Oct. 18--With the value of Mosaic Company's stock down nearly 80 percent since June, one might expect its shareholders to be irate about all the money they've lost.

After all, some $56 billion in shareholder wealth in the fertilizer giant has been wiped out since the company's stock hit an all-time high of $163.25 a share on June 18. It closed Friday at $33.66 a share.

But the mood at Mosaic's annual shareholders meeting, held Oct. 9 at a Radisson hotel across the street from its Plymouth headquarters, was reflective, with investors asking probing questions about global fertilizer demand. The only whiff of dissent came when an older shareholder asked why the company was paying for an executive to go to business school (disclosed on page 34 of Mosaic's proxy statement). No one mentioned the plunging stock price.

It somehow seemed fitting that the Mosaic meeting was held just down the hall from a conference on Transcendental Meditation. Both groups -- the Mosaic shareholders and the transcendentalists -- appeared in a trancelike state as they crossed paths in the hotel lobby. "Gee, I thought there would be more anger," said a perplexed Warren Poole, a retiree from St. Paul who owns 200 shares of Mosaic, as he left the meeting.

But it's hard to get angry with a company that just a week before the shareholders' meeting reported its net earnings had nearly tripled to $1.18 billion in the first quarter ended Aug. 30, from $305 million in the same quarter a year earlier. Indeed, some analysts argue that Mosaic's stock slide has more to do with the uncertainties surrounding the worldwide credit crunch than with the company's recent performance.

Worries have surfaced in recent weeks that the seizure in the world credit markets will spread to the agricultural sector, making it more difficult for farmers to obtain loans to fund their operations. On Oct. 1, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer told reporters that "there's a possibility that we certainly could see tight credit having an effect on agricultural production." Those words were enough to send a host of farm-related stocks, from tractor manufacturer Deere & Co. to Archer Daniels Midland Co., into a nosedive.

The next day, as it explained its earnings, which while up 284 percent to $2.65 per share fell short of analysts' expectations, shares of Mosaic plunged. The stock fell $28, or 41 percent -- its steepest one-day slide since going public in 2004. Mosaic also disclosed that day it would curb production of phosphates, a key ingredient for fertilizer that accounts for about 54 percent of Mosaic's sales.