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 65