Just read this morning.  I've saved several articles I've found on this and have posted them below (newest to oldest).  Decide for yourself what is going on here.

Gavilon firm may be headed for a sale

January 21, 2012 

Omaha's Gavilon LLC, formerly the grain merchandising arm of ConAgra Foods and the nation's third-largest grain storage company, may be headed for a multibillion-dollar sale.

A spokesman for Gavilon's principal owner, hedge fund group Ospraie Management of New York City, said Friday that the business is considering "strategic alternatives," a phrase that usually means a company is seeking a buyer. The statement did not name potential buyers or say when a sale might take place.

Gavilon has about 350 employees at its headquarters and trading room, leased from ConAgra in downtown Omaha, and about 2,000 employees at more than 300 locations, mostly in the United States.

It recently opened an office in Kiev, Ukraine, and has offices on six continents. In a 2010 World-Herald story CEO Greg Heckman said, "We're excited about the opportunities. The world is going to demand more food and fuel, and we're going to be there to help that happen as efficiently as possible."

On Friday, Heckman's office referred questions to Ospraie.

ConAgra sold the division for $2.8 billion in 2008 to Ospraie's Special Opportunities Fund and other investment groups. Since then, Gavilon has purchased a number of grain elevator companies and expanded its trading reach, doubling its employment.

"Gavilon has strengthened and firmly established its position as a leading, global commodity company with a robust pipeline of growth opportunities," said Ospraie spokesman Jonathan Gasthalter. "The company has decided to explore a broad range of strategic alternatives that may further its growth and create additional value for our stakeholders."

Investment companies like Ospraie often hold companies for four or five years then try to sell them at a profit and reinvest the money in other businesses.

Besides grain, Gavilon stores, trades and distributes other feed ingredients, fertilizer and energy products, including natural gas, ethanol and crude and refined petroleum. About two-thirds of its business is in grain and feed
ingredients and the rest split among the other commodities.

Gavilon's name was adapted from the Spanish word gavilan, or "hawk," and Ospraie is similar to the osprey, a fish-eating bird. Gavilon's other owners are General Atlantic, a $15 billion investment fund based in Greenwich, Conn.; Soros Fund Management, which is affiliated with investor George Soros; and a Gavilon management group.

The company traces its history in Omaha to ConAgra's 1982 purchase of the Peavey Co.

In 1998, ConAgra moved Peavey's trading group — 100 people and a $5 million annual payroll — from Minneapolis to Omaha. ConAgra merged its traders with Peavey's in a specially built trading floor in the fifth and newest building on the ConAgra campus, where Gavilon still has its offices.

The sale to Ospraie followed ConAgra's decision to focus on brand-name food products rather than handling commodities. Gavilon's finances aren't public, but in its last year as a ConAgra division, it made $669 million in before-tax profits.

http://www.omaha.com/article/20120121/MONEY/701219929#gavilon-firm-...

George Soros and Army Corps of Engineers Buying Up Farmland that They Flooded

June 29, 2011

Hayden's Note:Remember when the Army Engineers blew the Birds Point levee in early May? This is quite interesting…

Two huge intel leads in my email box this morning from way-back contacts that I've had for years, that are actually somewhat connected concepts.

• File this one under “Now It All Makes Sense.” A Missouri farming and ranching contact just got off a conference call wherein he was informed that the federal government is sending out letters to all of the flooded out farmers in the Missouri River flood plain and bottoms notifying them that the Army Corps of Engineers will offer to buy their land.

Intentionally flood massive acreage of highly productive farmground. Destroy people's communities and homes. Catch them while they are desperate and afraid and then swoop in and buy the ground cheap. Those evil sons of bitches.

2. Speaking of evil sons of bitches, George Soros appears to be “investing” in farmground through the same puppet company that he used to get into the grain elevator and fertilizer business. The company is called Ospraie Capital Management and is buying up farmground in a joint venture with Teays River Investments as a partner. Here is that announcement: Click Here

Okay. Here's the connection. This Ospraie outfit was a hedge fund specializing in commodities that was started and run by some cocky child who didn't know how to trade bear markets and got his butt kicked into next week in the grain market of 2008. He also lost a fortune trying to trade rare Earth metals. In fact, it was so bad that he had to shut his fund down because he had promised his investors that he would give them all of their investment money back if the fund lost more than 30% in one year. Whoopsie.

