Farmers' Choice of Credit among the Farm Credit System, Commercial Banks, and Nontraditional Lenders

Understanding the factors that affect a farmer’s credit source is useful for lending institutions to more effectively target customers and provides insight into credit sources that would be affected sooner if a credit crisis would occur and the characteristics that are correlated with a customer using a particular lending institution. Results of this paper suggest that the customers of commercial banks would be the most at risk as they are the most leveraged. Results also show that as conditions deteriorate, farmers add more lending institutions and are also more likely to use a commercial bank or nontraditional lender.