Farm Credit Service Continues to Report Misleading YBS Lending Data

The FCS has long given lip-service to its lending to young, beginning, and small (YBS) farmers and ranchers, an obligation Congress imposed on the FCS in the Farm Credit Act. Young farmers are those 35 or younger, beginning farmers are those who have been farming 10 years or less, and small farmers are those with gross annual sales of less than $250,000. The Farm Credit Administration (FCA), the FCS’s regulator, routinely publishes data on the FCS’s YBS lending, but that data grossly overstates the FCS’s YBS lending because of the manner in which the data is reported. Even with this expansive definition of YBS lending, data published in the FCS’s Annual Information Statement indicates that the FCS increasingly tilts away from lending to YBS farmers and ranchers...more