MINNETONKA, Minn. (AP) - If you see a 6-foot 3-inch guy roller-blading around Lake Harriet chatting about North Dakota or about how farmland is too expensive or about grain (especially if you hear him talking about grain), say hello to Gregory Page, the new CEO of Cargill Inc.

The son of the North Dakota prairie is fit, quick-witted and deeply experienced within Cargill's world of agriculture and financial services. If the past few years have been an indication of what lies ahead, he'll need his wits.

His predecessor, Warren Staley, who reached the company's mandatory retirement age of 65, picked up Cargill's moribund results of the late 1990s and turned the company into a hurtling freight train of record sales.

It has nearly twice the employees today as when Staley began, with 153,000 people scattered across 66 countries. It recorded earnings of $1.73 billion in 2006, and saw nearly the same amount in the first nine months of fiscal 2007.

Cargill, the country's second-largest privately held company measured by sales, saw much of that change come after refashioning itself as a partner to other businesses, much like IBM did in the computer world.

It's the world's largest producer of salt, supplies a quarter of the meat consumed in the United States, all of the eggs eaten at McDonald's and is the largest poultry producer in Thailand, which is no small feat: chickens are originally a southeast Asia jungle bird.

Famously insular, Cargill promotes from within. Page, only the fourth non-family-member to head the 142-year-old company, won the job Feb. 6 when the family members, top executives and outside directors who make up the board voted him in.

And Page, 55, will have to keep the family happy: About 90 MacMillan and Cargill family members control the vast majority of company stock; the rest is held by an employee stock ownership plan and by senior management.

The people in Page's hometown of Bottineau, N.D., remember him well. His brother still lives in the area, and Page returns from time to time to give speeches.

"Make a story of him. He deserves it," said Roger Heid-breder, a high school classmate who today is a manager at Bottineau Feed Elevator.

Bottineau is the county seat and boasts a junior college, but it's home to just 2,600 people.

Page's father ran an implement dealership and insurance office, among other businesses; his mother was involved in community theater. His parents had four sons and a daughter.

Page was a Boy Scout, played basketball, hunted, fished and camped in winters. "There wasn't a lot of summer camping, because everybody was busy," Page said.

His family, though surrounded by agriculture, was not truly a farming family, Page said. They kept 40 brood cows and had 800 acres, but Page said it wasn't what locals considered farming. "People would laugh out loud if I said I was a farmer," he said from his top-floor office at Cargill headquarters, a French chateau nestled in the Minnetonka woods.

His siblings today are scattered: one in Chicago, one near Bottineau, one in Kansas and his sister in Denver.

Page intended to return to Bottineau after three years as a trainee in Cargill's Kansas City office. That was in 1974.

Instead he found the world beyond Bottineau, and he's never left Cargill. "You probably have stereotypes of who you're going to meet and that wasn't true at all," he said.

He ended up working for Dave Larson, who today sits on the executive team as executive vice president of the company.

"I think I stayed as much because I was learning a lot from him," Page said. "Basically, (he had) the same demeanor as my father, which is, good enough's never good enough.

"It was like, 'This is great. It doesn't even require a style change on my part.'"

Coached by Larson, seven years his senior, Page gave up on going back to Bottineau by his fourth or fifth year.

"I was trying to bring him along as fast as we possibly could," Larson said. His memory of Page was that he was curious, bright and quick. "He can be pretty impressive on the stump if you will," Larson said.

After several domestic jobs in Cargill's animal nutrition business, Page went to Singapore in 1985 to lead animal nutrition operations in Asia. He returned to the U.S. in 1992 and continued to climb the corporate ladder. He has been president, chief operating officer and on the board since 2000.

Page said his plans for the company do not include a strategic shift of the kind Staley undertook when he became CEO in 1999, opening up the reclusive grain giant and building a new business out of solving other companies' food problems. (Cargill, for example, has developed trans-fat-free versions of many foods for companies that wanted to drop the ingredient without changing the taste of their products.)

Page said his role would be one of continuing the company's expansion that was begun under Staley.

"I would hope that the world would continue to afford us the opportunity to grow and broaden our geographic breadth," he said.

He repeatedly has sounded cautionary bells about biofuels. Speaking at a food industry meeting about 11/2 years ago, Page warned farmers that the rising cost of energy could reshape how crops are used - whether for food, fuel or feed.

"In a world awash in record crops, this worry may seem idle, but how might it look if we encounter back-to-back short crops?" he said.

Speaking more recently, he underscored the importance of food first, fuel second, for the world's crops.

"The fact that we can even contemplate doing both, I think, is a huge endorsement of the progress that agriculture's put in place over the last 20 to 30 years."

Page has also explained why it's not prudent to jump on the ethanol bandwagon, saying that support for ethanol could evaporate if people sense that it drives up the cost of food, a situation that appears to be happening today. Many food companies, including Hormel last month, are reporting higher costs and lower earnings because of the rising cost of corn.

The company has not invested as heavily in the renewable energy industry as its rival Archer Daniels Midland, but it has ethanol plants in Eddyville, Iowa; and Blair, Neb.; and a biodiesel plant in Iowa Falls, Iowa. Emerald Renewable Energy, a Cargill subsidiary, plans to build four ethanol plants in the Midwest, and recently purchased land in Illinois for one of those facilities. The company also has two biodiesel plants in Europe.