Who Moves the Food? The Biggest Companies in Agribusiness
Published · Updated · 5 min read
Between a farmer's field and a supermarket shelf, much of the world's food passes through the hands of a fairly small number of large companies. They sell farmers their seed, fertilizer and machinery, buy and ship the harvest, and turn it into oil, feed, meat and dairy products. Knowing who they are helps explain why prices at one end of the chain don't simply pass through to the other.
This page is the overview of a series: each sector below has its own article with a ranking of the ten largest companies.
Grain and oilseed traders
Four trading houses have dominated the international grain and oilseed business for decades, often called "ABCD" after their initials: ADM, Bunge, Cargill and Louis Dreyfus. The Chinese state-controlled COFCO International has joined them in size; Cargill, the largest, had revenue of $154 billion in its fiscal year to May 2025.
These companies buy grain from farmers and elevators, store it, move it by rail, river and ship, and crush oilseeds into oil and meal. They mostly earn on volume, logistics and processing margins rather than on the price level itself, which they hedge on futures exchanges. That is why their revenue falls when crop prices fall, as Cargill's did in 2025, without that being a sign of trouble.
Top 10 and background: The Biggest Grain and Oilseed Traders.
Fertilizer
Fertilizer supply is even more concentrated than grain trading, because the raw materials sit in a few places. Canada's Nutrien is the largest potash producer, with about a quarter of world capacity by its own figures; Norway's Yara and the US companies CF Industries and Mosaic are major producers of nitrogen and phosphate fertilizer. Morocco holds roughly 70% of the world's known phosphate rock reserves (USGS), mined by the state company OCP. How closely nitrogen prices follow natural gas is explained in Fertilizer Prices and Natural Gas.
Top 10 and background: The Biggest Fertilizer Companies.
Seeds and crop protection
A wave of mergers in 2017 and 2018 left four groups at the top: Bayer (which bought Monsanto in 2018), Corteva (spun off from the Dow-DuPont merger in 2019), Syngenta (taken over by ChemChina in 2017) and BASF (which bought the businesses Bayer had to sell). In the United States, Corteva and Bayer alone supplied more than half of retail seed sales for corn, soybeans and cotton in 2018-20, according to the USDA's Economic Research Service.
Top 10 and background: The Biggest Seed and Crop Protection Companies.
Machinery
Tractors and combines come mainly from Deere (United States), CNH (the Case IH and New Holland brands), AGCO (Fendt, Massey Ferguson), Kubota (Japan) and CLAAS (Germany). Their sales follow farm incomes closely: when crop prices are high, farmers buy machinery; when prices fall, orders drop a year or two later.
Top 10 and background: The Biggest Farm Machinery Companies.
Meat
Brazil's JBS is the world's largest meat company, with net revenue of $86.2 billion in 2025, ahead of Tyson Foods and MBRF. In pork, Chinese producers such as Muyuan have grown quickly since African swine fever wiped out many small farms.
Top 10 and background: The Biggest Meat Companies.
Dairy
France's Lactalis is the largest dairy company, with estimated revenue of $31.9 billion in 2024 (Rabobank Global Dairy Top 20), ahead of Nestlé, Dairy Farmers of America, Danone and China's Yili. Several of the largest, such as Fonterra and Arla, are cooperatives owned by dairy farmers.
Top 10 and background: The Biggest Dairy Companies.
Palm oil
Palm oil comes mostly from Indonesia and Malaysia, where large plantation groups work alongside millions of smallholders. Singapore's Wilmar is the largest processor and trader of palm oil.
Top 10 and background: The Biggest Palm Oil Companies.
Cocoa, coffee and sugar
These crops are grown largely by smallholders but processed by few companies: ofi and Barry Callebaut lead in cocoa, JDE Peet's is the largest pure coffee company, and Europe's beet sugar is processed mainly by Südzucker, Tereos and other groups owned by beet growers.
Top 10 and background: The Biggest Cocoa, Coffee and Sugar Companies.
Food retail
At the end of the chain, Walmart is by far the largest food retailer, with $713 billion in revenue in its 2025/26 fiscal year; Europe's largest is the Schwarz Group, owner of Lidl and Kaufland. In the US, farmers received 18.5 cents of each dollar spent on food in stores in 2024, according to the USDA.
Top 10 and background: The Biggest Food Retailers.
What concentration means for prices
Size cuts both ways. Large traders and processors run the ports, ships and crushing plants that make global trade cheap and reliable, and spread risk across many regions and crops. At the same time, where a farmer can sell to only one or two buyers, or buy seed and fertilizer from only a few suppliers, those companies can have more say over the price than the farmer does, while many competing buyers limit that influence. How the consumer price splits between farm, processing and retail is explained in Producer, Wholesale and Retail Prices. Competition authorities in the US, EU and elsewhere approved the big seed and chemical mergers only after requiring businesses to be sold off, and market concentration in meatpacking and fertilizer remains a recurring subject of investigations and political debate.
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Frequently Asked Questions
- Who are the ABCD companies?
- ADM, Bunge, Cargill and Louis Dreyfus, the four trading houses that have long handled a large share of international grain and oilseed trade. China's state-controlled COFCO International now operates on a similar scale.
- Do the big traders set world grain prices?
- Not directly. World prices form on futures exchanges and in physical markets with many participants; traders mostly earn on logistics, processing and margins and hedge their price risk. Their size matters more locally, where farmers may have few buyers to choose from.
- Why is fertilizer supply so concentrated?
- Because the raw materials are geological: potash comes mainly from Canada, Russia and Belarus, and Morocco holds roughly 70% of known phosphate rock reserves, so a few producers supply most of the market.