@steveconaway1 @gwiesefarms Not even the bosses, the support staff. Loan ops, underwriters, etc. The lack of experience on that side is making the origination process tough.
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Jack V
429 posts
Jack V
@AgBankerJack
Ag Banker, Farmer, Humorist, Proud Penn State Alumni | talks about Ag Lending, finance
Yolo County, CA Katılım Ağustos 2025
443 Takip Edilen130 Takipçiler
This was my thought when I saw this too. Mid sized operation with cattle, crops, and land debt. Say it’s a father and one or two sons. Pretty easy to hit $5-$7+ million in exposer for everything. If everyone signs guarantees for the entire operation, some of these small town 1-3 branch banks LEGALLY can not have that much exposer to a single borrower/entity.
If they are a small town bank with large bank ownership, they probably don’t even want to mess with the headache of ag lending. Good chance large town ownership is only operating the bank in the small town because of the strong “sticky” deposit base they can leverage elsewhere.
If you are a mid sized progressive operation your cash flow is probably break even to maybe only slightly above after the last few years depending on cattle income, owned paid for land, and any off farm income helping it out. If you don’t have a long term relationship with your community lender, good luck switching $5+ million of loans to another smaller local bank. It would be: (1) too much work to properly analyze the credit and bank expose to be competitive. (2) small bank would have to participate out (sell) part of that loan portfolio to a different bank, thus cutting into margins more. (3) there is a reason the customer is switching banks and that means there is a problem = red flag!
I’ve met with and know some good ag lenders in small town banks, but often times it’s their bosses or bank regulators who have the loan officers hands tied, yet it’s the loan officer who is painted as the bad guy when a customer gets a “No”.
Also, I know some big and progressive farmers who do all their banking through their larger community bank because that bank CAN out preform Farm Credit. The bank provides answers quick, makes fast decisions, provides superior customer service, and truly understands the customer and doesn’t require going through a bunch of committees and analysts like Farm Credit. Some local banks are still providing excellent ag lending experiences, but a lot of times it’s behind the scenes regulatory factors customers don’t know or understand which prevent them from doing even more.
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I don’t believe it’s that they have stopped betting on you.
It’s that they don’t have enough capital to keep up with your growing needs or their officers don’t have any ag experience, not wanting to approve loans they don’t understand. Aka brain drain.
Tork@TorkWhisler
Rural banks around here are getting out of ag lending, one by one, and that should worry you more than any price on the board. When the people who know your balance sheets better than anyone stop betting on you, that's a verdict.
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@PlowboyPodunk @TorkWhisler Can’t see how people are making debt payments pencil at these land prices.
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@TorkWhisler You better own your land your farming these days
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@KurtHolscher @TorkWhisler I don’t think it’s the lenders, it’s the underwriter/analyst knowledge.
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@TorkWhisler It could be that there are not enough farms to justify keeping a knowledgeable farm lender on staff.
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@TorkWhisler I gave them an honest shot to keep the business too. If I was a BTO, I don’t know if that would have made a difference.
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@US_Stormwatch What are they considering “developed water supply”? Much of the water storage was developed and intended for Ag use.
Is this the misleading state that includes environmental use in the Ag bucket which overstates the use of water by production Ag?
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Another fascinating post related to water and ag policy in California.
Alec Stapp@AlecStapp
Chatted with a water resource economist at an event in California yesterday. The state’s water “shortage” really is one of the most unforced errors in policymaking. Key stats: - farmers use 80% of the developed water supply - residents use 20% - cities pay ~20x higher prices (!) for water than farmers (~$722/acre-foot vs ~$36/acre-foot) - some of the biggest agricultural districts in the state pay literally $0 for their water - meanwhile agriculture accounts for just ~2% of California’s economy It’s crazy that politicians tell residents to take shorter showers or get rid of their lawns instead of just charging farmers the market price for their water usage.
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Insane stat of the day: California almonds use roughly 3–5.5 million acre-feet of water per year, depending on methodology.
That's ~4-7x more water than all data centers in North America used combined in 2025.
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@gwiesefarms The hardest person to retrain can sometimes be the one in the mirror, especially on the spending side.
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1. Slash or remove the most expensive parts of the business. Anything can go.
2. Change (retrain) all your current work and spending habits.
3. Have a tangible goal for what needs to be done to turn it around.
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🚨Farmers who had a negative cash flow at the start of the year, and need to have a profitable 2026 to keep going...
This is how you save a business.⬇️
Sam Parr@thesamparr
Recently re-listened to the Acquired Podcast with Howard Schultz. Not many people remember that in 2008, Starbucks was SEVEN MONTHS from insolvency. Market cap fell from ~$28B to ~$5B. Schultz came back and saved it: - Closed 1,000 stores. Starbucks had never posted a negative same-store-sales quarter in company history. Now they had several in a row. - Stood in front of the entire company and cried. "I've let you down. I'm doing my best. We're trying to save the company." - Closed every U.S. store for an entire afternoon to retrain baristas. - Flew 10,000 store managers to New Orleans. - Schultz said the company against his CFO’s advice - "We have 7 months until we go insolvent." - Ran the math and figured out each store needed 10 more customers per day Today the company is worth $100B+.
