Farm Loans

For farmers and ranchers, the USDA has a new online tool to help them make sense of loan offerings. Here is FSA administrator Richard Fordyce.

"It's actually, in my mind, a very valuable tool for farmers, ranchers that are looking at obtaining credit through Farm Service Agency, whether that's for purchasing equipment, purchasing land, and maybe folks looking for credit that are new to the agency. They can go into the farm loan discovery tool. Folks can access that through farmer's dot gov slash fund that'll bring up the farm loan discovery tool, simply hit the start button and producers can start to go through that and it will ask five questions.

Your answers determine which questions are asked. Next, so you don't waste time.

It should streamline the process and it will create an environment where potential borrowers have more knowledge when they walk into the office, or have a person to person visit anytime moving forward that we're going to roll out tools or resources on farmer's dog. These tools and resources are for farmers, so we probably ought to talk to farmers as we are developing some of these things and see if we're on the right track. And we certainly did that. This time we talk to borrowers. We also utilize staff within Farm Service Agency to kind of fact check and make sure that the direction that we were going with this tool was the right way. The farmers that were asked to contribute to what the look was and what the navigation of it was, we're very happy."