A few years ago an accountant I know told me about some of her clients. They were a couple of guys on a mission to assemble hundreds of millions of dollars of U.S. farmland for a Canadian pension fund. That’s when I started to realize there’s a lot more going on in the world of agri-finance than you hear about. Here are some of the big players in the agri-finance universe.
The types of players include banks that specialize in agricultural loans, non-bank finance companies that do land and equipment loans, farmer-owned lending co-ops, REITs that own and manage farm real estate, private equity funds that buy cropland, sovereign wealth funds, and, of course, pension funds.
One of the big agri-finance players, the Dutch Rabo AgriFinance in Chesterfield, Missouri, is headquartered only half an hour from my office. I recently sat down with their executive vice president, Curt Hudnutt, to talk about their market share in ag lending and the overall condition of agricultural loans. Rabo makes land, operating, and equipment loans. The company also sells crop insurance and offers commodity price hedging.
One of my goals was to show you the five largest agricultural lenders in the United States. Sounds easy, right? It isn’t. You have to pull together data from the Federal Reserve and beyond, and you have to specify the criteria. Are you talking about banks that do more than half of their lending to farms, dollars in farm real estate loans, number of farm loans, or some other metric? I think the fairest way to rank them is by how many dollars in ag loans a retail lending entity held as of the end of the most recent quarter. I thought this list would just be five large banks, but I was wrong. Here are the top five ag lenders as of September 30, 2018:
The types of players include banks that specialize in agricultural loans, non-bank finance companies that do land and equipment loans, farmer-owned lending co-ops, REITs that own and manage farm real estate, private equity funds that buy cropland, sovereign wealth funds, and, of course, pension funds.
One of the big agri-finance players, the Dutch Rabo AgriFinance in Chesterfield, Missouri, is headquartered only half an hour from my office. I recently sat down with their executive vice president, Curt Hudnutt, to talk about their market share in ag lending and the overall condition of agricultural loans. Rabo makes land, operating, and equipment loans. The company also sells crop insurance and offers commodity price hedging.
One of my goals was to show you the five largest agricultural lenders in the United States. Sounds easy, right? It isn’t. You have to pull together data from the Federal Reserve and beyond, and you have to specify the criteria. Are you talking about banks that do more than half of their lending to farms, dollars in farm real estate loans, number of farm loans, or some other metric? I think the fairest way to rank them is by how many dollars in ag loans a retail lending entity held as of the end of the most recent quarter. I thought this list would just be five large banks, but I was wrong. Here are the top five ag lenders as of September 30, 2018:
- Farm Credit Services of America (ACA)
- Farm Credit Mid America (ACA)
- MetLife Insurance
- Rabo Agrifinance / Rabo Bank NA
- Compeer Financial (ACA)
