Odd Lots - What It's Like to Do Big Ag Business in Venezuela and Ukraine

Episode Date: January 29, 2026

The Trump administration says it wants to kick start private investment in Venezuela now that it's captured Maduro. And Ukraine is eventually going to need a massive rebuild. But what is it like for a big multinational to actually operate in these types of places? In this episode, we speak with Jeff Kazin and Mike Rohlfsen, the cofounders of agricultural consultancy AgrisAcademy and former long-time Cargill employees. Jeff previously ran Cargill's Venezuelan business and Mike was the company's first employee in another geopolitical hotspot: Ukraine. We talk about the challenges they faced in these two locations, including dollar shortages, corruption, and security threats, and their sometimes creative solutions to them.Read more:Venezuela Leader Pressed From All Sides Over Oil Industry PlansUkraine Says It Attacked Small Oil Refinery in Southern Russia Subscribe to the Odd Lots NewsletterJoin the conversation: discord.gg/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Thanks for listening to OddLots. Follow the show on Amazon Music for more future episodes or just ask Alexa play the podcast, OddLots on Amazon Music. Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts Radio News. Hello and welcome to another episode of the OddLots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. And I'm Joe Wisenthal. Joe, one of the big topics of discussion, there are a lot of topics of discussion nowadays, but when it comes to the recent takeover of Venezuela, the Trump administration's takeover of Venezuela. I don't know how to. Acquisition.

I don't know how to describe it. I don't either. But the action in Venezuela. One of the themes or things that you saw people talking about was this idea that, well, even if the goal is to get more oil, Venezuela's oil industry is a mess. It's in shambles. Yeah. So you hear things about, you know, ships that are rusting in the dock and pumps that don't work and whatever. people talking about really creaky infrastructure and also just a bad environment for doing business.

Yeah, I mean, this is the thing. And so in the Venezuela-specific context, we know that the oil infrastructure has been degraded for years, which is why there is all these numbers about the massive amounts of upfront investment that would be required to get the oil started. But then there's this other phenomenon that's global, which is that there's really not much of a connection per se between the existence of natural resources in the ground and some way to get them out commercially anywhere. This also happens to be the case in Greenland. It happens to be the case in Western Australia, which is a very well-run country, which is that assets in the ground are anywhere mean nothing

without the sort of rule of law, refining, processing, shipping infrastructure, etc. So all these places of various different degrees, the actual existence of some asset, in Venezuela's case, oil, that's totally part of the story. Absolutely. So this got me thinking, what is it like to actually do some sort of industrial business in a place like Venezuela? And I always wanted to do more on the Venezuelan economy. I think it's pretty interesting and more interesting now. So that is exactly what we're going to do today. We're also going to talk about doing business in another hot spot. Hot spot. Hot spot is a good way of putting it, which is Ukraine. Right. We did a number of episodes immediately after Russia's invasion. of Ukraine, talking about the effects on the grain business. But the important thing, which we didn't

get into that much, although I think we did a little bit, is like, well, the green business, the weed export business, it still exists. It was impaired. But then the day-to-day business of running a commercial operation in that intense environment, how that changes and so forth and so forth. How does that change under the new competitive strains? And I just want to say one more thing, which is, you know, when you talked about, well, what is the right word now to describe our relationship with Venezuela. It's, I've been thinking about a lot of this too. Do you have a word? No, I don't because it's very context dependent, right? If you were to listen to the administration, he's like, oh, Maduro was arrested, right? If you believe this was a flagrant violation of

international law, you'd say he was kidnapped, etc. There's almost no words to describe it. You saw the president talking about already selling Venezuelan oil. So whose oil is this already? It's just a, it's a very odd situation to say they'll leave. Definitely. Okay. So speaking of odd situations, we have the perfect guess to talk about them. And just I just got to say, I got a headline, U.S. Seeks immediate talks on acquiring Greenland. Trump says, so at some point we will have another conversation about weird relationships with parts of the world that we didn't think about as much. Yeah, the Greenland economy episode is yet to come. Inevitably going to arrive. Okay. So we're going to be speaking with Jeff Kaysen. He is the co-founder of Agress Academy.

and also the other co-founder, Mike Rolfson. So Jeff and Mike, thank you so much for coming on all thoughts. Really appreciate it. Thanks for having us. Yeah, thanks for having us. So first of all, why don't you give us a sort of nutshell summary of your career history? Because this is why we're talking to you. Both of you had very long, interesting careers at Cargill, which is one of the massive, massive agricultural conglomerates, among other things.

