The Farmer Goes to Sea

Farmers in the grain-growing north know Cargill, Inc. as one of the world's biggest, most audacious* grain companies with a hankering as big as its elevators for taking on unconventional jobs, rushing them through by unconventional tricks.

But when Cargill began buying farm and meadowland along the tree-shaded Minnesota River near Savage, Minn, little over a year ago, even Cargill-wise farmers hooted at the fantastic reason: Cargill was going to set up a shipyard to build ocean-going vessels. They had some excuse for hooting. Savage is 14 water miles from the Mississippi. For most of those 14 winding miles, the Minnesota was barely 3 1/2 ft. deep.

The Laugh That Failed. Last week, folks along the Minnesota were too busy to laugh. Into the Minnesota at new Port Cargill they triumphantly plopped a 180-ft. Army towboat, the Bataan (cost $1,000,000), moored it snugly alongside three 300-ft. ocean tankers they have launched in the last four months, are now fitting out. Without wasting a moment, they jumped to work on the first of a new batch of Navy tankers Cargill contracted to build fortnight ago.

Cargill's architect of the unconventional, who turned the dreamy meadowlands into an up-to-the-minute shipyard (for around $1,000,000) is a practical doer named Chris Jensen, 46. He joined Cargill ten years ago in a characteristically Cargill way.

In erecting a Cargill office building in Omaha, Danish-accented Chris Jensen made so much profit on the job by his construction short cuts that Cargill hired him to put his tricks to work for them.

The Tricks That Worked. His first job was building a Cargill dream: a frame-less, sheet-steel grain elevator shaped like a balloon. To keep the unsupported steel from collapsing when empty, Jensen built it on frames, pumped in compressed air, pulled out the frames, let the air pressure do their work.

Cargill's left-handed thinking and high grain-shipping rates shoehorned it into the boat business in 1937. Smart, mathematics-minded Cargill president, John H. MacMillan Jr., designed his own unconventional low-cost "articulated unit" barge vessel, that looked like four boxes hooked together with springs and cables. When old-line shipyards refused to have anything to do with such a crazy thing, Chris Jensen turned out the unit in an improvised shipyard beside the Cargill grain elevators in Albany, N.Y. Only grief it ever met was a storm on Lake Michigan, which sank it in 60 feet of water. Chris Jensen got a salvage crew together, yanked the 300-ft. link of barges to the surface, had the motor, running an hour later, cut the usual salvage cost in half.

Cargill had time for one more ship experiment, the 12,500-ton tanker, Victoria, which was completed in the Albany yard in 1941, sold to Argentina in time to become the first Argentine ship torpedoed in World War II. The Victoria did not sink. She was torpedoed in what was thought to be the engine room, just under the stack, but the stack was a phony. The engine room was somewhere else.

The Job That Paid. When Cargill got its first Government ship contracts (for four towboats and six tankers), the Albany yard was abandoned and everything usable was shifted to Port Cargill, where there was plenty of labor, plenty of subcontractors for fabricating within reach at nearby Minneapolis.

To get additional equipment, Chris Jensen ransacked machine shops and railroad yards, came up with many a prize. Example: a White truck on railroad wheels, now used as a Port Cargill switch engine. To get water for launching, a pool 20 ft. deep was dredged at Port Cargill, and a 9-ft. channel was dredged all the way to the Mississippi.

No blueprint expert, Chris Jensen leaves fine details to his staff of engineers and Navy officers, runs the yard and its more than 2,000 workers on a "let's try it this way" basis, hits his best form in emergencies. When the flooded Minnesota threatened to sweep away the big administration building in June, Chris Jensen had 120 jacks thrust underneath, raised the building three feet in twelve hours to let the muddy waters sweep underneath. The office staff kept on working.

The Future It Made. With a ship building backlog of nearly $30,000,000, Cargill, Inc. has no trouble fitting its new yard into the pattern of its postwar operations. To get lower freight rates for Port Cargill now, Cargill, Inc. has already bought the 115-mile Minnesota-Western R.R. which taps Minneapolis and the rich grainlands of central Minnesota. Thus, Cargill, Inc. has its own port at the head of the navigable Mississippi, its own railroad to supply it.

Cargill men hope this will be enough inducement for grain, coal and ore ship pers to make Port Cargill their rail-ship transfer point (WPB designated it the region's ore transfer point for war ship ping this spring, but retracted when Minneapolis and St. Paul objected). Cargill has long boosted river shipping, contended the big obstacle was not shallow channels, but lack of the proper boats. At war's end, Cargill, for the first time, will have an efficient, top-notch yard to rectify that.

*In September 1937, the Cargill Grain Co. of Illinois, a subsidiary of Cargill, Inc., virtually cornered the Chicago corn market, squeezed short sellers so tightly that the Chicago Board of Trade stepped in, told Cargill to sell corn holdings at an arbitrary price. Cargill refused to comply. In 1938, the Board of Trade expelled Cargill of Illinois from the Board for its price manipulations in the corner fight.

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