The Farm Security and Rural Investment Act of 2002 made permanent the interest assistance program for the Farm Service Agency's guaranteed loans, authorized a significant increase in funding for the program, and targeted funding for beginning farmers and ranchers. The research presented here...

The Farm Service Agency’s (FSA) Farm Business Plan was used to compare the characteristics of beginning farmers receiving direct Farm Ownership (FO) loans in fiscal 2005 by the type of delivery mechanism. Regular FO loans were commonly used by small and intermediate size family farming...

Past research on agricultural loan pricing is not extensive and has been hampered by a lack of suitable data. The Farm Service Agency (FSA) has guaranteed approximately 5 percent of farm debt of the Farm Credit System (FCS) and banks, the primary lenders to agriculture. As a requirement of the...

Risks associated with guarantees of land contracts are expected to be greater than guarantees of loans made by commercial lenders. Farmers utilizing seller-financing have greater debts, less cash flow, less equity in real estate, and less solvency than farmers utilizing regular FSA guarantees....

An analysis of default by racial and ethnic minorities is estimated for direct farm loans made by USDA’s Farm Service Agency (FSA) in fiscal 2005. Logit model results indicated that when controlling for creditworthiness, Blacks who received FSA direct loans had higher default rates suggesting...