Episode 72: Evaluating the Health of Your Operation
In this episode of "AgCredit Said It," host Phil Young is joined by Jordan Huntsman, a commercial credit analyst with AgCredit, to discuss evaluating the financial health of farm operations at year-end. The conversation covers key financial indicators that farmers should focus on, such as net worth and working capital, and the importance of preparing a balance sheet annually. Jordan explains the components of a balance sheet and the significance of tracking assets and liabilities. They also delve into the concept of working capital, its calculation, and its role in maintaining financial stability.
Main Topics Covered
- Importance of Year-End Financial Evaluation:
• Preparing a balance sheet annually to assess the financial health of farm operations.
• Key financial indicators: net worth and working capital. - Tracking Financial Data:
• Using tools like QuickBooks for basic financial tracking.
• Importance of maintaining accurate records of acres and yields. - Understanding Financial Metrics:
• Definitions and explanations of balance sheets and working capital.
• Debt coverage ratio and its significance. - Assessing Profitability and Readiness for Expansion:
• Evaluating net worth changes to determine profitability.
• Avoiding long-term decisions based on short-term data.
• Steps to take if encountering cash flow issues. - Benchmarking and External Variables:
• Comparing financial performance with historical data.
• Considering external factors like market conditions, interest rates, and weather patterns.
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- Transcription
Speaker 1 (00:08):Welcome to AgCredit Said It your go-to podcast for insights on farm finance and maximizing your return on investment. Join us as we talk to industry leaders, financial experts, and area farmers, bringing you skillful advice and strategies to grow your farm's financial future ag credit setting where farm finance goes beyond the balance sheet.
Phil Young (00:38):Welcome back to another episode of AgCredit Said It. I'm Phil Young, I'm here today with Jordan Huntsman. He's a commercial credit analyst with ag Credit and our topic today with Jordan is evaluating the health of your farm operation at year end. So kind of a financial topic. Welcome Jordan.
Jordan Huntsman (00:55):Yeah, thank you for having me.
Phil Young (00:57):Yeah, good, good to see you again. Yeah, so we wanted to kind of talk about financial numbers, financial metrics, the financial health of your operation, looking at culminating that data and then looking at it. So I guess what key financial indicators should farmers focus on when assessing the health of their farm at year end? That's a good point in time to look at it.
Jordan Huntsman (01:21):Yeah, definitely year end is the time of year that we focus on, especially that's when we really ask our customers to get a balance sheet prepared. And the biggest thing in terms of assessing the healthier operation is that balance sheet and not just having it once, not just having it once every 10 years whenever you decide that you need a loan, but doing it every year that way you can keep track of that for yourself. And I'm sure this has been said on the podcast before by another guest at some point I believe Joel has been a guest on the podcast and said this, but a balance sheet is really just a financial snapshot of where your farm is at any given point in time. You can do a balance sheet at any point in the year. We choose year end because it aligns with tax return reporting, so you're reporting your taxes on a calendar year and also it's a settled period for most of our customers, which is grain farmers.
(02:20):Grain farmers at year end have grain in the bin or they already sold grain and there's not the growing crop factor involved in that. So growing crops, it's always kind of a nebulous number in terms of what bushels are there. And so year end is a good time for tracking that. As far as specific indicators for tracking progress or financial improvement of a farm, I'd say the bottom line number that everybody always wants to look at on their balance sheet is net worth. So if your net worth is going up from one year to the next year, generally you feel pretty good. I think there's a little bit more to that. I think some of your additional questions we'll get to there, but probably the other big one would be working capital. How much additional cash or working capital, we somewhat use those interchangeably. They are a little bit different, but how much working capital have you built or depleted over the past year and what was the cause of that?
(03:24):Did you spend money on equipment? Did you put money down on a farm? Did you build cash because your earnings were solid for the year? Those tend to be the things that I would specifically look at. And as far as other things that I think customers should be tracking specifically, I would say you should be tracking your acres and your yield for the various crops or different types of livestock, whatever type of operation you are keeping track of those because at the end of the year that's kind your point where you know, okay, this past year we had this many acres we farm and you can go back in the future and get that information, but it's a lot more work once you're two, three years down the line. And I say to track that because whenever we do financial analysis, what my job is, we look at what your farm operation historically has done and then we try to say what we reasonably expect it to do in the future. And so if you were farming 500 acres one year and a thousand acres the next year, well your financial results are different, we need to kind of have a good understanding of that.
