6 Million -- Idaho Farmer Among World's Richest Men

BOISE - Those frozen French fries and hash browns in your freezer are there because of a hard-working farm kid who saw the world in a potato.

J.R. Simplot, the kid who grew up on a dusty Declo, Idaho, farm, is now a driven 89-year-old and one of the 100 richest people in the world.

The Simplot Co. has 12,000 employees worldwide and annual revenue of $2.8 billion. Yes, it is famous for its potatoes. And yes, it supplies more than half of McDonald's French fries.

But the company is also among the nation's top 10 cattle producers. There are also fertilizer plants, construction companies, ethanol-production plants, lawn and garden supplies, silica sand, pet food, cheese and a guacamole-production plant.

And that is the short tour.

Simplot did not hit the stratosphere of wealth until relatively recently. More than half his fortune was made after age 84. Around 1980 he helped bankroll a couple of guys who thought they could build a better computer chip.

Today Micron Technology is a Fortune 500 company and a major player in the high-tech world of computer chips. That is another 12,000 employees and annual revenue of $3.5 billion.

At age 14, John Richard "Jack" Simplot made his first real money. He sold 21 lambs for $80.

Next he proved he could do it with hogs at a time when the market for hogs was poor.

He bought 400 head for about $400. He built a hog pen by the creek and a cooker to stir up some feed. He sold those hogs for 7 cents a pound and got a check for $7,500. "That was a fortune back in those days," Simplot said.

It was the 1920s. He was an eighth-grade dropout and ready for business.

His next venture was to grow potatoes with an experienced partner. "He made me use certified seeds on alfalfa ground that had been in hay for three or four years, and we came up with a better potato," Simplot said.

They heard about an electric potato sorter and went to get one. They got busier, sorting potatoes for other farmers as well, until they had a dispute.

"Let's flip and see who owns it," Simplot said. "And that's how I got in the sorting business. And I never quit."

The Simplot Co. now produces a mind-boggling 2 billion pounds of potatoes a year.

In the 1930s, he also grew onions. One day, in need of money, he drove to California to collect $8,500 from an onion processor who owed him. He spent the morning waiting for the man to show up. While he waited, he struck up a conversation with another man who was also waiting.

The debtor never showed up, but before long Simplot had a contract with the other man to supply him with 40,000 pounds of onion flakes and 50,000 pounds of onion powder.

Never mind that Simplot had no idea how to dry onions.

He toured the processor's plant, saw that it used a prune dryer and came back to Idaho to learn how to powder onions.

He made half a million dollars that first year.

When the demand for dried potatoes dropped after World War II, Simplot realized the vast potential of frozen products. Before the decade was over, the world had frozen spuds by the bagful.

In the 1960s he hooked up with Ray Kroc, who was putting together a fast-food hamburger chain. Today McDonald's is the king of burgers and fries around the world, and 50 percent of those fries come from Simplot potatoes.

If you ask Simplot what made him successful, he will say that he held on to his assets and never sold them. He waited for them to grow.