Farm Credit Services of Mid-America

The Farmer and I went to a Farm Credit Services Of Mid-America Customer Appreciation dinner on Tuesday evening.  They hold one every year, and I think we’ve been there every year since we moved to the farm.

They always have doorprizes, and I always hope I’ll win one of course!  And also of course, I never do.  This year, however, we had a number of “blue shirts” at our table and one of them won the table centerpiece.  By default I ended up with it…  the “blue shirts” were Farm Credit Service employees and guess they didn’t think they ought to take stuff home at a customer appreciation dinner!

If you’re into farming and ever needed a loan, chances are you’ve heard of Farm Credit Services.  They are one of three well-known GSEs (Government Sponsored Entities), the other two being Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.  Unlike Freddie and Fannie, however, they are continuing to thrive and maintain solid business practices.

They’ve been around a long time:

The seeds of the Farm Credit System were planted by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1908, when he appointed a Country Life Commission to address the various problems facing a predominantly rural population.

At the time, agricultural real estate loans from commercial banks, if they were available at all, had prohibitively high rates and short terms. Until 1913, for instance, federal law prohibited national banks from making loans with maturities beyond five years.

The Joint Committee on Rural Credits drafted the 1916 Federal Farm Loan Act. That was the beginning, but there are three more things that shaped Farm Credit Services.

In 1929 the Agricultural Marketing Act was enacted to help stabilize farm prices and finance agricultural cooperatives. Then in 1933, the Emergency Farm Mortgage Act recapitalized the land banks with $189 million and cut interest rates to deal with the Depression. The Farm Credit Act was also enacted in 1933, and that revamped the FICBs and created 13 Banks for Cooperatives. All this is the basis of the Farm Credit System as it exists today.

Of course, that’s just a very condensed version of the history of Farm Credit Services. The speakers at the dinner were quite good and had a lot of interesting information to impart on that subject and more. I wish we had a program so I could call them out by name because my memory … isn’t that great.

We did get a hand-out with information about Tennessee agriculture, noting that Tennessee ranks 31st in livestock sales in the entire country, creates over 21,000 jobs, and pulls in over $60 million in property taxes and $110 million in income taxes.

In Tennessee there are:

• 4,653 corn producers
• 1,115 dairy farms
• 42,872 cattle farms
• 2,967 soybean farms

And Tennessee ranks 13th in the nation for broiler production, 9th for cotton production, and 3rd for tobacco production.  Interesting!

Oh, and Farm Credit Services is not just about agribusiness.  They help small farmers too.  (Or we wouldn’t have been there, with only 12 acres!)  And they also have programs to provide scholarships to youth going to college, and a new program to help young people going into farming. 

We need people in farming.  At the rate farm land is being turned into housing developments, I sometimes wonder who is going to be feeding the people in this country in a few years.

So how about this?  If you like to eat, hug a farmer today!