Phil Young (04:34):You threw out two terms and I wanted to define those and we've done that on previous podcasts, but I just want to make sure everyone understands what it is. And number one, the first one is a balance sheet. So just can you walk through a pretty simple definition of what what's entails in a balance sheet?
Jordan Huntsman (04:51):Yeah, balance sheet, it's really just the tracking of your assets. So assets being essentially the things that you own, equipment or farm real estate, your house is an asset grain. You have prepaid inputs, seed on the balance sheet or fertilizer. Those are all things that you own. It might be a long-term asset that's real estate, that's equipment might be a short-term asset, something that converts to cash in the next year. Those would be things like grain or fertilizer. You're going to put it in the ground, you're going to harvest a crop and then convert, converted into cash. And then you have liabilities. That's the other half of the balance sheet. So that is things that you owe that could be loans to a bank that you owe either to finance, farm, real estate, finance equipment, same thing. Loans from equipment dealers or John Deere, whoever. And that's also loans that you have for operating expense. And along that same lines would be payable. So if you use line of credit or if you have payables with your local elevator, same thing, that's a liability that you owe that finance one of those assets on the balance sheet.
Phil Young (06:07):I know there's a succinct way to say it, and I always say this to borrowers if they're new to a balance sheet, is that in simple terms it's what you own and what you owe and it is just a good way to explain it. You kind of did that there. Yeah, highlight in each side. The other word I want you to define maybe a little bit more in detail is working capital. I think we'll probably talk about that more here later as we progress. Can you define what the equation is for working capital?
Jordan Huntsman (06:31):Yeah, working capital. So the actual accounting equation is current assets minus current liabilities. So what that is is I said some of the things that you own, you expect to convert into cash within the next reasonable period. We always say a year, that's the technical accounting, but really if it's grain it might be over the next 12 to 18 months or something. So that's your current assets. And so those are things that we consider to be liquid. And by liquid obviously not a literal liquid just means easily converted cash. You could sell it, you can go within the next 30 days, even if it's fertilizer in theory, you could go sell it again and you have cash from it. And current liabilities is the opposite side of the balance sheet on that. So that's all the liabilities that are due within the next year. And so that would be things like your operating loan, so your financing, the inputs for your crop or feed for your livestock.
(07:30):You're financing those on short term whenever you sell your end product or your grain, your livestock to generate cash. In theory, you're at least paying that back down on the line of credit. And then additional current liabilities would be the loan payments that are coming due within the next year. So any of your term obligations, if you owe a real estate loan, you have a payment every year or every month. If you have accounts payable with a grain elevator or co-op, you're going to have those come due in the next year also. So working capital at its simplest is the extra amount of current assets that you have compared to those current liabilities. And the way I've always historically described working capital to people, some customers will jokingly say that working capital is non-working capital because they're not actually earning something off of it. And that is true right up until the point that you need it and working capital whenever you need it.
(08:35):My illustration would be that it's kind of like the suspension on a truck. If your truck does not have a suspension and you're running back a country road at 60 miles an hour, you're going to feel every single bump whenever you go over top of it. Whereas if your truck has a suspension on it that works pretty good, you're going to feel something but your back's not going to be absolutely aching at the end of the road. Working capital in financial sense does the same thing. Whenever you have a good year, you're not going to feel the bumps in the road because there weren't any. Whenever you have a bad year and all those bumps show up, that's the year that you need it. And I mean ag credit, we finance farmers, it's what we do. We understand there's years where people lose money. And the flip side of that is we do expect that people carry working capital that way whenever they lose money that things continue to go smoothly.
Phil Young (09:33):I always explain working capital in a kind of domino situation. So you have your first domino is your earnings that you get every year and then working capital is that second domino. And so the first domino, let's say you have a bad earnings year, maybe that working capital is there to kind help you out, but if you don't have that working capital there, you only have one domino to fall and the whole thing falls apart pretty quickly. So that's why I always have to explain it, but I like your truck suspension analogy. That's good. That's a good way to say that. So how do you recommend Farmer, now that we kind of understand the metrics and indicators, how do you recommend Farmers track and organize their financial data through the year to make that evaluation or that record upkeeping easier?
Jordan Huntsman (10:21):Yeah, so I mean I think that some farmers may use QuickBooks or something like that, at least for sort of the rudimentary information. QuickBooks only tells you certain things and if you've ever seen a printout from QuickBooks or if you use it or if you use some other accounting software at the end of the year, if you look at your final year end report, there's several big line items that are not on there. And grain inventory would be one of 'em or livestock would be another. If you're a livestock operation, you get to the end of the year that's not there. And I guess throughout the year, kind of like I said, I'm not going to say that a balance sheet in the middle of the year for most farms can't be used, but really it's that year end one that becomes critical. And I think it is different from different operations.
