Remarks by Glen R. Smith

Board Member

Farm Credit Administration

Farm Credit West Board Meeting

Monterey, California

August 1, 2018

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

thank you for the invitation to attend the Farm Credit West conference in beautiful 

Monterey, California. These past seven months have been an exciting and exhilarating life 

change for my wife and me. This week will mark exactly seven months since we pulled out 

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

I would like to take this opportunity to introduce my wife, Fauzan.

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

a farmer. My wife and I, together with our son Peter and his wife, own and operate a 

2,000-acre corn, soybean, and small cow/calf operation. In addition, I have spent a 

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

farm management. 2018 will make the 36th year since I started our 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. Of course, as a board member, I have now divested all ties to the Farm Credit 

System.

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 seven 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 that I can confidently say will keep the 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. Along with Jim on this trip, we are delighted to be 

joined by his wife.

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

interested in hearing about is your association’s 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 
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advanced age of the American farmer and rancher today and very concerned about the 

implications for the future.

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 association’s YBS program, and maybe 

by that information-gathering and brainstorming process, we can see these 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 mentioned that I see my first year in this job as listening and learning. I’m from the 

Midwest, in the backyard of Farm Credit Services of America, the largest association in the 

country, in the heart of AgriBank, the second-largest district in the System. I know quite a 

bit about corn, soybeans, cattle, and hogs — I’ve raised all of them, and I can tell you

we’ve got some problems. I’m not as familiar with other areas of the country, and that will 

be part of my education as a Farm Credit Administration board member. So far this year, I 

have traveled to Texas, Arizona, South Carolina, West Virginia, and now California. Before 

the end of the year, I plan to be in Vermont, Minnesota, North Dakota, and Louisiana. I 

need to know what makes things click in these areas — what types of issues currently 

exist. 

Here in California, since the first of the week, I’ve visited a dairy, an almond and pistachio 

operation, a cattle feedlot, extensive food processing facilities, and a winery. You have 

tremendous diversity, but you have problems, too, ranging from tariffs to water to labor. 

Other areas of the country are doing quite well. That is the strength of the System: the 

diversity of enterprises as well as geographic location. And that’s how we’ll get through 

tough times together, by working together in the spirit of cooperation.

If I may, I’d like to digress a little bit to a story from my youth. Sometimes these early 

events shape our lives into the adults we are today. I was 10 years old and working in my 

grandfather’s corn crib, helping to shell corn. In the 1960s, most farmers still harvested 

their corn crop and stored it as the whole ear in cribs. Then later in the year when prices 

were good or the livestock needed feed, a corn sheller, which was basically a small, 

stationary combine, was booked for the day, the neighbors would show up for trading 

labor and we would go to work. 

It was hard, back-breaking work, scooping and raking the ear corn into the drag, but I was 

big and strong for my age and very proud to be pulling my weight alongside the men of 

the neighborhood at $1.25 per hour. I happened to look up to see my Dad racing across 

the yard on an open tractor, pulling a wagon heaped with shelled corn. In a split instant, 

the front-end of the tractor hit a rut and took a violent bounce, throwing Dad in front of 

the rear tires. He tried to crawl away but the front tires of the wagon hit him, rolled him 
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over with the back tires passing over as well. Dad survived, but he spent months in the 

hospital hovering between life and death. Meanwhile, I took care of the chores. 

At that time, we had about 200 head of cattle on feed, but it was mid-summer, no hay had 

been put up yet, and we were running out of feed. Then one day, several neighbors 

showed up and mowed all our hay fields. A couple days later the whole neighborhood 

showed up — I think over 40 people — to rake, bale, haul, and mow away enough hay to 

fill two big barns to the roof. All the farmwives gathered to cook a huge noon meal for the 

work crews. To this day, I keep a picture of that whole neighborhood gathered on our front 

porch after lunch in July 1966.

That is the spirit of cooperation. That is the spirit of agriculture. That is the spirit of 

America embedded in the mission of the Farm Credit System. Sticking together — that is 

how we’re going to get through these tougher times, only to prosper in better times.

I’m somewhat a student of agricultural cycles. I’m fascinated by stories of great family 

wealth generated by multi-generations, only to be lost in one generation, or tremendous 

farm wealth generated in just one generation by sheer guts and determination. Hard work 

and management skill may not be enough. Sometimes it just comes down to the luck of 

timing in a given agricultural cycle. My father was born in 1930, spent his formative years 

in the Depression and grew into an adult who was very scared of risk and debt. I cut my 

teeth as an entry-level farmer in the ’80s and don’t want to repeat those challenging 

times. Financial institutions should learn from those same history lessons.

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 

today or in the last several years. As we 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.