Company: AGM-PH
Filing Date: 2025-04-16
Form Type: DEF 14A
Source: 0000845877-25-000143
Chunk: 48

Company: FEDERAL AGRICULTURAL MORTGAGE CORP
Filing Date: 2025-04-16
Form: DEF 14A
Chunk 48
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 vary with actual business and personal performance.

| 33 |

| EXECUTIVE COMPENSATION GOVERNANCE |

#### Peer Groups and Market Posture
Farmer Mac is a federally chartered corporation created to establish a secondary market for agricultural and rural loans designed to:

• increase the accessibility of financing for American agriculture and rural infrastructure;

• provide greater liquidity and lending capacity for agricultural and rural lenders; and

• facilitate inter mediate-term and long-term agricultural and rural funding across business cycles.

Farmer Mac is unique because it is a government-sponsored enterprise ("GSE") regulated by the Farm Credit Administration but is also a publicly-traded financial services company. It is therefore difficult to identify "peer" companies for comparison purposes. However, the Compensation Committee has worked with Aon to identify a blend of comparably-sized publicly-traded financial services companies and other mission-focused financial institutions whose business and risk profiles align with Farmer Mac's. The result is a peer group that includes public banks, Farm Credit System ("FCS") institutions, Federal Home Loan Banks ("FHLBs"), and National Rural Utilities Cooperative Finance Corporation ("CFC"), a mission-focused, financially-oriented cooperative based in the Washington, DC metropolitan area focused on financing rural infrastructure.

The Compensation Committee uses a peer group to assess competitive practices. Any peer group used by Farmer Mac is selected based on criteria approved by the Compensation Committee and is designed to align the peer group with the unique attributes of Farmer Mac. The peer group used for 2024 executive compensation decisions included two segments that grouped similar types of organizations for analysis – one segment composed of public banks and one GSE segment composed of FCS institutions and FHLBs. That peer group reflects the Compensation Committee's decision in August 2023, as part of its regular annual review of the peer group, to maintain the public banks and GSE segments of the peer group without change other than to reflect merger activity to help inform executive compensation decisions for 2024. The Compensation Committee also continued to use CFC's executive compensation information in composite peer group data for 2024 executive compensation decisions.

The Compensation Committee selected the organizations in the 2024 peer group to balance traditional asset comparisons with total employee headcount, operating expense, complexity of operations, number of products, and realistic career opportunities. The Compensation Committee believes that this approach to the peer group:

• remains relevant to Farmer Mac in business and organizational focus;

• provides valuable information about relevant but distinct labor markets;

• is of sufficient size to buffer against the effects of removals due to