(11:15):If you're a grain farmer, you have a full year conversion cycle and by that I just mean each year you have one crop, you grow it, you sell it. If you're livestock, you might have multiple conversion cycles in there. If you have different groups of cattle or if you're a dairy operation, you have monthly cashflow. So you might be tracking the profitability on a group of cattle, well, this is what I paid for and this is what I sold them for and this is what feed went into 'em. But all that tends to hit more on the earnings side, just keeping track of expenses and income on the balance. I would really just recommend setting it up kind of as an annual thing that you do. The way I've described it to people before, everybody likes to eat, nobody likes to do the dishes, so everybody wants to go farm, you want to run the tractor, you want to haul the grain. Nobody likes sitting down and doing the financial stuff except for me, I'm one of the few guys sitting there wanting folks to do it just so that I have the information. Yeah, I guess at the end of the day it is a little bit of a chore. I'm not going to tell people it's not just to sit down and do it, but it's kind of changing the oil in your car, changing the air filters in your house. It's stuff that just needs done.
Phil Young (12:46):Yeah. How can a farmer assess if their operation was profitable over the past year?
Jordan Huntsman (12:55):Yeah, I mean that's probably what it comes down to. The biggest thing, and I think it was one of the first things I said was we can do all that actually from a balance sheet. We always ask for tax returns and p and ls or what be it depending on the timing, but how much money you made in a year can truly be determined from your year end balance sheet provided that you have the balance sheet from last year end. And that's why I say that this should be an annual thing. You should be doing it every year. The way that I would assess if I was profitable, and I'll admit I'm not personally a farmer. I grew up on a dairy farm, but I do not farm. But if I was a farmer the way I would, the measuring stick I would use for how much money I made is whether or not my net worth went up during the year.
(13:49):And the only way to know that is if I know where I started from and where I ended that. Now the other part of that is that sometimes our net worth goes up for reasons that don't have anything to do with actually generating a profit on our farm. And what I mean by that is, okay, you bought the real estate for $5,000 an acre, good for you, and now it's worth 10. Your balance sheet looks significantly different whenever your real estate values go up. But the only way you can use real estate value change to pay a bill is if you sell it. And I don't know about your experience bill, but most farmers don't like selling farm ground. So if the real estate appreciation is not going to pay a bill, we got to look at the earnings and that's your network change from year to year. Excluding those value change adjustments,
Phil Young (14:46):We get approached a lot for new things that farmers want to do. They want to maybe buy another piece of farm ground or they want to build a shop or they want to expand their livestock operation. How does a farmer evaluate if they're financially ready for expansion and a new investment based on year end data?
Jordan Huntsman (15:04):Yeah, I think some of that comes down to risk tolerance, what the comfort level of a customer is, but probably the starting point going into that would be my biggest recommendation people is don't eyeball it. Don't go by gut feel in terms of, oh, I think I can afford that. And where we look at financials, I kind of said, we look at the historical earnings of an operation, so we'll look at the last five years and we'll take that and we'll kind of create an average and then we create a projection off of the historical. And what we're really looking for in doing all that is a typical year, and by typical year in general, kind of an average year for the operation at the current size that they are. So maybe five years ago you farmed 500 acres, now you're at a thousand. We get that, we understand that and we take that into consideration, but what is the expected earnings of that a thousand acres?
(16:06):And so that's how we approach it. And I, in all honesty, recommend a farmer to do the same thing. Look at what your earnings have historically been. Don't just take one year because well, if you've been grain farming the last five years, you've made a lot of money in the last five years in general, I can't say everybody, but in general, folks have made a lot of money in the last five years. I think in general, everybody's going to find out that this year and next year might look a little different from that, and that's not a bad thing. Back to that point. We understand there's good years and there's bad years, let's find what's reasonable. And so I would recommend that the farmers start out, figure out what your balance sheet looks like, what your typical year earnings look like, and then rather than going off of a projection or an estimate or a gut feeling of, well, I think I can afford that, figure out what's possible and then figure out what's reasonable. What's possible might be $8 corn, what's reasonable might be three 50 to $4 corn for the next 12 months. Maybe it's something higher than that long term. And so that's kind of what we look at what is reasonable. And so we kind of sensitize things a bit, look more at your historical margins in terms of repayment.
Phil Young (17:26):I think one of the things that credit department here has said before is being careful not to make long-term decisions based on short-term data. So if the market's good right now, it's not always going to be that good said, have a reasonable projection for what you're looking at.
