A steady supply of minerals is important both to our current lifestyle and to promising emerging technologies. Optimizing the extraction, processing, and transportation of minerals can help ensure an efficient allocation of resources during the production cycle. This results in challenging optimization problems - stochastic, high-dimensional, often non-convex and non-linear. The first part of my presentation will provide an overview of some of these problems and the current solution methods. In the second part, I will present some of my recent work in this area, which uses policy search methods to compute adaptive policies for the initial processing of mined material.