So talk to us about. Why we're talking to you, I guess. Yeah, I guess I'll start out. This is Jeff Kaysen. I did a full career in Cargill 30 years and started at the ground up, you know, Baton Rouge, Louisiana ports, buying grain to go to export. It was ahead of wheat trading, did a lot of wheat trading at some point, spent some time in their murder's acquisition shop around the world,

looking at various businesses. I ended up as a CEO of a joint venture between Cargill and Monsanto at the time, switched over into the vegetable oils, particularly the refined vegetable oils, was the head of trading for what we call the West, so the Western Hemisphere on the refined oil side. And that's actually where my time with Venezuela was connected. Cargo had a very large oils business there, actually a packaged oils business. And I finished up my career in the feed side, a lot of aquaculture,

very large salmon feeders around the world, shrimp, all kinds of various aquaculture. and then really the western side, South Latin America on the feed side all the way to Argentina. So a typical, highly varied cargo career. Similar story with me back then when Jeff and I started, you know, cargo intentionally threw you around to many different places. So yeah, I had three different domestic roles in the early to mid-90s that got your feet wet in different markets in the United States. And I also was involved on the export side out of Houston, you know, similar to what Jeff did. And then about five years in, I got tapped on the shoulder to go to Ukraine.

There was no real commercial presence for Cargill then. What year are we talking about? This was, this would have been April of 1995. Okay. Yeah. So I was young. I was single. I spoke Russian.

I was perhaps tongue and cheek. You ticked all the boxes. Expendable. And, you know, with a blank slate that not really knowing what was going on at the time and probably rather difficult to find people to come there. I had raised my hand already to go, and fortunately they circled back to me and gave me that opportunity, and it was five wonderful years there, taking it basically from a theoretical representative office to,

I think we had seven or eight business units and a couple hundred million dollars invested. So it was a wonderful experience over those five years. And I also was with Jeff in the Merger and Acquisition Shop shortly after returning. and went into corporate ventures for a while after that and left Cargill a little earlier than Jeff did and went through AgTech and AgTech oriented venture capital. Then about three years ago, we kicked this off. I hope you guys are cool with us turning this into a five-hour conversation now because I imagine there's an incredible number of stories and I already have a billion questions. So we're going to be doing a little bit of that on the fly. Jeff, talk to us about the years you did business with Venezuela and maybe.

the difference in what years those were and then the sort of different conditions from like the beginning to the end as you saw them yeah so uh because of the oils business i was attached to that and i'd like to say that um it was a very business and i ended up and i have a lot of grain experience too so i ended up kind of the head of overseeing training for all of it and probably the biggest statement is i think when i started the boulevard the currency was like one to 800. And this is, and I get my years right. And I think, you know, three years later, it was like one to 12,000 or something like that. You ended up, we ended up in that period of super hyperinflation where the economy basically seizes up. And, you know, you watch from the capability,

if you don't have a functioning currency and the government makes you sell in local currency, in order to go, you have to have some way to exchange it. And we effectively, became dependent on the government to do the exchange to go out and buy dollarized raw materials right now. 80% of global trade is still in dollars and a lot of the grain trade is. And that probably is the most single telling thing. The currency ceased to function. And that really changed the game on the ground in Venezuela. I want to get into some of the currency complications in a little bit, but I was surprised that Cargill had any business at all in Venezuela. Can you just tell us what exactly Cargill was doing over there? Yeah, and keep in mind, I'm currently a former employee,

and Cargill does not own the business there anymore. I was reached out to by Cargill. Basically, this is very typical of Cargill. They'll have females. They'll go out. They'll start with females. They'll, they had the long-term salt. Salt was a big play there. Cargill is a large producer, globally of salt. A lot of things quietly. I think there was a lot of industrial use salt there. They had the petrochemical business was using salt. I don't actually am not an expert on the petrochemical side. And then there are in lots of food processing businesses around the world. In this case, you know, they were natural flour millers, oil refineries, oil bottlers, the rice I had not seen anywhere else in the world. It was actually gone by the time I got there.

pasta plants. So in this case, probably the more unique thing was that not only we were doing primary processing, we were going all the way to consumer. They actually had a very, I think the number one brand that they had bought over time. I think there was an acquisition from Bungi predates me in there also. So they were, you know, this was a very wealthy country and a place where you could do some very good business in and then repeat that model in multiple countries all over the world. And so, yeah, that's how they got there. It was very natural flow. And they had a very large investment there. The news doesn't stop on the weekends. Context changes constantly. And now Bloomberg is the place to stay on top of it all.

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Mike, on Ukraine, you know, 1995 is still the early days of real post-Soviet optimism, right? And people hadn't become jaded yet. And they probably hadn't woken up to sort of all the various pathologies and stuff that would occur in the wake of the dissolution of the socialists. Union, et cetera. Talk a little bit about the calculation and the hopes for Ukraine and the degree to which, you know, over the many years that you've paid attention to this market and worked in it, how they unfolded relative to say expectations. Well, I almost would say you underestimated the optimism at the time. In 95, there was a tremendous amount of optimism. We had a very dynamic team And quite frankly, even the older folks that we would find to help be a part of what we were doing commercially, even though all they had known is the system, there were folks that were experienced and hardworking and very excited to jump into the sort of things that we were doing in a very differentiated way.

