FCS Financial: One Hundred Years July 2016 | Page 69
Gary Irwin, now vice president, administration, started his
career in the Farm Credit System in 1974. “There’s a county in north
central Missouri,” he recalled, “where we had a high market share
and we probably had a bad loan on one quarter of every section. We
worked with a lot—a lot—of situations where people simply didn’t
have the income, didn’t have the financial strength to manage their
way through it and we as the lender went with them as long as we
could but we had to have a lot of difficult discussions with customers.”
“As the farmers go, so go we,” Jeff Houts, executive vice president,
operations, has been heard to say and this was never truer than
during the 1980s. However difficult a time it was for the farmers, it
was equally difficult for those who were trying their best to get them
through it. “It was challenging to the board, to management, to the
customers and everyone as a cooperative,” said Bob Idel. “How do
you keep things going when you’re writing off adverse debt, and still
need to grow and stay sound?” For those who found themselves on
both sides of the coin it was doubly difficult, a situation common to
association employees, many of whom came from farming families.
“It wasn’t fun at work and it wasn’t fun when you went home
afterwards,” said Donna Copenhaver whose husband worked their
family farm. “There was a lot of stress with the customers, and a lot of
farmers that you’d been lending to . . .
well, you could no longer finance their
operation.” Richard Detring, whose
family history with the Farm Credit
System goes back to his grandfather
Albert’s days when he worked for
the Production Credit Association in
Farmington, recalled the thirty years
his own father spent on the board,
including the difficult times during the
agricultural crisis. “He left me to do
the farming at times. I know it weighed
on him. He’d be thinking about it and
I’d have a question for him, but I could
tell things were on his mind and not on
the farm operation.”
Larry Wade (left),
president of the Osage
PCA, with Woodrow Bray,
chairman of Osage PCA
Board of Directors.
The Perfect Storm
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