How many employees, customers and community members will take that path is anyone's guess, said Bob Kudrle, an international trade specialist at the University of Minnesota. If Cargill's strategy works, Kudrle believes other global businesses in other economic sectors will follow.

"I can't think of anything that looks quite like this," Kudrle said of Cargill's new initiative. "Employees don't normally get involved [to the degree that Cargill is asking]. But at this particular juncture, American companies must be hugely frustrated with the absolutely indefensible claims being made about the destructiveness of trade. Most economists are dismayed by what the administration is saying" about participation in the global economy.

On a recent business trip to South America, MacLennan said he and Vorwerk found themselves in the office of the president of a Latin American country.

"He lamented the loss of American leadership as it relates to open trade," MacLennan said.

Nevertheless, complaints about free trade agreements costing American jobs are not limited to the White House. Nor are they the province of one party. Democratic congressman Rick Nolan, who represents Minnesota's Iron Range, is a longtime critic of free trade agreements. These days he complains that the dumping of cheap Chinese steel in the U.S. has cost miners in his district jobs.

"While I absolutely believe that trade is good for our nation and the world," Nolan said in a statement to the Star Tribune, "it must be fair trade that requires partner nations to abide by the same standards of living wages, health care and pensions, human rights and environmental protections as we do here in the United States. In the past, hasty and rushed trade agreements have resulted in hundreds of thousands of lost U.S. jobs, suppressed wages, as well as environmental damage and worker exploitation across the world."