Cutting the ribbon: State Member for Murray Plains Peter Walsh, Federal Member for Nicholls Sam Birrell, Greenham Tongala site manager Darren Maloney and Greenham’s managing director Peter Greenham celebrated the opening of a new plant on Saturday.
Photo by
Aidan Briggs
The sun shone over Tongala on Saturday as the town welcomed a new Greenham meat processing plant.
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The plant can hold between 350 and 400 cattle at any one time and has utilised the herringbone system in order to create a low-stress operation for both cattle and staff.
Construction on the plant began in October 2021 and two years on, opening day arrived.
Proud: Peter Greenham told attendees about his strong personal connection to Tongala through his father’s previous plant.
Greenham managing director Peter Greenham said it felt personally fulfilling to open a plant in the same place as his dad.
“Today has been a fantastic day. It’s taken a while to get here, but after two-and-a-half years it’s finally here and we’re really happy to be opening it,” he said.
“Thirty years ago my father (Peter Snr) opened the first facility here, which is behind us, and then four years later he built another one.
And it’s open: Sam Birrell cuts the ribbon to officially open the new facilities.
Photo by
Aidan Briggs
“Today it’s just an evolution of upgrading and updating what we had and being able to value-add on to what we had and hopefully for the future to have bigger and better things.”
Some of those modern changes have centred around the type of cows used and looking to more international markets for distribution.
“Today it’s more about high-quality beef being processed here instead of dairy cows. Tongala has always been about processing the local dairy cows and manufacturing beef for the US,” Mr Greenham said.
Pleased: Sam Birrell spoke warmly about the opening of the new plant.
“The diversification was the biggest part of the upgrade because now we can rely on more than dairy cattle, but also a lot of beef cattle and also a lot of grain-fed beef.
“With that we can now actually sell to a lot more countries by being high quality grain-fed, high quality grass-fed, and diversify the products that we can produce from here.”
Big day: Hundreds of people took part in the opening, touring the site and staying for lunch afterwards.
Photo by
Aidan Briggs
Mr Greenham said the company was looking forward to being a job provider in the area and said the plant was looking for people to work there.
“Since the opening we’re looking for people to work and I think that will also bring people to this area and they’ll be using the town and using the facilities here and adding value to the economy,” he said.
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