State-owned farming company Landcorp is out of the running to buy the 16 Crafar family dairy farms in receivership.

Receiver KordaMentha has announced it took 50 bids for some or all of the land, and Landcorp is not among the preferred tenders.

Landcorp chief executive Chris Kelly says the result isn’t surprising, as the company lodged what he describes as an ‘opportunistic’ bid.

"We put in a bid which we thought was realistic fully knowing that at least one other bid was higher than ours but they're the breaks."

"They didn't specifically cite money as the issue they just said we were not the prefered tenderer. The money angle is purely my spin on it, I suspect that will have had something to do with it, but who knows?"

If it wasn’t already the frontrunner, Natural Dairy NZ Holdings is now the clear favourite to win the tender for the Crafar farms.

Landcorp was only other publicly confirmed contender, and while the Hong Kong-based company moved quickly on Tuesday to reinforce its own credentials it’s now keeping a low profile through spokesman Bill Ralston.

"At the moment they just said let's close it down and let the [Overseas Investment Office] make up their minds and we'll carry on from there."

Natural Dairy has a sale agreement with KordaMentha, conditional on Overseas Investment Office approval and no better offers coming in.