WAYZATA, MINN. — Cargill Animal Nutrition recently announced that the company made several leadership changes to its pork team.

Patrick Duerksen was promoted to pork commercial director; Brent Frederick was named technical services and innovation director and Scott McAdoo was hired as Cargill’s director of pork business analysis and support.

Duerksen first joined Cargill as a production manager for the pork business while managing hog barns in Arkansas.

After that, he moved into technology deployment, business development and business efficiency in the United States and worldwide. During the last 13 years, Duerksen led strategic marketing of the animal nutrition business. He started working globally before shifting to the North American market.

In his new role, Duerksen will lead the pork sales and nutrition consultants, working with customers to drive the profitability and success of Cargill’s pork operations.

“The deep passion and commitment our team has for supporting our customers is what really excites me about leading this team,” Duerksen said. “I’m honored to take on this role to bring more impactful insights and solutions the pork industry and help grow and develop our team.”

After working with pigs on his family’s farrow-to-finish farms in Georgia, Frederick received a degree in animal science from Texas A&M University. He received his master’s in animal nutrition at Iowa State University and a PhD in nutrition at North Carolina State University.

Frederick then worked as director, R&D and innovation at Christensen Farms for 17 years. In 2020, he joined Cargill as Pork Innovation Lead, and began working across pork and poultry innovation during 2022 as the Monogastric Innovation Lead.

In his new position, Frederick will lead research and innovation teams along with in-field technical experts for the pork industry.

“Bringing the researchers and in-field nutrition teams together is exciting for us and our customers,” Frederick said. “Our goal is to create better connections across the teams to provide better insights as well as drive research and innovations that are relevant and impactful for our customers.”

McAdoo joined Cargill late last year after nearly 30 years of pork industry experience. He began in the 1990s with Cargill Pork as an operations manager for sow production, growing a herd of more than 170,000.

He then moved to JBS’ live pork operation after Cargill sold its business in 2015. McAdoo also worked as an account manager for Agristats Live Pork before returning to live production as director of operations for Tyson Foods’ pork breeding stock operations.

Cargill said McAdoo’s experience leading large integrated operations, as well as his experience managing data, make him a great asset to support customer profitability.

In his new role, McAdoo will also lead the live production support specialists.

“The technology and data we have at our fingertips today is light years ahead of what we had early in my career,” McAdoo said. “I look forward to helping customers realize more productivity and profitability through our many tools like Pig Flash, Producer Profitability and Swine Production Dashboards within the Cargill Nutrition Cloud.”