(soft music) - [Announcer] This is a production of WEDU PBS, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Sarasota.

- I don't know about you, but when I'm shopping for produce, I don't usually think about dinosaurs.

But perhaps I should, because if it weren't for dinosaurs, we wouldn't have the abundance of food we take for granted today.

That's because the fossils of prehistoric animals and plants are rich in phosphate, which is a key nutrient in fertilizer and is a vital part of modern agriculture.

And one of the largest deposits of phosphate rich minerals is in Central Florida.

You're about to meet the CEO of a Fortune 500 company that's the world's largest integrated producer of phosphate, next on the Suncoast Business Forum.

- [Announcer] Suncoast Business Forum, brought to you by the financial services firm of Raymond James, offering personalized wealth management advice and banking and capital markets expertise, all with a commitment to putting clients' financial wellbeing first.

More information is available at raymondjames.com.

(bright music) - For more than a hundred years, Florida's phosphate industry has been a major economic driver for the Tampa Bay and central Florida regions.

Over the years, there have been dozens of companies mining and processing phosphate in this region.

During the past 40 years, the industry has consolidated and Mosaic, one of the largest public companies in Tampa, has emerged as the industry leader.

Bruce Bodine is President and CEO of the Mosaic Company.

Bruce, welcome to the Suncoast Business Forum.

- Yeah, thanks, Geoff.

Pleasure to be here.

- Great to have you.

In the mid 1800s, scientists discovered that phosphorus was an important nutrient for the growth of plants in agriculture.

And then the late 1880s, late 1800s, they discovered an enormous deposit of phosphate in Central Florida.

Over the next a hundred plus years, phosphate and the mining of phosphate, processing of phosphate became a very, very important part of the economic growth and develop in this area, but I don't think most people even realize that's the case.

- Yeah, Jeff, I think you're right.

I mean, even as a kid growing up, I didn't realize, you know, phosphate was in our backyard, and I think most people don't.

But it's kind of a two part story for Mosaic.

We are a big economic driver for the region, and Tampa Bay and Central Florida.

We employ over 45,000 employees directly and indirectly, if you look at the entire industry and the support structure, and really about $12 billion of economic value through the phosphate industry, all right here in Central Florida.

For Mosaic, also, our mission is to help the world grow the food it needs.

And I think that's a very noble mission.

It resonates extremely well with our employees.

I'm an employee and you know, that's something that's motivated me in my career, 30 years in this industry.

But we sell phosphate and potash, crop nutrients to 40 different countries around the world where over 50% of the North American farmer supply for fertilizer.

But you know, again, most people don't realize that that large industry exists right here in Central Florida.

It's not just Disney World and you know, the old citrus industry.

There's a big phosphate industry in your backyard.

- Why is there so much phosphate in Central Florida?

- That's a great question, Geoff.

It's Mother Nature and one of the amazing things that she did over millions of years ago.

I don't know that you may know this, but Florida used to be much bigger in landmass, used to be much smaller in landmass.

Through the various ice ages, through, you know, millions of years of our history.

At the right time, marine life got trapped in one of the receding, you know, ice ages.

They washed upon and weathered upon the shores of kind of the Upper Lake Wales Ridge, which is called the Bone Valley, interestingly enough, because that had trapped some dinosaurs and a lot of prehistoric marine life.

Phosphate exists in the bones of all living animals.

You mentioned in the opening in plants as well.

Those things are what we extract and the natural resource that Mother Nature left millions of years ago, and that was where the large deposit here in Central Florida existed to feed phosphate rock to various geographies throughout the globe to help grow food for farmers.

- For most of the 20th century phosphate from Florida was extensively used in the United States and throughout the world.

We were supplying the world with phosphate.

That changed over the last several years.

Am I right?

- That's true.

I mean, so that deposit, not only was it discovered in Central Florida, but you know, later on it was discovered in other places in the world.

China has a large deposit, Saudi Arabia, large deposit.

The Middle East in general has got a lot of phosphate deposit.

The northern coast on the west side of Africa has a large deposit.

So now there are a lot of different players.

But yes, go back 50, 60 years ago, Florida was one of the primary suppliers of exporting products around the globe and then supplying the American farmer with phosphate fertilizer.

- For more than a hundred years, there were dozens and dozens of companies that were mining phosphate, they were processing phosphate, they were shipping phosphate.

But now there are just two, and the largest clearly is Mosaic.

How has the industry consolidated and why?

- It has gone through a lot of transformation and even in my 30 years, I've seen a lot of change.

I mean, it was probably well over 50 companies at one point in time.

Some would say even over a hundred if you go back far enough.

And it's now consolidated, as you said, to two.

