A King Of Agriculture

What does Cargill mean when it talks about food innovation?
An array of things. In some cases it's fiber you enjoy eating. In other cases it's the sensation of sweetness that comes without a calorie burden. In some cases it's a healthfulness promise: phytosterols from soybeans, antioxidants that people are concerned about. In some cases, they're high-performance sports drinks that have a glycemic response that coincides with an athlete's needs. These are probably things that a lot of people don't think about, but there are sports beverages where our role is to understand metabolism to the level that we understand how the energy is released into the bloodstream.

What is your view on biofuels?
We have one very strong principle, which is that mandates are inherently bad. Agriculture is an outdoor sport, and it's very difficult for somebody to sit in any chamber in the world and determine what next year's weather's going to be, and therefore to mandate some specific level of any crop … And on the other side of it, we're not big supporters of subsidization, but at least it's a quantifiable set of damage. If you say you're going to pay 45 cents a gallon to have ethanol produced, you can calculate what the burden is. But with a mandate, it's incalculable.

How, as the CEO, do you ride herd over such a wide range of businesses?
You don't. And I think anybody that set out to do that would disserve the organization and the employment promise. Cargill is, at one level, a relatively loose confederation of entrepreneurial businesses, and I think it's why a lot of people work here a long time and enjoy it. At the same time, we share one balance sheet and one reputation, and so we have other principles about which we're fairly intolerant. There is this dual reality at Cargill.

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