Cargil International Corp. history

He was later joined by his younger brother Sam and in 1868 moved to Minnesota, where the company established its headquarters and began to take advantage of the post-Civil War western expansion of the railroad and agriculture.

In 1875, Cargill moved to La Crosse, Wisconsin, and brother, James, joined the family business.

In 1882, they sold their Red River Valley grain elevators to William Cargill in order to raise more capital.

Sam Cargill left La Crosse in 1887 and moved to Minneapolis to manage the office there, which was identified as an important emerging grain center.

Then in 1888, James, William, and Sam Cargill formed Cargill Brothers.

In 1898, John H. MacMillan, Sr., and his brother, Daniel, began working for W.W. Cargill.

Upon Sam Cargill’s death in 1903, William Cargill became the sole owner of the La Crosse office.

When the elder Cargill died in 1909, leaving the firm burdened with a heavy debt load, John Hugh MacMillan forced out William S. Cargill and took control of the company.

MacMillan led the company through a difficult period after the struggle for power; not until 1916 was its financial situation completely secure.

Four years later, as a fallout from the financial crash of 1920, Cargill posted its first loss.

When Albany, New York brokers began to open offices in the Midwest, bypassing Cargill as a middleman, Cargill opened an office in New York in 1922.

In 1929, Cargill opened a permanent office in Argentina in order to secure immediate information on Latin American wheat prices.

The feud began in 1934, when the Board denied membership to Cargill.

John MacMillan ran the company until his retirement in 1936.

At the same time, the aggressive nature of MacMillan’s management style also created problems for the company, most notably in the September Corn Case of 1937.

In 1938, the Chicago Board suspended Cargill and three of its officers from the trading floor.

In 1943 Cargill entered the soybean processing business through the purchase of plants in Cedar Rapids and Fort Dodge, Iowa, and Springfield, Illinois.

In 1945, Cargill purchased Nutrena, an animal-feed producer, a transaction which doubled its capacity in poultry and animal feeds.

By 1949, Cargill had made a major entry into soybean processing, and its researchers were exploring the value of safflower and sunflower oil.

In 1953 Cargill opened a Swiss subsidiary, Tradax, to sell grain in Europe.

Similarly, in 1954 barges that carried grain to New Orleans began to backhaul salt up the Mississippi.

In 1955 Cargill opened a Swiss subsidiary, Tradax, to sell grain in Europe.

And in 1960, Cargill opened a 13-million-bushel grain elevator in Baie Comeau, Quebec.

In 1962, Cargill did rejoin the Chicago Board of Trade, two years after the death of John MacMillan, Jr.

Cargill Beginnings, Cargill, Minnetonka, Minnesota, 1965; Morgan, Dan.

These developments set the stage for the famous grain purchase of 1972.

When Kelm retired in 1976, Whitney MacMillan, greatgrandson of founder W. W. Cargill, became chairman.

Brazil’s land reform agency has raised concerns over aspects of the original purchase in 1978; if validated, it could be one of the biggest land-grabs in Brazilian history.

Also in 1979 came the purchase of the Laurent malt plant in France, which initiated Cargill’s involvement in the malting business.

The 1980 embargo on grain sales to the Soviet Union left Cargill long on grain.

Finally, in 1981, Cargill beefed up its trading operations with the acquisition of Ralli Bros, and Coney, a U.K.-based international trader of cotton, rubber, wool, and fiber.

Typical of its approach was the purchase of Ralston Purina’s soybean-crushing plants in 1985.

Cargill started its business in India in the year 1987.

With the help of consultants McKinsey & Company, MacMillan initiated a major reorganization of Cargill’s North American operations in 1990.

The company responded with an employee stock ownership plan, and in 1993 reportedly purchased 17% of the firm for $730 million from 72 Cargills and MacMillans.

For the fiscal year ending in May 1995, Cargill reported that its revenues exceeded the $50 billion mark for the first time, totaling about $51 billion, with net income standing at $671 million.

For 1996, Cargill reported record net income of $902 million on record sales of $55.98 billion.

The economic turmoil that erupted in mid-1997 in Asia and then spread to Latin America and Russia sent global commodity markets into a deep slump, depressing both sales and earnings at Cargill.

In January 1999 the company started a three-year, $30 million ad campaign with a Super Bowl television spot and a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal.

In January 2000 Cargill and Dow Chemical announced that a 50-50 joint venture called Cargill Dow Polymers LLC would begin construction of a manufacturing plant in Blair, Nebraska, where a new kind of plastic would be produced, a recyclable plastic fiber made from plants rather than petroleum.

In August 2001 the company acquired Emmpak Foods Inc., a Milwaukee-based privately held meatpacker that was subsequently melded with Cargill’s Excel unit.

In January 2002, for instance, the company joined with CHS Cooperatives to form Horizon Milling, LLC, which instantly became the leader in United States flour milling, surpassing Archer Daniels Midland Company.

In the fall of 2003 an integrated marketing campaign dubbed "Collaborate>Create>Succeed" was launched to articulate Cargill's new vision.

In October 2004 the company merged its fertilizer business, Cargill Crop Nutrition, into the publicly traded firm IMC Global, Inc., which then changed its name to the Mosaic Company.

In December, the US supreme court is scheduled to hear a case, first filed in 2005, alleging that Cargill was one of two major companies to have “aided and abetted” child slavery in west Africa.

In 2006, following a Greenpeace campaign, Cargill and other major soya buyers – along with their customers such as McDonald’s – agreed not to trade in soybeans grown in newly deforested areas of the Amazon.

In June 2007 Staley retired after a remarkable eight years at the helm marked by a greater openness, several major acquisitions, and a concerted shift well beyond the company’s grain trading roots.

By 2008 the operation that started as a single frontier outpost in Iowa had become one of the largest privately held companies in the western world.

In 2009, The New York Times found that Cargill-supplied hamburgers contaminated with E coli had been made from a mish-mash of cheap scraps more likely to have contact with faeces, some of which had been doused in ammonia to kill bacteria.

In the year 2010, the company acquired Kinray, an independent pharmacy in the United States.The major countries of the company’s operations in Asia Pacific include India, Japan, Malaysia, South Korea, Singapore, Thailand, Australia, etc.

In October 2011, the United States Justice Department announced that a biotech specialist at Cargill had pleaded guilty to stealing information from Cargill and Dow AgroSciences.

The facility is expected to open mid 2014.”

A 2017 Mighty Earth investigation found that cocoa purchased by Cargill and others via a series of third parties had been grown in illegally deforested protected areas in Ivory Coast.

In September 2018, 10 farmers linked to the Rural Union of Santarém (SIRSAN) sued Brazil’s National Indian Foundation over the Munduruku demarcation process, claiming to own part of the land within Munduruku-claimed territory.