Alan Guebert is an Illinois farm journalist.
Ask 100 farmers to name the current chief executive officer of Cargill Inc., the $45-billion-year agriculture giant, or ConAgra Inc., another $24.5-billion-per-year ag behemoth, and 100 blank stares will be the reply.
Ask the same farmers to name the boss at Archer Daniels Midland Co., the $11.3 billion-per-year food processor – puny compared to the other elephants – and 99 will smile knowingly and answer: Dwayne Andreas.
When news filtered out a few weeks ago that the U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago was investigating ADM and had subpoenaed Cargill, A.E. Staley and CPC International for alleged antitrust violations – price fixing – in the high fructose corn syrup, food and feed additive markets, the clapping you heard wasn’t thunder. It was farmers high-fivin’ each other.
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Particularly in ADM’s case. The company and its chief Dwayne Andreas are two ag powers that many farmers love to hate. He is the reigning emperor of agribusiness; the company, a “supermarket to the world.”
For nearly a year, whispers of a federal probe into ADM have been on the Illinois grapevine. The rumor broadly hinted that ADM was in federal gunsights because of its domineering presence in the cash grains markets.
ADM is the cash grain market in much of Illinois and other U.S. regions because of its nearly insatiable processing needs. Operating at capacity, ADM’s corn wet milling plants gobble up 1.4 million bushels of corn every 24 hours. Its soybean oil and meal crushing units squeeze the food and feed out of 63 million kilograms of soybeans each day.
With that size, however, comes distrust – mostly because of ADM’s fat margins. The company routinely makes more money than other processors.
There are other oddities in ADM’s woes. A chief tenet in ag circles long maintained ADM was bulletproof to government guns, mostly because of money and political connections.
Ex-politicos warm several boardroom chairs at ADM. Heavyweights include Robert Strauss, ex-chair of the Democratic Party, Nelson Rockefeller’s widow, “Happy,” and Brian Mulroney, former prime minister of Canada.
Bulletproof? If ever true, it certain is not the case now.
Two more ironies. First, Andreas believes in hiring family. With Dwayne as CEO, brother Lowell as past ADM president, son Michael the current vice-chair and nephew Martin a senior vice-president, ADM has always been able to keep a secret.
Now, however, the ADM insider which fed the FBI information for the investigation allegedly is an outsider, biochemist Mark Whitacre.
Dwayne Andreas once bragged publicly how to avoid government snooping: do business by telephone, he advised. “I have never written a letter in my life,” he noted in a 1987 New Yorker profile.
“If you write a letter,” said Andreas back then, “you need a secretary. If you have a secretary, you need a file cabinet. And if you have a file cabinet, the government will want to look into it.”
According to news reports, Whitacre collected damaging information for the alleged antitrust action electronically, by wiring his briefcase with a tape recorder and tipping the FBI.
If true, this is stunning stuff for ADM. The question farmers are asking is just as stunning: Does the emperor have no clothes?
