Cargill: Trading the World's Grain

Leading business historian Wayne G. Broehl, Jr. offers the first full-scale history of Cargill and its rise to international leadership among the "big five" grain traders, a group whose distinctions are private ownership and a passion for secrecy, even though they deal in the most "public" of commodities, the grains that feed the world.

In Broehl's account the Cargill story becomes a grand narrative history and reveals a classic example of the American tradition of development from a small-scale frontier enteprise to a complex international organization and a successful competitor in global markets. Cargill, International ranks highly on the Forbes list of the 400 largest private companies. Over the years the company has successfully integrated into its operations everything from manufacturing steel to squeezing oranges to turning chickens into McNuggets, but the core business was, and has remained grain, one of the basic building blocks of civilization.

Carefully documented from a rich lode of family and business correspondence made available for the first time, Cargill is history at its best. Wayne Broehl has continued the story of this remarkable company in Cargill: Going Global (1998).