(IARN) — Farm Credit Services of America (FCSAmerica) recently modified its patronage program, offering increased benefits to its customer-owners.
Jim Knuth, senior vice president of FCSAmerica, says these changes allowed the financial cooperative to issue its largest return to date.
“We paid out the largest cash-back dividend in the history of our program, one-percent of their eligible loan balance. Again, that’s allowed us to return a record share of earnings to our customer-owners. In Iowa, that amounted to $103 million,” Knuth said.
“It goes back to our unique, cooperative business model,” Knuth said. “We do one of two things with our earnings -Keep a portion to adequately capitalize our business and have financial strength for future generations or return a portion of our earnings directly to our customer-owners.”
FCSAmerica’s recent pay out exceeds the previous record, set in 2018 – 90 basis points, or 0.90 percent of a customer’s eligible daily loan balance. The cooperative also delivered cash-back dividends early, according to Knuth
“Traditionally those checks have gone out in mid- to late March. We sent checks out in late January, and that’s (been) a great change,” Knuth said. “Our goal was to move up the distribution of our cash-back dividend to maximize the impact our patronage program has by getting it into the hands of our customer-owners as they plan for a new production season.”
FCSAmerica is proud to support agriculture and its customer-owners.
“We’re pleased to return this benefit to our customer-owners over the last 16 years. We hit a milestone, paying over two-billion-dollars back in cashback dividends and there’s more to come,” Knuth said.
Story courtesy of the Iowa Agribusiness Radio Network.
Image from KIWA Image Archives.
