Shellady: Not my father’s grain market anymore | Business

You see, my father got into this business in 1962. He was fresh out of Drake University and landed a job with Cargill. He didn’t know much about Cargill back then, it was just a pretty good job for a kid out of Muscatine, Iowa. It was at Cargill where he leaned the grain business. Cargill has a very good reputation for teaching new hires the ins and outs of agriculture – among other things. It is still one of the largest privately-held companies in the world. If it were a public company, it would rank 15th in the Fortune 500. Their revenues for 2018 were $114 billion. Needless to say, it is a behemoth. Not as big in 1962, but it still had its street cred, if you get what I mean.

My father was lucky – he had a knack for the trading business and was promoted quickly. He was first stationed in Des Moines, Iowa, where I was born, and then subsequently we were moved to Minnesota and finally Chicago. The mighty Chicago Board of Trade was where he would stay until his retirement, and it would also be my launching point into this unique line of work. Wearing a funny colored jacket, in this case a black and white cow print, standing around in an octagon-shaped pit of 300 other loudly-clad men, trying to trade the world’s grain – for a profit. I almost left out the hard part – for profit.

This was the early 1970s and this was raw capitalism. There were no trading screens; the quote boards, where trades were recorded, were staffed by men with chalk and erasers. This wasn’t your normal scene in “Trading Places,” as there was a certain decorum — ties to the top of the neck and a modest…