant was annually receiving around 1.6 million dozen eggs for distribution.
Innovations at Mile End South continued into the 1970s. In 1971 a $20,000, 20,000 gallon stainless steel silo for storing unprocessed milk was erected; another followed in April 1973. In September 1972 a new honey processing plant was built at Scotland Road, Mile End South capable of handling all of South Australia’s honey production. In August 1976 milk homogenising equipment that could treat 22,500 litres an hour (up from the previous 4,500 litres an hour) was installed at Mile End South. Then in April 1977 an automatic carton packing process, allowing cartons to be placed in crates at a rate in excess of one per second, was implemented. (By this time the Mile End South plant used more than 3 million cartons per month).
At the same time Mile End South’s refrigeration system was completely upgraded. Southern Farmers’ began to market yoghurt from October 1976 and in April 1978 a new high-speed German-made ‘Gasti’ machine accelerated the filling of cream, custard and yoghurt containers.
One of the biggest changes in the history of the Mile End South plant came in mid-March 1982 when Southern Farmers’ implemented, at a cost of $4.8 million, a complete upgrading of milk processing operations and a streamlining of milk packaging practices. The redevelopment included new packing equipment that enabled cartons to be packed into crates at a rate of more than 600 crates per hour. Southern Farmers’ executives maintained that Mile End South was now ‘Australia’s most modern milk pasteurising and processing plant’.
The company took over its long-time rival AMSCOL in September 1977. Among other changes Southern Farmers’ acquired a wide range of assets – for example SAFCOL, Australia’s largest fish processor marketer, in 1984, Consolidated Foods, Victoria’s largest processor and distributor of fresh milk in 1987 and Woolworths Ltd.’s dairy manufacturing/processing operations in 1988. They disposed of others, including 2 South Australian firms it had bought in 1982, wholesale grocery firm D. and J. Fowler Ltd (sold in 1984) and George Chapman Smallgoods Pty Ltd, sold in 1987.
At its peak in the mid-1980s, Southern Farmers’ had owned around 12 acres/c.4.9 hectares at various locations in Mile End South; by the end of the decade it owned only one property, the main plant in London Road.
With the purchase of a range of food and beverage assets, Southern Farmers’ had become the sixth largest food company in Australia with sales approaching $750 million. By 1988, its centenary year, the company was a major national conglomerate and bore little resemblance to the co-operative venture tentatively launched 100 years before.
In November 1989 another corporate raider, John Spalvins’s Adsteam, bought IEL outright for $592 million and with it Southern Farmers’ (among many other assets). Spalvins bundled all of his food holdings into one company, National Foods, which he sold in early 1991 for $230 million. Southern Farmers’ was a part of National Dairies, the dairy foods component of National Foods. At this time Southern Farmers’ disappeared as a corporate entity, though the name itself was not formally deregistered until January 2012.
Striving for further improvements in profitability during the 1990s, National Dairies moved most of the Mile End South processing operations interstate. By the late 1990s only milk and cream processing and distribution and some administration work was being undertaken at Mile End South. Late February 1998 National Foods announced that it would close operations at Mile End South.
From 1999 to 2006 National Foods leased offices on the northern side of London Road as an administration and enquiries centre. (From 1919 - 89 the building had been owned by Farmers’ Union/Southern Farmers, hence the Farmers’ Union sign carved into the façade which remains today).
In November 2007 National Foods was bought by Japanese beverage and pharmaceutical giant Kirin Holdings. In October 2009 Kirin acquired Lion Nathan and National Foods became a part of the Melbourne-based Kirin Holdings subsidiary Lion Dairy and Drinks. Then in December 2020, Lion Dairy and Drinks was acquired by Bega Cheese for around $400 million; the Farmers Union brand is now controlled by that company. The factory at Salisbury South is now known as Bega Dairy and Drinks, Salisbury.
Farmers’ Union survives as a brand name on 2 broad product lines, Iced Coffee (launched in 1977) and its variants, and on a range of yoghurts.
Since 2033, the main factory building has been leased to Haigh’s Chocolates as a production facility. (In 2010 Haigh’s built a distribution centre at 200 Railway Terrace, Mile End South, across the road from its production plant).
The 2 original Art Deco influenced façades of the 1920s remain, though instead of ‘SA Farmers’ Co-Operative Union Limited’ the name ‘Haigh’s Chocolate Factory’ has been carved in its place.
In their 1998 heritage study of West Torrens, McDougall and Vines recommended that the Mile End South site be considered for inclusion in the State Heritage List. To date this has not occurred.