So we had rock stars in our group that were 22 and out of school, and we had rock stars that were 60 years old that were. probably had some sort of legacy experience in agriculture in the Soviet Union, but was able to translate that to us. And it was an absolutely fantastic experience back then. It was more than just a job. It was, you felt it was transformational. It was, you were changing the way business got done there. There was an insane amount of chaos, but working in a regimented, ethical way, got you business by, you know, in another route. So, yeah, Yeah, we made it work. It was classic cargo at the time, sort of being sort of pioneering and entrepreneurial. And, yeah, we made it work and started with the trading side and slowly but

surely put assets on the ground and a lot of other more formal things that made it look more and more like a regular geography by the time, you know, the year 2000 rolled around in when I left. So, Mike, you were on the ground in Ukraine. And Jeff, you were managing the Venezuela business remotely. What was that actually like? Because I am. imagine, you know, we're talking about a couple decades back now, communication must have been more difficult than it is even nowadays. It was very typical. I wouldn't say, you know, there was, we had leading edge AS 400s back in the day, and so

communication has always been a priority of a trading firm, and so there was a lot of investment at that, right? You know, that was very typical that you would have one, and I remember, I'm a trading manager, not the overall business manager, but I would have. You know, we would have local merchants in each country, and you've got to connect and coordinate that. You know, think about if you're buying, say, you're buying a multi-grossary boat cargo. You're going to load that cargo in New Orleans with all kinds of different commodities. And it's going to, you know, you're going to leverage that out to get your freight costs down and create competitive advantage.

And so you're coordinating all your different trading groups in the region. And then that actually goes out on a global basis. So you're constantly looking at. for that edge. So I play the coordination role and then at the local level, like, you have to have local expertise on the ground, particularly in the cases Venezuela started to become unstable. You need people that understand how to navigate the government, how to navigate the various channels to get things and continue to get things done. And that takes local know-how. So that was kind of that big picture role that I would be filling in, of course, the risk management side.

and then you have that very local execution side to make things happen. You've got to have both. Yeah, and the same proxy existed for us, at least in our external communication and how we linked up. So my usual routes of communication went through our Geneva office and then outward throughout the rest of Cargill. So the external communication was world class. We had satellite phones through which we ran our modems and that kind of thing, early on at least. internal, a whole different story I could probably waste 45 minutes explaining just simple sending a fax type story and things like that in 1995 and 1996, but before things got a little bit

better integrated. But yeah, it was a dichotomy between internal and external, but manageable nonetheless. One of my first journalism jobs was literally monitoring the fax machine and making sure if a fax came in that the newsroom would be aware of it. thrilling times. We could easily do an hour on internal communications and the sort of like pre-email, pre-SLAC, pre-I-B. I don't know, the pre-I-B era, it's very long ago. But pre-digital document management in general on how that must have been.

And maybe we'll have you back just to talk one day about that. Jeff, I remember I had a, it's interesting enough, I forgot about this. But when my first year of college, I had a roommate who I think had done some mission work. for his church in Venezuela. And he was there when he, by the time he was roommates, he was talking about, oh, this guy Hugo Chavez, it looks like he's going to win. This is going to be bad news, et cetera.

And so I should have taken that more seriously and paid more attention. What was, though, the point, a lot of people were concerned about Chavez, obviously. What was the point, though, in which you sort of saw, like, okay, this is, this is turning down. And what was it? And what was the process by which, like, oh, we're starting to get serious inflation. We are starting to have a more difficult time doing business or importing dollar-denominated machinery. When did that sort of sink in for the business? Yeah, so I arrived.

We were already to Maduro. So we were already. So Chavez, the time there had already passed. And, you know, it's the frog in the boiling pot, right? It starts small and then it starts to, you know, and then you get all. all these unintended consequences. And you're trying to, and then, you know, there's a socialist regime, you're trying to plug holes, right, and all these things that start to go on.

And plus, you know, you also have a government that is healthily paranoid about being overthrown, right? There's a power aspect that's going on and all this at the same time. I think it really, really took a plunge. I mean, it wasn't good at Chavez, but when the currency and, you know, as you said, the oil industry starts to deteriorate so that spicket of dollars is drying off. It takes ever more dollars to pay off everybody in the system, right? It's a constant payoff system. And then you just don't have enough money, so you just run the printing press, right? And I remember this. There was a point,

it got, it happened so fast a couple stories. One is the BTU of a paper boulevard. The BTU value is worth more than it could buy. You could burn it. So you literally burn them for fuel. burn it through fuel. That's crazy. And there was a time where they were, they were having the boulevars printed, but they didn't pay their printing bill. And they were flying it. The printing was being done in dollars outside the country. They didn't have enough money to buy the boulevars to fly them in. So you started running out of currency on the ground, like you just, even if you wanted to work on it. There's all kinds of these kind of stories. But it was right in that probably two years into Maduro space when the currency stopped functioning.