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Jack V retweetledi
Surging commodity prices will push CPI above 4% YoY in May and US inflation will likely be above 7% annualized for the 2nd quarter unless the war ends soon.
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Jack V retweetledi
The @SandCountyFdn Leopold Conservation Award® honors farmers, ranchers and forestland owners at the forefront of conservation in American agriculture.⠀
⠀
Discover more and submit your application for the 2026 Leopold Conservation Award before the deadline on July 17. ⠀
⠀
Learn more and apply at cfbf.com/leopold
#CAFarmBureau #FarmBureau #LeopoldConservationAward #SandCountyFoundation #Conservation #SustainableAgriculture #California #Farmer #Rancher
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Hot take: cold brew coffee is superior to hot brew and it's not even close.
Its got so much more punch to it.
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@DocD19 @BBGreatMoments I remember going to a game in Reading (I think) during college. It was a great time. Didn’t appreciate it enough at the time. Spikes were just coming to town when I left.
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@BBGreatMoments many terrific stadiums and experiences to be had - Pennsylvania is a treasure trove - Clipper Magazine (now Penn Health) in Lancaster has been rated #1 - Lehigh Valley , City Island Harrisburg for starters
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Have you ever been to a Minor League baseball game?
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@gwiesefarms I have been arguing for a while that the Fed has not hiked enough, then lowered too fast. Fed should have at least matched the 6.5+ inflation before beginning to ease.
We should be at least 50bps higher right now.
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Inflation is one of my greatest fears.
Interest rates need to go higher RIGHT NOW if we don't want to see the cost of everything go up 5% over the next year.
Charlie Bilello@charliebilello
US CPI Inflation Rate moved up to 3.8% in April, its highest level since May 2023. The Inflation Rate is now back above the Fed Funds Rate and CPI is likely headed above 4%. The Fed is once again behind the curve and should be hiking interest rates.
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BREAKING: The Dow Jones Industrial Average erases all losses and turns green despite US CPI inflation hitting a 3-year high.
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@commbankerguy @mikulaja Don’t let perfection stand in the way of good enough.
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@mikulaja I go back and forth. Old people don’t want to use it unless it completes 100% of the task versus 70-80% of the task. However, if it’s not good enough to use, then it probably isn’t good enough anyway.
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The whole top-down pressure on employees to use more AI (“tokenmaxxing”) is bizarre.
I don’t remember the C suite threatening to fire people for not making enough Twilio or Plaid API calls or whatever.
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Just got a good leg session in at the gym. Making a quick breakfast now then hitting the trail on my mount bike. Fishing and camping later tonight at poe paddy. Good day.
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@RampCapitalLLC @NostalgiaFolder This is the correct answer. Verbatim.
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@NostalgiaFolder 4 and it’s not even close. 1 I would still be friends with. 2 and 3 complete psychopaths
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Jack V retweetledi
We love to see a farm kid chasing his dreams! Happy Farm Kid Friday!
(mommysaurus6 via TikTok)
#agtwitter #farmkid
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@1toomanycarbs @PalmerLuckey @wholemars @AOC Exactly! This is what I say to people when they complain about Bezos. Hes created a huge amount of value for people’s time. You save a couple
Hours of going shopping in a day for groceries, clothes, etc, and instead he will have it delivered to your door in under 48hrs.
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@PalmerLuckey @wholemars @AOC It really is that simple. You created something people found valuable, and so they pay to get that value. Seems like a mutual benefit to me.
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The single largest form of theft in America is wage theft. $50 billion a year are stolen from American workers.
If a billionaire amasses their wealth by underpaying their full-time workers so severely that they must rely on food assistance and government programs to survive, then no, that wealth was not earned by one individual - it was a wealth transfer subsidized by underpaid American workers and the public who get stuck with the bill for large corporations free-riding off our systems.
The point is less about individual morality. It’s more about how our current economic reality of shattering inequality rewards screwing over workers and exploiting essential systems at scale.
We’re talking monopoly power. Rent-seeking. Wage theft. Profiteering. Stock buybacks. Destabilizing housing markets. Companies using SNAP/EBT to underwrite their wages. Massive government subsidies or contracts to corporations following lobbying and dark money in politics with little to no oversight or accountability.
Some people get enraged that I draw attention to this. That’s on them. Let them call me shrill, dumb, inexperienced, girly, uneducated - these folks will say anything to distract from or undercut the truth that working people are getting screwed, and giving people a fair shake means we must have a grown conversation about reigning in abuse of power.
Marco Foster@MarcoFoster_
AOC: “There’s a certain level of wealth and accumulation that is unearned. You can’t earn a billion dollars. You just can’t earn that. You can get market power, you can break rules, you can abuse labor laws, you can pay people less than what they’re worth, but you can’t earn that”
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Here's a fun field planning sheet that a person in the Fullstack Ag community designed with Claude Design!
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