But it appears that Soros swooped in and saved the day because this Ospraie is the “co-investor” with Soros that bought the remnants of ConAgra's trading operation and renamed it . . . Gavilon. In the industry, it is widely acknowledged that Ospraie IS Soros. That [CNN] article is here.

As you probably remember, Gavilon just recently bought both DeBruce Grain out of Kansas City and the biggest grain elevator company in the Pacific Northwest, thus making Soros (who is the money behind Gavilon through both his own Soros Fund Management AND his de facto control of Ospraie) the third-largest grain company in the U.S. with 280 million bushels of storage capacity, behind only Archer Daniels Midland (542 million bushels storage capacity) and Cargill (344 million bushels storage capacity).

Bottom line: Soros, through Ospraie, is buying up farmground. Please also note that the hotlink citation above is dated June 26, 2009. My contact says this has been going on for two years – and also remember what I told you about farmground prices inflating wildly, especially in Illinois. I have personally confirmed farmground in Illinois selling for $13,000 per acre within the last month, whereas that same kind of ground in Illinois was going for $5,500 per acre the day Obama was inaugurated.

http://www.benzinga.com/11/06/1214088/george-soros-and-army-corps-o...

George Soros owned Gavilon quietly purchasing our food

April 3, 2011

My brother-in-law is a wheat farmer and reads websites daily about wheat prices, grain news and agri-business in general. He read a story last week, that he since can’t find and I can’t find when I googled it, which makes me wonder if the story was scrubbed, about George Soros purchasing grain elevators in Nebraska. These particular elevators are apparently the last stop before the wheat is shipped out of the county.

Please read on. I did find some interesting stories about Soros and his acquistion of other grain and grain elevators. The name of his company is Gavilon and according to several agri-business sites, it’s the 3rd largest business, now just behind  ADM (Archer Daniels Midland) and Cargill. Last fall he also purchased a huge amount of the grain business in Australia. This from Agrimoney.com in December:

AWB [Austrailan wheat] was in talks to sell a stake in its domestic grains handling business to US-based Gavilon before the Australian group became a takeover target.

Gavilon, which is backed by George Soros’s Soros Fund Management has since unveiled its own expansion plans in Australia, the southern hemisphere’s top wheat-exporting target.

Soros is not just a tumor in America, he’s a global cancer.

http://rartee.wordpress.com/2011/04/03/george-soros-owned-gavilon-q...

AWB snares Soros-backed Gavilon for grains deal

March 2010

AWB has signed up Gavilon, the Soros-backed commodities giant, as a partner for its flagging Australian grains business, six months after a deal between the two groups was first rumoured.

US-based Gavilon has agreed outline terms over paying book value, plus an unspecified premium, for AWB's domestic commodity management business, with a final deal expected by June.

Gordon Davis, the AWB chief executive, said that the Gavilon deal would "enhance the competitive position" of the commodities management business and "provide a platform for further growth".

Greg Heckman, the Gavilon chief executive, said the deal represented an "excellent opportunity" for the Nebraska-based group to expand its footprint, which already extends through the Americas and into Asia, "in a meaningful way".

http://www.agrimoney.com/news/awb-snares-soros-backed-gavilon-for-g...

Ospraie in a corner

Dwight Anderson built a $9 billion hedge fund empire betting on volatile commodities markets. His world came undone this summer.

November 12, 2008

One vehicle that might reward a more patient style of investing is Ospraie's Special Opportunities fund, which Ospraie and its primary investor, Credit Suisse, started. It is a private-equity-style fund that buys stakes in companies that Ospraie hopes to grow over time.

Right now it's bankrolling alternative energy and agriculture. Earlier this year the fund co-invested in a $2.8 billion deal to buy the trading operation of ConAgra, which also owns dozens of grain elevators, and the operation was renamed Gavilon.

In late September a company Ospraie co-owns was selected to build a wind farm in Rhode Island. Surely even John Cusack's character from Say Anything could take pleasure in buying something like that

http://cnnmoney.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?expire=-1&tit...