That was really when we knew we were in trouble. Just to go back to something you said, so an American company working in any foreign country has to abide by American laws particularly related to things like bribery and corruption. And maybe for both of you, and I imagine, you know, that this is a very prominent issue in both these countries, maybe more. in Venezuela and Ukraine, et cetera, but we know that there's significant corruption in Ukraine, et cetera. Can you talk a little bit about essentially how you function in these environments where probably lots of people are getting paid off literally or in the bribery sense and

how you have to navigate that from the perspective of a multinational? I'll start. Sure. And going back, again, within the perspective of the mid-90s, there were two impediments, and I use the word impediment, you know, not that it impeded us, but it did create a headwind for, shall we say the ease of doing business and the scale of doing business. Yeah. So the two parts that created impediments for us is there still was a fair amount of governmental influence

in the grain business in 1995, and it really was from a county perspective and a state or what they referred to as obelist perspective all the way up to the central government. So there were plenty of ways to keep those people happy and quietly by grain at scale that would also go through a state-owned railroad system and a state-owned court system. So most of the infrastructure, and there were gatekeepers at various stages that could easily be catalyzed to shoveling. we say, to get grain out the door at very reasonable numbers and trade at large scale. And I would, I could name names, but, you know, there's plenty of, some of the global traders that don't have to apply to the U.S. rules-based system. So what we basically did is did at old school, we went straight

to the farms in smaller quantities, in reasonable amounts with people we could trust and just gutted it out through atypical ways of getting the grain out of the country, which, ironically. is some of the infrastructure that we built on the Danube River system that it's very lumpy, it's transshipment through cranes and vacuvation systems and things like that as opposed to a big, you know, high-scale elevator. Those are some of the things today that are getting grain out of the country because some of the main elevators have been destroyed or damaged in some way. So that was our biggest problem, you know, you could get around it and quite frankly it was more rewarding doing it that way as we saw our impact on the ag sector, but that was sort of a big picture reality at the time

when I first got there. I think in my case, it is comforting as operating is to know you don't have to pay those type of bribes or facilitated payments. The company did a very good job of instilling that. Everybody who joined, trained on it yearly, and quite frankly backed it up, right? If you didn't make your numbers because you would have had to pay a bribe to get there, it didn't hurt you career-wise. They knew you talk about it.

You tell them, I'm not going to do this. And it happened. And we had these stories that happened. But it's on that side, it made it very clear for your employees to know how to operate. The other thing I want you to think about in the global food space, right, is if you're a Nestle or Frito Lay or one of that, and you're buying raw materials. So you have a plant in Venezuela. Okay. You want to make sure that you have food safe product.

U.S. grade and the standards, right, food safety, you want to actually, it actually draws business to you, right? Right, the brand value of American food. Right, and that you're going to act honestly, and they don't have to pay a bribe to get a truck, you know, to the plant on that day, right, the things like that, the way you can do business. So at that time, let's call them Western companies. They're now today, more modern companies. They like to go to some of these early markets together.

and because they knew that they had a supplier that, you know, if you were making malt barley for the brewery and it's a, you know, South African brewery, they knew that you were actually going to, you know, make a contract and stick to the contract no matter what. If we had to work it out, there was crop failure, you would, you know, hold your word was your bond. And, you know, I'm going to tip a hat off to my former employee. They were very good about how that operated. And I work with them in places basically in any, all the corners of the world. and everything from, you know, fish meal to licing to wheat, that brand helps out in these environments because, you know, the customers can count on you. And in food, super important, right? Because if you screw that up, you can kill somebody. And or tarnish the customer's brand, right? If something gets through this, that's the same way it is in the U.S., actually,

but not with maybe the same criticality when you're working in a remote location. around the world. So this actually leads into something I'm really curious about, which is, obviously, Cargill is a private company operating at that time under a socialist regime under Maduro. What was the relationship like just between a private commercial enterprise and a socialist government, especially for something as critical as food, right? I imagine the government cared about the food supply. We had to follow both sets of laws, right? You have to follow the local law too, right? So if they say you must transact in boulevars, you have to transact in boulevars.

