Blount Announces Sale of Forestry Division to Caterpillar Inc.
Construction Equipment
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Commodities giant's high-wire act
CNN Money
You might assume the commodities boom has been an unalloyed good for Bunge, a nearly 200-year-old agriculture-industry titan with $38 billion in sales. The company, whose name is pronounced with a hard 'g' (BUNG-ee), is relatively unknown but has long been among the world's largest soybean crushers and a giant producer of fertilizer. Think of it as a sort of Archer Daniels Midland without the ubiquitous public TV advertisements.
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How Brazil outfarmed the American farmer
CNN Money
Phil Corzine is not abandoning Illinois. A longtime soybean farmer in Assumption, a small town east of Springfield, he is firmly loyal to his state - he once ran the Illinois Soybean Checkoff Board, a program in which Illinois farmers promote Illinois soybeans. But the 1,300 acres Corzine planted in 2007 are not in Illinois, or even in the Midwest. They're in central Brazil, in the state of Tocantins, part of a big swath of soy-producing lands that stretch between the Andes and the Atlantic forest and from northern Argentina to the southern flanks of the Amazon basin. Soylandia, as this immense region might be called, is almost entirely unknown to Americans. But it may well be the future of one of the world's most important industries: grain agriculture.
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