We are the formation, Mosaic, of a consolidation between Cargill, a nutrition business, and another company called IMC Global, which I happen to work for in my early career.

We consolidated for Mosaic, it'd be 20 years ago this November, so our 20th year is coming up.

But the predecessor companies, as they were many, go back, you know, 50 to a hundred years.

And yes, that's all that's left today, our resilience is existed because A, we provide an essential product.

You think about fertilizer, it grows over 60% of the food, you know, whether it's corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton, it doesn't matter, food and clothing is due to fertilizer.

So we have resilient products.

And you think about, even in COVID, we were an essential industry, so it had to run.

You realize the essentialness of our products in the global market.

But through consolidation, we've gained the best of technology, we've gained the best of people, and it's our people, our processes and our understanding of this space that has allowed us to be one of the last companies standing.

- Mosaic is one of the largest public companies in the Tampa Bay area.

It's in the Fortune 500.

It's the world's leading producer of crop nutrients and fertilizer products.

What is the range and the scope of the different products that Mosaic produces?

- Yeah, we're in four key geographies where we have a footprint, but two primarily North American, South America, where we actually have productive capacity on, you know, crop nutrition.

In North America, we have a large footprint, millions of tons we make on phosphate fertilizers.

We also make millions of tons in Saskatchewan, Canada of our potash fertilizers and nitrogen, potassium, which is potash, and then phosphate are the three essential nutrients that plants need to survive, remain healthy, and have the proper yields at the farm gate.

So that's our geography in North America.

And South America is similar, we have a lot of manufacturing facilities on phosphate fertilizer.

We have a smaller potash mine in Brazil, but then we have some distribution sites, warehouses, ports to move our product throughout South America.

And then we have some distribution businesses in China and India as well.

So that gives you kind of a scope, the breadth of a Mosaic, it's quite large.

- The world's population is about 8 billion people at this point and growing, and it's estimated that about 10% are food insecure, that there is an inadequate regular supplies of food for these folks.

How does Mosaic, which is a vital part of the food chain, so to speak, see its role and responsibility in this area?

- Well, first look at our mission.

We help the world grow the food that it needs is our mission.

I mentioned that earlier.

And so our responsibility is to extract responsibly the natural resource we have, turn that into the nutrients that are needed to support farmers across the globe.

Because to your point, we're at 8 billion, projections are to get to 9 billion by 2050.

To do that, we create the suite of products.

Some are commodity type products that diammonium phosphate, mono ammonium phosphate, muriate of potash, those are kind of the commodities.

But Mosaic prides themselves on making differentiated products that actually further enhance the performance at the farm gate, get more yields outta the same amount of acres of farmers.

We call those performance products.

We also have a suite of biologics that we're developing that when you add with the commodity fertilizers, you actually get higher yields than, so one plus one equals more than two, which is good.

If you think about the challenge of feeding 9 billion people and closing that calorie gap, we have to do that in a sustainable way.

We've got climate change issues.

Population is competing for arable land.

How do we do more with the same amount that we have rather than just adding more farm land.

And if you think about it, studies have been done to close that gap on population in calorie, just by adding land could add twice the size of a country of India and more farmland.

I don't believe that's sustainable.

Again, how do we aid with technology, better products to get the grower to make more food in the same amount of land that they have?

That's kind of our mission in helping the world grow the food it needs with technology.

And we're doing that right here in Central Florida.

- Tell us about your formative years.

Tell us about your family.

Tell us about growing up in Polk County.

- Yeah, well, let's go back.

I was born in Michigan.

We moved to Lakeland when I was seven years old.

So I've been in Lakeland pretty much my whole life except for a couple stints in Canada and in Minnesota.

My family's middle class, hardworking, opened their own business, ran their own business in Lakeland for, still running the same business since 1978.

My dad still goes to work every day.

So the work ethic was instilled upon me very early in life and, you know, a lot of admiration for my parents and what they did.

And I think, you know, set, you know, my ethics and kind of how I think about work in motion very early on in life.

But, you know, you think about how I got into this industry, which is kind of interesting as well, and family was involved with that.

I can recall going on family vacations, whether it be on the east or west coast of Florida, but going south.

And we'd go from Lakeland down through Mulberry and I was that kid in the back of the station wagon, saucer eyed, looking at the horizon to see if I could see one of the large drag lines that, you know, we extract the phosphate rock from.

And, you know, when you would see it, it's "Mom and dad, look at that."

And, you know, kind of was enamored with that.

Even in fourth grade when on a field trip.

I can remember, Carlton Palmore Elementary School, fourth grade in Lakeland.

They used to allow students to come out to the mines and the phosphate mines and tour.

And I vividly remember, you know, those type of things as well.

