Farm Credit Mid-America is celebrating the largest return to their customers to date as part of their annual patronage program. The distribution happens in the month of March, and president and CEO Dan Wagner describes some significant returns for their customers.
“We are delivering $210 million to our customers in patronage this year, and that brings us to $858 million in total over the last 6 years,” he said. “What’s exciting for me is that our patronage is our way to celebrate our success of our organization with our customers. And March is a really exciting time of year not only for March madness but also it’s the month we hand out patronage and I love making customer visits and hearing those stories.”
Here in Indiana Farm Credit Mid-America customers will be receiving $63 million in distributions.
“A significant amount of money coming back to our customers in Indiana, obviously. The rest of that will be distributed to our customers in Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee.”
Wagner tells HAT the patronage program represents one of their core values as a cooperative.
“The value that we have as a financial institution is we’re going to keep what we need to maintain a strong financial balance sheet, and when we have a strong balance sheet, we can return those earnings back to our customers. Over the last 6 years we’ve been paying our patronage payment and it’s a good sign that we’re a very strong financial cooperative. Our capital levels are quite high and even when we had such fantastic growth that we’ve had over the last couple years, especially in 2021, we still have the capacity continue to pay such strong patronage payments.”
He says checks will be sent by mail the week of March 21-25, 2022.
Hear more from Wagner in the full HAT interview:
