Financing for the operation you have
Most lenders underwrite to a template. Your farm doesn’t fit one — rented acreage, several entities, landlord arrangements, an insurance claim, a hard year in the middle. My first move is never to change your operation, and it isn’t to start dialing lenders either. It’s to understand your situation completely, then find lenders who can underwrite the farm as it stands.
Five things, in this order
Understand the bind you’re actually in
Before I contact a single lender. Statements, tax returns, rent rolls, equipment notes, crop insurance records, open payables and receivables — and a real conversation about how you got here. A lender exiting agriculture altogether is a different problem from three dry years pulling your coverage ratio down, and the answers aren’t the same.
A package that survives underwriting
Balance sheet, income statement, cash flow projection, entity structure, collateral schedule, crop insurance position, marketing plan. Reconciled, internally consistent, and written so a credit analyst can follow it without a phone call.
A long list of the right lenders
Not the bank down the road and nobody else. I work a list — matched to your scale, your collateral position, your timeline and your history — so a single no doesn’t end the season.
I present it myself
I walk the lender through the operation, the numbers, the hard years and what caused them, and a structure built to answer the risk they’re actually worried about. I’ve been the analyst reading these files. I know which questions come next — and by this point I already have the answers.
I keep it moving
You’re on a combine with no signal when the credit officer calls with a question. I’m not. Questions get answered the day they’re asked, and a file that goes quiet gets a phone call, not a week of silence.
Traditional first — but not only
If a bank can do it at bank pricing, that’s where we start. When the calendar or the balance sheet says otherwise, there is a whole market beyond it.
Traditional lenders
- Community and regional banks
- Life insurance company farm mortgage programs
- FSA guaranteed and direct programs
Best pricing, longest timelines, least flexibility on structure.
Non-traditional lenders
- Specialty agricultural lenders
- Asset-based and borrowing-base facilities
- Private credit funds active in agriculture
- Equipment lenders, sale-leaseback, seller financing
Costlier, but faster and willing to build a structure around your collateral.
A rate you can live with beats a rate you can’t get. Sometimes the right answer is a costlier loan that closes faster than a cheaper one that may never come at all.
Honest about timing
Nobody can promise you a closing date. What I can tell you is where the time actually goes, so you can plan around it instead of waiting in the dark.
The deep dive
Fastest when your records are in reasonable shape, longer when we’re rebuilding statements from scratch. This is the part you can speed up by getting me everything at once.
Building the package
Mostly on me. I’ll come back with questions once, in a batch, rather than pestering you through planting.
Lender review
The slow part, and the part neither of us controls. Committees meet when they meet. What we control is never being the reason a file waits.
Structure and close
Terms, covenants, collateral, reporting requirements. I stay in this part, and I’ll be straight with you: sometimes getting the loan at all is the victory, and living to fight next year’s battle is the best outcome on the table. When there’s room to improve the terms, we take it.
Tell me what your lender has said.
If the answer was no, the cash balance is dropping and the bills are stacking up, that’s exactly the call to make — and the sooner the better.