Now, we didn't have tether or Bitcoin at this point, right? So the world's changing in an interesting way. You have to follow that. I mean, you don't want to, I don't know, poke the bear, right? And then you have to have people to become experts on how whatever government you're working with runs. And we do. And that's how we would. But this was a very common, still is common to operate.

some of these places where, you know, places that have cocoa, right? You know, some of the African countries there are Zimbabwe, right, South Africa. You still have this situation. You have to become, there is a competitive advantage of becoming experts at working in difficult places. Were you ever pressured, though, for instance, to lower grocery prices? Oh, absolutely, all the time, right? And there were laws on theoretically how much you could make and how much you could make and how the counting was done on that.

And, you know, if we had a global rice shortage, it was not the fact that we had a global rice shortage and prices rising. It was Cargill that was doing it, too, you know, to the people. You had to have an escapegoat effectively. And, you know, at some point, you just know that you can't import at price X and sell it for X minus, you know, a bunch. And you'll just bleed out. And quite frankly, at some point and several geographies, we get a situation where, you're

corporation says we will put no more dollars in the country. And we were there. And I can still remember that. So if we wanted to import something, we had to get dollars either from the government or figure out how to export something that created dollars. So that's where you really start to struggle because you basically rely on the government to exchange boulevars for dollars. And that's where we tried all kinds of things to try to export.

I mean, there was salt there. We tried pallets. But every time you tried to do something, somebody in the economy was like grabbing that, oh, no, if you really want to move that, you know, to the port, that's going to require some facilitation payment or something like that. It just, and the team down there was desperately trying to, because the other thing we needed beyond just the raw materials that we needed spare parts. And this may be, lies to your question about what's the situation there.

You know, if you need to buy some electrical equipment from Siemens, they're not going to want boulevars and they want euros or dollars. So we were having to try to figure out how to generate enough dollars just to get spare parts. And, you know, I'm not sure how I can only speak from my situation is now the team is really focused instead of kind of on their day-to-day job of running logistics and parts, you know, and getting things in, their jobs switch to how do we originate dollars. So you have, you know, a couple people that are just expert in government and maybe like camp out at government offices for long periods of time trying to figure out winding through the red tape.

And then you have people trying to figure out, you know, hey, can we, you know, put one ton one kilo bag or one metric ton bags together of salt that's sitting in this pile and get them out of the country and sell them to generate dollars. So now you have a dollar generation team. And that can play out all over. Argentina before Malay. I don't know what the situation is now was like that. So when you have hyperinflation, you get into a situation where you have to have a team that's just $1,000.

I wasn't expecting the conversation to go in this, but for either one of you and Jeff, you mentioned the non. I wasn't expecting to talk about Tether in this episode. But in today, 2026, when you think about sort of these currency bottlenecks that exist, do cryptocurrencies or whether it's stablecoins or something truly decentralized? like Bitcoin, are people seriously either implementing or thinking about how some of these new financial technologies can solve pain points within the global ag trade? Mike, this is your specialty. Yeah, well, again, I can't speak to the specificity, maybe country by country, but certainly if you look maybe in the big picture, the average producer somewhere in the world that has

a currency issue where it impedes them in maybe the quality of their bank, their access to capital, their access to foreign currency to upgrade whatever it is, absolutely the tethers of the world and things like that are going to fundamentally change the access to that sort of thing when you compare it to the way it was before, for sure. And I will maybe add a little half answer to what you threw out there too. There's a lot. lot of great stories for folks looking for something to entertain themselves around Bitcoin, especially the early Bitcoin mining that was going on in Venezuela, for people that were concerned about where the country was going, where they would tap into a small hydro plant

at maybe a family's place out in the woods somewhere and mine Bitcoin, put it on a wallet and had it as their escape valve in case they needed it. And sure enough, there was a night where they traips through the jungle and went to another country and had it on their wallet and started another life. So, yeah, there was some very interesting early pioneering Bitcoin stories around what the ball of our forced folks to do early on. Hello, I'm Michelle Hussein. And for more than 20 years, I was at the BBC.

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You certainly ask interesting questions. What separates good leaders from transformational ones? I'm Jessica Chen, and in season two of Leading By Example, we'll sit down with executives like Grace Chen of Bertie Gray to find out. It's important to understand where you spike, but also really acknowledge where you don't and find people who can fill those gaps. Listen to leading by example, executives making an impact on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Talk to us about people actually leaving Venezuela, because this is also something that you hear a lot about, which is, you know, if you were a Venezuelan with some amount of means in the past, you were very incentivized to leave, especially if you're working in certain businesses that the government was targeting. Did you experience that at Cargill as well, this sort of brain drain? It happened all the time.

First, I want to set the scene, right? We have a, at the time we had an office in Caracas, very nice, right? A lot of employees there, not just kind of, because we had a brand business, right? We had people that were, you know, label designers. And, I mean, it was the full on, think of it, I don't know, more maybe the Proctor and Gable, the retail side of things. So big office, nice. we had, you know, satellite communications there. There was no Starlink yet.

