Remarks by Glen R. Smith

Board Member

Farm Credit Administration

Farm Credit Council Board of Directors Meeting

Washington, D.C.

June 4, 2018

Thank you, Todd. As a board member of the Farm Credit Administration, I would like to 

thank you for the invitation to attend your Council meeting here this afternoon. These past 

five months have been an exciting and exhilarating life change for my wife and me. This

week will mark exactly five months since we pulled out of our rural home driveway, our 

only home in our 36 years of marriage.... Quite a change!

We hail from West Central Iowa. Like most of your directors, I will introduce myself first as 

a farmer. My wife and I owned and operated a 2,000-acre corn, soybean, and small 

cow/calf operation. Now that farm is run by our son Peter and his wife. In addition, I have 

spent a lifetime in the farmland service business, primarily in land appraisal and brokerage 

and farm management. It’s been 36 years since I started the business, Smith Land Service

Co.

Throughout the years in both our farm operation and business, we have worked closely as 

partners with Farm Credit. We had numerous long-term real estate loans over the years in 

several ownership entities. Our company contracted regularly with Farm Credit in the ’80s 

and ’90s, and our company appraisers regularly exchanged sales information with the 

Farm Credit appraisers in our area. It was a valuable partnership that worked well both 

ways.

As a farmer and ag businessman, I have the basic financial skills necessary to survive and 

prosper. However, they are nowhere near the level of financial expertise and talent 

required in an oversight agency like FCA. After five months on the job, I can say I have 

never worked around a more talented group of people than what you will find at FCA —

people I can confidently say will keep the Farm Credit System true to its mission in 

providing safe, reliable credit to American agriculture.

As an example of that dedication, my first move upon arriving at the agency was hiring my

executive assistant, Jim Morris, who is with me today. Many of you personally know Jim as 

a veteran of the agency, dating back to 1987. He is a licensed attorney in Washington, 

D.C.; Illinois; and New York and has an incredible wealth of experience in almost all facets 

of the agency’s operation and history.

I see my job this first year as listening and learning. One of the areas I’m particularly 

interested in hearing about is your different associations’ success in promoting your YBS

(young, beginning, and small) farmer programs. As I worked through the interview and 

Senate confirmation phase of my FCA position, almost unanimously at every Senate Ag 

Committee office, I was asked the question: “What can we do to promote and help young 

farmers and ranchers get started?” Members of Congress are acutely aware of the 

advanced age of the American farmer and rancher today and are very concerned about the 

implications for the future.
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I’ll confess that this subject is near and dear to my heart, as my wife and I started out as 

true beginning farmers. Although our son makes the sixth generation in our family to farm 

in Pymosa Township, almost all the land owned by my great-grandfather’s and 

grandfather’s generations had been sold throughout the years. We started out in 1982 as 

sharecroppers with about $2,500 equity in my wife’s 1979 Olds Cutlass, but we both had 

good educations and plenty of ambition.

Through those tenuous early years, a patient, conscientious, and — most important —

loyal lender stayed with us, allowing us to prosper when economic times turned for the 

better. I’m interested in hearing what is working in your associations’ YBS programs, and 

maybe by that information-gathering and brainstorming process, we can see those 

programs grow Systemwide. Jim and I and FCA staff have researched the history of YBS 

and the authority FCA has under section 4.19 of the Farm Credit Act, and as we move 

ahead, it is my personal desire and goal to see this program grow.

I just reviewed the Funding Corp’s quarterly report for the System this past weekend. It 

looks like 2018 is starting out well, with a combined System net income of $1.266 billion 

for the first quarter, which is up slightly from $1.244 billion from the first quarter of 2017, 

with most of that increase coming from an increase in net interest income. Congratulations 

to all your associations for their collective participation in this performance. Along with 

those congratulations, I would like to share with you some advice I share regularly with 

my son back on the farm in Iowa.

Decisions and practices established in the past during good times don’t always apply to the 

future. Since the ’80s, we have had a pretty good run in agriculture — almost two-and-ahalf decades of steadily increasing incomes, land values, and balance sheets. Not so much

for my son today or for us in the last several years. 

As farmers and ranchers continue to work with very tight profit margins, decreasing 

liquidity, and what I feel are fragile land values, let us be vigilant in establishing the best 

lending practices pertinent to the times. I believe these practices need to be cautious as 

we look ahead to ensure the mission of Farm Credit in providing a safe, reliable source of

credit to American agriculture and rural America.