So it's kind of interesting, that imprint on my mind and help me get to the industry that I am blessed enough to lead today.

I don't know, but it is interesting how, you know, through family and my formative years, somehow probably imprinted on what I do today.

- [Geoff] After high school in Lakeland.

You went to the University of Florida.

Did you know what you were gonna study?

Did you know what you wanted to do?

- I always was good, Geoff, in science at math, so I thought that engineering was probably something I would pursue.

I started as a electrical engineer and quickly realized that I liked to touch and feel things.

So with electrons moving around, you have to do a lot of imagination.

So I switched to environmental engineering and graduated as an environmental engineer.

But solving problems always was something that I was good at, and using science and math and kind of logic to get to doing that was something I excelled at, so engineering was kind of a natural fit.

- So in 1994, you graduated University of Florida, environmental engineering degree.

What came next?

- Well, I quickly got my first job.

So the summer before I graduated actually did a summer job with a small engineering company in Lakeland called Florida Engineering and Design.

Interestingly enough that engineering company supported a lot of the big phosphate operations and I was quickly seconded to one of the majors.

It happened to be IMC at the time, they weren't hiring, but they could bring in a contract engineer, interestingly enough.

That's how difficult the economy was in the late, well, actually mid nineties.

Did that for a number of years, actually went there every day like it was the company I worked for.

That job came to an end probably 18 months.

And in 1999, fast forward I got offered a full-time job with IMC at the time, and the rest is kind of history, so to speak.

- In 1999, you were hired full-time by IMC.

IMC in 2004, merged with Cargill, which then got merged into Mosaic, became Mosaic.

How did all of this change during that period of time?

How did you find your way in all of the changes that were going on within these companies?

- Yeah, well luckily because of that small engineering company that supported the industry, I got to meet a number of key leaders in both companies, ironically, prior to 1999 even.

And then 1999, I was a project engineer at the formation of Mosaic.

I got asked to go into operations.

That was kind of, in those days, the path to higher leadership.

I didn't know that I was maybe being groomed or thought I could, you know, be to some higher level position at that point in time, it was just I wanted to influence more.

I wanted to solve bigger problems.

That was a way to be able to do it.

I went into operations managing one of our beneficiation plants for phosphate and that's kind of how I started.

And then my career progressed around Central Florida.

We had a number of operating sites, got the move from site to site to site.

I always was one that was like, wow, you know, this is a best practice that I saw at site A. I'm met site B, why can't we do that?

Would ask, you know, questions along the way and look for ways to bring knowledge that I had seen at other locations to the greater, you know, enterprise or the greater business locally, looking for best practices, standardizing approaches.

Those were things that just came naturally to me.

And I think that worked well for the customer.

Whether it was the general manager at the site, whether it was our commercial teams, whether it was our engineering teams, you know, standardizing, looking for, bringing best practices, simplification and efficiencies.

It was like, Hey, let's get Bruce on our team.

And then pretty soon, my network grew, I got asked to do more and more jobs.

And eventually led to 2012, which came across roads of me actually leaving Central Florida and going to Saskatchewan.

I, you know, sat down at the time when my family and debated, hey, we would have to uproot at this point in time 'cause it was probably need to go there.

I was offered to be a general manager of our largest mining operation anywhere in our global footprint.

And I would've been the first to kind of go north of the border and have kind of us Canadian experience.

That attracted me as for, you know, maybe longevity in my career.

But doing something different out of my network, you know, could my approach in leadership and could my approach to solving problems work in a different geography?

Not that Canada's drastically different, but people didn't know me.

I didn't know them.

And, you know, that excited me.

And after a lot of discussion, we decided this is a great experience.

We can do this.

I had three girls at the time, we sold our house in Lakeland and actually moved to Minnesota, Edina, Minnesota, right outside of Minneapolis.

And I commuted for two years up into Saskatchewan, 10 days up there and four days home.

And that's how I got introduced to potash mining in Saskatchewan.

But at the highest level, it's how do you engage people?

How do you set aspirational vision?

And how do you motivate and hold people accountable to achieve something that hadn't been achieved before?

And that was my challenge.

We had done a major expansion, spent hundreds of millions of dollars at this facility, and we had to prove out that capacity.

And so there was a big rallying cry at the site, something to really motivate and get people rallied behind.

And I got to be a part of leading that and lead kind of that whole business through some foundational transformational change.

And that was one of the highlights of my career, to be honest.

- Tell us about potash mining.

To most people, potash is not a household word, but it's an important part of Mosaic's business.

How does potash fit in and what is it?

- That is, that's the potassium.

So the K on the periodic table.

That helps the plants remain healthy.

If phosphate has its roll, potash has its roll, nitrogen has its roll.