And so the office was a nice place, right? And people actually, you know, they were like, oh, yeah, I was there on Saturday. And the problem is, is when you left that office, you zipped to your dated community, more likely an apartment complex. You just had to go from secured compound to secure compound. And then it became, you know, you didn't know if you were having water that week or hot water. you might not have electricity for several days. You might not have access. There might not be anything to buy in a grocery store.

Now, our employees were getting some food from us because we made some basics, right? You know, every week we would make sure that we got something transferred from the plants and put this stuff together. So the life style that people lived was not easy, even for those that theoretically had, you know, were well-educated, had good jobs. and eventually, even our business, of course, the business is slowing down and they leave. And then, of course, in our case, we had a plant that got nationalized at gunpoint. Well, if you're a highly skilled manager operator, you don't want to stick around and start to have to do your job at gunpoint, right?

Because they don't have any expertise in how they run the plant. So the big wave, the first wave, the first, somebody said, several. million Venezuelans were the most educated, the most skilled, and it compounded itself, right? Because now nobody knows how to run the electric generation station, right? Nobody knows, you know, obviously the petrochemical industry, right? You can go get reemployed around the world. You know, if you're a, you know, a petrol engineer, no problem. And so those people went all over the place. And the beauty of working for a multinational is we picked up as many as we could. And that is, you know, in that conversation to bring you, you have an employee they call, they're very nationalistic.

They know they're doing important work. They've had enough. And you get that call and they go, you know, they're, they, it's kind of sheepish. They're like, they feel like they're abandoning you. And, you know, we go and find them. And my story was, you know, one of my last employees just says, I'm going to Mexico City. I think his wife was working for Sony at the time and had some type of employment. And I said, well, what are you going to do?

And he goes, I don't know, but I'm not going to be here anymore. You know, I mailed my big screen TV and a couple things, DHL, and I'm going to take my guitars on the plane, and I'm done. And I said, well, I know what you're going to do. You're going to go to this address and you're going to work for me in Mexico. And that played out hundreds of times inside my employer. you'd go to a meeting in Mexico City. I still remember management meeting.

They run a very large crush, refined facility north of Mexico City. And half the people in the room are Venezuelans, talented, smart, educated. And that played out. I know from my social media, you know, that happened in lots of Western companies. They were very, my experience working with Venezuelans was it was fantastic. They had a good education system, smart, business. savvy and we gladly reemployed them around the world. Sticking with Venezuela for a moment, and we've heard all the numbers about the oil industry

and the amount of upfront capital it would take to sort of profitably begin shipping oil at scale or selling oil at scale. What is your understanding right now of the equivalent within the realms that you're working in grains? Like, is there the same sort of view that all the infrastructure that was being used during the days when he was working profitably would need a significant amount of capital for an entity like Cargill or the sort of family of global food companies to want to reenter that business. Look, I am not a Venezuela, an expert. Our business is actually an education and

risk management around supply chains. And we do a lot of work with U.S. growers. So this was a bit of an accidental experience from what happened to bring me here today. We do know we were struggling to keep the plants maintained. These are, but there, and I'm sure there's a lot of work that has to be done. I think the number one thing you have to have is security, right? You have to be able, you're going to need some promises that there's a lot of companies that lost a lot of money in Venezuela, right, with the assets they had. Because the second you walk away from an asset there, try to even say mothball, everything

gets stolen, okay? You don't expect there's, you walk into a plant that you shut down five years ago that there will be anything there. You have to defend it at a couple times. Otherwise, if somebody's going to go in there and, you know, sell the parts in the black market and scrap the rest because scrap iron trades in dollars. And so you can't expect that there's, unless the, whatever it is is running, you can't expect much.

And I know that they were started. Strange again, strange things that happen. As the domestic situation got worse, they actually had to increase imports of finished goods. because you couldn't finish them in the country anymore, but there were still demand. And you had remittances, right? Same with like Mexico, right? So there is some dollars floating even into people that stayed.

I know we had some employees that talk about sending money to their families in Venezuela and easier to do now, probably, but that was, you know, the Miami banking connection and some things like that. So I suspect that there's, yeah, a tremendous amount of work, but I'm not an expert on the current situation. I think it can be done in the basic staples. Those plants are not that hard. Flower mills, oil refineries.

Yeah, there's no doubt if the world put their mind to it. And I just saw we sold $300 million worth of oil here this morning. They went apparently to buy the currency. Remember we talked about currency stabilization? Apparently, they must have used a lot of that to buy bolivars and create a more stable exchange so you can get the economy loading. So, you know, it adds off to the current administration for somebody's obviously paying attention. But yeah, it's going to take security.

