Cargill: The 1937 Corn Squeeze and America's Largest Private Company

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Cargill began in 1865 in Conover, Iowa, where William Wallace Cargill and his brothers built grain flat houses, the storage bottleneck every farmer had to pass through. When he died in 1909 the company was drowning in debt and issued $2.25 million in gold notes due in 1917. World War I sent grain prices to records, and Cargill paid off everything by 1915. Under John MacMillan Sr. it expanded into Canada, Europe, Latin America and trade with the Soviet Union. After the 1936 corn crop failure, the Chicago Board of Trade ordered Cargill in 1937 to sell physical corn reserves; it refused, was accused of trying to corner the market and was suspended, and when the suspension lifted it never rejoined, trading through independent brokers instead. Today it is the largest privately held company in the United States, with $154 billion in 2025 revenue, about 155,000 employees and roughly 22 percent of the U.S. meat market, and more than 90 percent is still owned by the founding family.

World War II saw Cargill build T-1 tankers for the U.S. Navy and buy Nutrena Feeds. It struck a $40 million wheat deal with the Soviet Union in 1963, hit $5 billion in sales by 1972, and was carrying $4 billion in debt by 1999 after the Asian financial crisis and Russia's default. In June 2020 it stopped publishing quarterly results it had released since 1996. Its supply chains have drawn lawsuits over child labor on West African cocoa farms, a $30 million 2024 settlement of claims that meatpackers suppressed wages, which it denied, and a COVID-19 outbreak linked to more than 1,500 cases at its High River, Canada, plant. Environmental groups tie it to deforestation through a 2003 soy port at Santarém in the Amazon and palm oil from Sumatra and Borneo.

• In 1971 Cargill sold Iraq 63,000 tons of seed grain treated with a methylmercury fungicide; it arrived late, was baked into bread, and caused at least 650 documented deaths.
• The Iraqi grain was dyed pink and labeled in Spanish and English, which local farmers largely could not read.
• A Brazilian court fined Cargill more than $120,000 in 2023 over child labor in cocoa harvesting.
• NGOs allege Cargill used 36 shell companies in Colombia to acquire more than 50,000 hectares, over 30 times the legal limit.
• In 2024 the USDA found human-grade antibiotics given to cattle later sold as raised without antibiotics.