2,200 Farm Service agents will be training in Omaha
BY CHRIS CLAYTON | WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER

Printed in the Omaha World Herald on Apirl 27, 2004

Thousands of Farm Service Agency employees have begun training in Omaha on new computer software that will help them identify farmers who are at risk financially.

his is the first week of training for state loan chiefs and coordinators in Farm Business Plan, a Web-based software program that Farm Service Agency employees will use to authorize loans. The U.S. Department of Agriculture will spend about $2 million over the next 22 weeks to bring more than 2,200 FSA employees from around the country to train in Omaha.

Farm Service Agency employees train on laptop computers.

After two failed attempts to create a broad-based financial management system, the USDA's expectations are higher for Web Equity Manager®, which was developed by a Glenwood, Iowa, company and already is used by private lenders.

"One of the benefits of this is to be able to identify farmers before they get into trouble or become delinquent," said Carolyn Cooksie, FSA deputy administrator for Farm Loan Programs.

The system flags loan officers when it detects potential problems in a farmer's financial data.

Most private farm lenders - including 292 banks in Nebraska alone - already use Web Equity Manager, which was developed by Equity Consultants Inc., or ECI of Glenwood. Those private industry links were a major draw for the FSA when it began looking for a new customer management system more than two years ago.

"We've got to keep up with the credit market today," Cooksie said.

The FSA is the lender of last resort for farmers. More than 88,000 nationally - mostly small operators - have loans from the FSA because they couldn't obtain credit through private lenders. Another 39,000 farm loans are secured by FSA.

"They are already high-risk when they walk through our doors, so we are putting together some better financial planning tools for them," Cooksie said.

The system also will help the FSA collect data to react to national trends. In the late 1990s, Congress asked the agency how many hog producers with government loans could be in financial jeopardy due to record low prices. The FSA didn't have a way to effectively track or identify such potentially insolvent farms.

"It drives me crazy because we don't have an efficient way to feel comfortable about the numbers I'm giving folks," Cooksie said.

By the end of the summer, the FSA will be able to examine the impact of livestock-price fluctuations, or floods or droughts in targeted areas of the country, by tracking data on the national, county or state level.

"With this, we will have every operation captured," Cooksie said.

Producers will be able to tap into the FSA program next year to update information on their farms and see projections for income and net worth. Eventually, producers also will be able to apply for FSA loans on-line. The software will allow the FSA, banks and producers to share the same information.

"The lenders can send their data to the FSA, and the producers can get online to do their planning," said Gary Kruse, president of ECI.

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