It's going to take some promises, stability, because, you know, you're talking about putting hundreds of millions of dollars on the ground into a place where effectively those type of investments were lost. And I don't think that's going to be an easy sell to the multinational world. What was it like just moving stuff within Venezuela? Because you describe how an empty plant would be gutted fairly quickly. I imagine if people saw an opportunity, you know, a truckload of something that could be valuable on the road. They probably seized on that as well. Yeah, I mean, it doesn't matter. You know, Venezuela was, you know, we had security experts that worked for us that understood what they had to ground.

you know, do on the ground to get shipments like, say, from the port to the plant or from the plant to a grocery store, right, or something like that or some kind of distribution. Very, it's very difficult. My more recent, you think this doesn't go on. And in Mexico, you know, we were losing a lot of trucks. Sometimes we'd get the trucks back. Sometimes we lost the cargo and the trucks. That still goes on, right, today.

And you sit there and try to understand what is the cost of doing business, right? And you will lose some along the way. And sometimes you hire local companies that are more able to navigate how to get things moved from point A to point B. And you effectively have to work from inside your compound. You also have to secure from theft, right, at the compound. It's just all these drags on the economy when you get into these. situations, right? It's just dragging the entire country down. In hyperinflation, I think, if you studied in it, you know, Mike and I both have some economics degrees, um, there's all these

dragging taxes on people, you know, your employee gets paid today and they just, as soon as they get paid, they run out and spend it. Like, they're done for the rest of the day, right? They're shoe leather tax. Right. And, you know, now everything has to be secured with, you know, multi-fenses and barbed wire and constant guards and trucks and all that stuff. And if you can remove that burden from the economy, it's just a huge, you know, in, you know, boost to the economy. Mike and I are, you know, watching things in Argentina. I love going there. It's a beautiful place and highly recommend.

But, you know, let's see how that goes because it feels like the country is starting to lose some of those shackles. Tracy, I just have a warning to, by the way, To me specifically? Yeah. You're not going to like it. I've been watching the show Landman on CBS. And so when we do commodity episodes, I'm going to start referencing a lot of things that I observe. But one of the themes is one of the plot lines very early on is the phenomenon of both trucks that disappear because the cartels still them and then magically reappear a month later. And it's not worth asking any questions because then you have to get the FBI involved and etc.

So the idea, what Jeff was saying about the truck suddenly coming back is something that I'm familiar with because I'm a viewer of TV. Stood up by the television. I'm going to steal myself for all the landmanned references that are going to come. Especially when we do oil episodes. Yeah. Mike, talk to us the, give us sort of your sense of Ukraine now versus before the war. And obviously there's still weed flowing out, but we talked about the impairment, et cetera. what is the sort of scale of the impairment and the damage, et cetera, and what sort of levels are coming out of Ukraine and sort of give us your sense of where things are these days versus at the end of 2021.

Sure. And again, I'm going to say something fairly similar to what Jeff is. I'm not as on the ground there, though I'm very close with a lot of friends that are still farming at scale and trying to make whatever it is they're doing work. I would sort of start off with a theme. I'm sure you've heard that they're incredibly resilient people. They've been through similar things like this before and perhaps not this generation, but certainly in the not too distant past, whether it be the Holodomor and post-Soviet situation and some of the starvation that came out of that. And then the World Wars 1 and 2. So it isn't like it's that distant in their past.

and they're figuring it out in a relatively simplified way. And I think that the two biggest changes as it pertains to the grain side is a simplification. So instead of some of the more complex to grow or expensive to grow crops like sunflowers and corn, they're pivoting more back to the basics of wheat and barley and things like that that just went in doubt, put that out there and see if we can get at it in the spring. The human capital piece is an enormous problem right now. They, you know, just to find people that can be part of your work teams, whether it be driving the trucks or driving the combines and tractors and are overseeing the grand elevator

operations is really, really hard. And then, as I alluded to earlier, some of the main horsepower export points have either been damaged or eliminated entirely or disrupted in terms of them being kind of gray as to where they're located relative to this this current fighting front sort of where it's located. But they're limping along and I've been kind of surprised to be honest with you. It's a total amount of grain that's been grown. It's just the mix has changed. The directions through which they're exported are changed. And certainly that ultimately changes the price that comes back to the producer there. So I'm sure they're not doing particularly well, but to their credit, they're still,

they're still giving it a hard swing. Just real quickly, so a thing I would like to learn today, what is it about wheat that makes it a sort of simpler crop to process an export than corn? Well, the seed is materially less expensive. The fertility required is materially less expensive, you know, per acre in their world. world per hectare. The other thing that's just circumstantially supportive in that part of the world is the organic matter and the richness of the soil there is incredible. You can kind of get away with it with lesser intensive agronomic crops like wheat to still eke out a pretty darn good crop.

