Farm Credit Services

About The Farm Credit System

The Farm Credit System is a federally chartered network of borrower-owned lending institutions comprised of cooperatives and related service organizations. Cooperatives are organizations that are owned and controlled by their members who use the cooperative’s products, supplies or services. The U.S. Congress authorized the creation of the first System institutions in 1916. Our mission is to provide sound and dependable credit to American farmers, ranchers, producers or harvesters of aquatic products, their cooperatives, and farm-related businesses. We do this by making appropriately structured loans to qualified individuals and businesses at competitive rates and providing financial services and advice to those persons and businesses.

Consistent with our mission of serving rural America, we also make loans for the purchase of rural homes, to finance rural communication, energy and water infrastructures, to support agricultural exports, and to finance other eligible entities.

Farm Credit institutions are chartered by the federal government and must operate within limits established by the Farm Credit Act. The Farm Credit System is regulated by an independent federal agency, the Farm Credit Administration, which has all of the enforcement, regulatory and oversight authority as other federal financial regulators. Farm Credit is a government-sponsored enterprise, or “GSE” – a privately owned set of institutions established by Congress to address the needs of a specific sector of the economy.

Farm Credit delivers the financial power of Wall Street to agriculture and rural America by issuing debt in the national and international money markets and using this capital to provide borrowers with access to reliable and competitive credit. The full financial strength of all of the Farm Credit banks stands behind the debt issued on behalf of the System. In addition, investors in Farm Credit debt are protected by the assets of the self-funded Farm Credit System Insurance Fund, which is administered by an independent agency of the federal government.

The Farm Credit System’s total loans equaled $158.063 billion at September 30, 2008, an increase of $15.157 billion since December 31, 2007. Approximately one third of the credit needs of U.S. agriculture are financed by the 99 Farm Credit associations and banks nationwide.

For additional information on the Farm Credit System, please visit The Farm Credit Council’s website at www.fccouncil.com, and for more detailed information on the System’s financial performance, please visit the Federal Farm Credit Banks Funding Corporation at www.farmcredit-ffcb.com.