Those are those three primary ingredients I talked about before.

But potash no different than phosphate in the way it was formed, millions of years ago in an ancient seabed, right?

The glaciers moved, buried it, and our deposit in Saskatchewan is one of the best in the world.

It is three quarters of a mile underground.

So, you know, we've got people three quarter of a mile underground extracting the ore from the ore seam, bringing it to surface through large hoist, and then refining that into a muriate of potash that's sold as a commodity across the globe.

- Over the next several years, you were given greater and greater responsibilities within the company.

You were invited to join the executive team at Mosaic.

Tell us about that.

- Yeah, so in 2000, I went to Saskatchewan in 2012, stayed there through 2014.

I came back to Minnesota and actually ran our supply chain and international distribution business for a couple years, then got asked to go back to Canada in 2016 to run our potash business unit.

So we have three business units, one's phosphate, potash, and we have one today in Brazil, and that would've put me on the executive team reporting to our CEO at the time.

And I couldn't have been more honored, jumped at that opportunity.

At that point, we sold our house in 2016 in Minnesota and moved to Regina, Saskatchewan.

And I ran that business for three years.

Experienced, you know, really great success.

We transformed that business not only from a cost and volume standpoint, but from a resiliency and flexibility standpoint over the course of three years, and then had the opportunity to come back to Florida, come home again in 2019.

- So in 2019 you returned from Saskatchewan or Minnesota to join the Mosaic again here and to run the phosphate business this time.

- [Bruce] Correct.

- And then a year later you were given the assignment of consolidating all of Mosaic's business operations Let's talk about that.

- Yeah, that's correct.

You know, it was an honor enough to come home again and kinda run the business that had been so, you know, formative for me and my career.

So it truly was an honor.

Did that for a year and then, you know, my boss said at the time, "Hey, we're gonna go ahead and consolidate all of North America."

And then that led into consolidating all of our global operations in North and South America.

And again, my problem solving mindset, some of the engineer in me now got put on a task that, you know, how do you build a structure from a global operation standpoint?

How do you actually put processes in place to share best practices and share talent, like I had been shared from kind of the US to Canada.

How could we do that more effectively and efficiently?

And yeah, that was a big challenge and something, again, big part of my career, had a lot of fun and led me probably to the position I'm in today.

- In January, 2024, you were selected to be President and CEO of Mosaic.

How would you say the company has evolved over the 25 plus years you've been with the company?

- Yeah, well, I've seen a lot.

Well, one is a consolidation in the industry, and you and I talked about that earlier, but things are dramatically different.

You think about the geopolitics today and what's going on a couple years ago and what's going on today with wars and invasions.

I mean, the Middle East, there's phosphate and potash in the Middle East and, you know, how could that change what we do from a supply and demand standpoint?

You know, those things are more prevalent today than ever.

You see weather patterns changing.

Look, hurricane Helene just roared through Florida and into North Carolina and caused a lot of issues there, but more volatile weather and weather patterns.

So there's always something disrupting the supply chain, disrupting the industry, causing, you know, events that people weren't anticipating, black swan type events.

The one thing that hasn't changed though in 25 years is the need to grow food and our mission to help on, you know, food security around the globe.

So that is the challenge of today for me as CEO, that's the challenge for Mosaic is how do we continue to bring products, value added products to growers and farmers around the world to help, you know, grow the food that the world's gonna need for the next 20 years.

- [Geoff] Mosaic not only has a commitment to agriculture and to providing nutrients for the rest of the world, but it also has a very big commitment to its workforce and to the communities it serves.

Tell us about that.

We care about our community.

We care about doing our work responsibly.

We're very focused on being good stewards of the resource that Mother Nature blessed us with.

We lead in technology on how to restore the land back to something, sometimes better than it was before we even arrived and disturbed it.

How did you do stream restoration, as an example.

Protecting species, whether it be plant or animal.

Those are things that are in the DNA of our people and what our people care about a lot.

In addition, we give $6 million a year to projects in community investment where our employees work and operate and where they care to put, you know, dollars and see things improve in the communities.

We are proud to partner with people like Feeding Tampa Bay.

We're proud to partner with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers or the Tampa Bay Lightning on tackling hunger or goals for food.

You know, again, food security, those that don't have access to food, those are the things that our employees, what our leadership team, really our culture within Mosaic is so focused on, is giving back and doing our work in a responsible way.

- Well, Bruce, I'd like to thank you so much for being our guest today.

- Well, thank you Geoff, it was a pleasure.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

- If you'd like to see this interview again or any of the CEO profiles in our Suncoast Business Forum archive, you can find them on the web at wedu.org/sbf.

Thanks for joining us for the Suncoast Business Forum.

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