So that's the circumstance there. It's also fairly easy to recycle your wheat and you utilize it as seed where that's not as straightforward with other crops. I have one last question, and this is to both of you, but what would be your major piece of advice or message to a multinational company that's considering either, you know, maybe they're looking at Venezuela and going, there's an opportunity there, I want in, or maybe they're thinking about post-war Ukraine and expansion there. What would you tell those companies?

Well, I mean, you have to have some expertise if you're going to go into these places. So if you don't have it with you, you need to find it and find people you trust. Security is going to be your number one part of it. Start with a small business, right, to learn how things actually work. We used to start with feed mills. You can put up a kaisemail, a relatively small portable feed mills, and start to learn how things actually work on the ground. We have hundreds of stories where we bought business.

businesses thought we knew what was going on, even after we'd been there, only to find up on first day that, oh, you know, you're supposed to pay a bribe to the meat inspector or something like that. So my advice is find a small business that you can run there with a reasonable investment and treat that as a learning curve or, you know, paying tuition before you jump in and make it, make those big hard capital asset investments. Yeah. And Ukraine has slightly different context. I think the blueprint is there is if you look at the, I would kind of describe the glory days of the grain business in the late 90s when the infrastructure really got built back up in a way that served the global markets with a lot of value added processing. Tremendous amount of investment that went through the aughts, you know, probably 05, 06, 08, right around there. So the blueprint is there.

I just think it's going to take, you know, resilient people, patients attempting to maintain your teams there within the reality of the things that are going to be personal decisions for them, for their safety, for their family, for whatever. You're just going to have to go with that flow for the foreseeable future and see how this all plays out. All right, Mike and Jeff, thank you so much for coming on All thoughts. That was fascinating. We could go on for another hour or two or three and listen to all your stories of doing business in these places.

But we're going to have to leave it there. So thank you so much. Yeah, thanks for having us off. Thank you. Joe, that was super interesting. Super interesting. Both from an agricultural perspective and then obviously Venezuelan and Ukrainian perspective. One thing that stood out to me was this idea of large companies, multinationals coming together when they enter a new market like that because it becomes easy.

to operate, I guess, at the legal and cultural level that they're used to. That was really interesting. Yeah, I hadn't thought about that at all, right? So it's like global multinationals, even setting aside law, you know, they have certain norms you just sort of expect. And so someone from Nestle talks to someone from, I don't know, whatever. And they're like, oh, have a shipment here at this time. And they can more or less expect that that entity will do that. Right. And without too much translation. or whatever. And so the idea that that is really important is something I hadn't thought of. Also on this, and it's something I've thought about even working at a large multinational

ourselves, is this way that large companies are sort of, we call the multinationals, but they're also like nations unto themselves in this sense. Like think about the fact that when you move from New York to Abu Dhabi to Hong Kong and back to New York, that there is a team that facilitates all of these processes of like visas and stuff like that and so forth. And like, and I thought about that when he described the phenomenon of the workers being more comfortable in the office than back home, that like the corporate office in this environment is like this like pocket of sort of, I guess you would say, developed world ease and comfort, right? And that the moment you leave that office, you are out of that, then you suddenly have to worry about a like.

Then you started to have to worry about maybe running water and security and how big companies sort of create these security and legal environments within themselves that are these like cross border pockets, but that will be the same from one office to another regardless of what country they're operating in. Yeah, absolutely. The other thing that I was thinking about was the currency question when it comes to Venezuela. I mean, you would assume with maybe this new relationship with the U.S., access to dollars, maybe we'll get a little bit easier. But it was fascinating to hear from Jeff just how creative they got when it came to securing dollars. So, for instance, you know, trying to export wooden pallets in exchange for U.S. currency and things like that. Basically bartering, right? Yeah, it does sound like it basically comes down to bartering or like here are some sacks of salt that can be used.

And then you have this issue, which is that you can have all of the talent on the country, although much of it's left in many of these cases. but you have all this talent and you have all this raw commodities, but you need a part and you need it from some advanced specialty maker of an industrial part for a refinery or whatever. Yeah. And that's sold by a European multinational and you need a hard currency for that. And so there is no getting around this fact that like true self-sufficiency is very rare. It almost doesn't exist anywhere in the world so long as any one component. And of course, we know this is what China is trying to sell for.

They want to have every aspect of the entire supply chain in-house such that there is no possibility of them not being able to access one part and grinding a whole industry to a hall. Yeah. All right. We could go on. Shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the All Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Allaway.

You can follow me at Tracy Allo. And I'm Joe Wisenthall. You can follow me at the stalwart. Follow our guest Jeff and Mike and their work at Aggris Academy at Aggris Academy. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez, at Carmen Armand, dashobed at Dashbot and Kail Brooks at Kail Brooks. And for more OddLod's content, go to Bloomberg.com slash OddLots with a daily newsletter and all of our episodes. And you can chat about all of these topics 24-7 in our Discord, discord.g. slash oddlots.

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