Jordan Huntsman (17:44):Yeah, I think the temptation of $7 plus corn sometimes gets to be that, oh wow, I'm making so much money, things are just going great. I've got cash coming out my ears. And that's all well and good for as long as it lasts. But if you've been in farming for any amount of time, you know that there is a flip side to that. We always say the cure for high prices is high prices. It always brings itself back down.
Phil Young (18:16):So on the flip side of that, what steps can a farmer take if they notice, hey, things are getting tight, if they have a cashflow issue, what are some steps and things they should do when they start to maybe notice that or start to feel that?
Jordan Huntsman (18:31):Yeah, so I guess the first point to that is hopefully you're noticing it before you actually are in the middle of it. And if you're building out your balance sheet and taking note of your working capital changes, you're probably going to notice a significant change before you actually have the fire alarm drill. Like, oh my gosh, there's a problem. And if you are noticing that probably step one is communicate with your lender, whether it's ag credit or whoever it is, communicate with them that you think there might be a problem because, well, Phil, and I know probably our least favorite thing is whenever we get the surprise phone call that says, I need cash and I need it yesterday. And so if you're communicating with your lender on the front end of that, that's a big part of the hurdles taken care of. And I should start by saying communicating with your lender does not mean that your lender's going to all of a sudden be angry at you or flip a switch and try to foreclose on a farm.
(19:36):That is not our goal. Our goal is to work with you provided that everything is financially stable, otherwise we're looking to work with you figure out what the cashflow shortfall is. Is it short term or is it long-term? Have you borrowed more money than you should on the long-term? Did you exceed that reasonable projection type level or is this more of a short-term cashflow issue where say, well, I have grain in the bin, but I don't have cash and I have a bill that's due today. Well, we can figure out a way to solve that problem by making a loan against the grain. And so that's probably the biggest thing in that picture would be figuring out is this a short term one time problem or a more ongoing issue? And we as lenders, part of our job is to help you figure out if that is the case, short term or long term.
Phil Young (20:29):And then I guess in your role, I mean I imagine you've done this a number of times is actually not just having the borrower drop off that information but walking 'em through it to collect it, and then maybe even just giving them a presentation after we've done analysis on where they're at. Have you done that a number of times, I assume?
Jordan Huntsman (20:46):Yeah. Yeah, we definitely have. I personally have, I mean if you find yourself in that spot, I ask your account officer to bring the credit analyst out with you. We're not always the most personable people. I will speak for us and say, but we're generally we're just trying to do our jobs to help you as the customer. And so yeah, I guess say I've presented, okay, this is what the near term looks like and probably most often it's a short-term cashflow issue. There are times whenever it's more of a long-term issue and you have to start staring at changes in terms of restructuring debt or maybe the most recent farm that was purchased was just too big of a bike and you need to scale things back a bit. But digging into the numbers, I guess the other part of it too is I tend to tell customers, look, these are your numbers.
(21:42):I might show them to you, but they're your numbers in terms of what the operation is and how much debt it has. And so taking hold of those, it is kind of like, I think we're going to pair this podcast with some additional physical health or mental health stuff. It's kind of like the know your numbers thing for health insurance or something. One year you get your information on cholesterol and maybe you see that it's high, well, you can take hold of that and maybe you start exercising the next year, you get your numbers down. Same thing with cashflow or your balance sheet. Asking for your information is a great first step. If you haven't or asking to walk through your information can be really helpful I think.
Phil Young (22:31):Good. Yeah, agreed. So something that the term benchmarking kind of comes to mind here when you're looking at businesses and kind of saying like, Hey, I guess I know what my numbers are, but how do I stack up with other farmers might be my size or in the same enterprise I'm in. Is there a way to say like, Hey, I'm doing all right based on the size I am and the location I am. Is there a way for a farmer to benchmark themselves against other farmers?
Jordan Huntsman (22:58):Yeah, whenever you guys gave me the questions that you might be asking this one, it's a difficult one to answer because there is some information. But the first and best benchmark is yourself. And so comparing yourself or your performance to how you did the prior year or the last three years on average, that is by far the best benchmark you can have just out the gate. And the reason for that really is that every farm operation, and I should say we've tried internally to create benchmarks, we've come up with some, it is difficult to share the information with customers because the information ends up from a very small data set of farmers that actually alike in terms of what they do. Even grain farmers, we think, oh, they farm corn and beans, how different can they be? But sometimes your legal structure, maybe if you have landholding companies or if you have separate LLCs for everything versus everything together, it can just really throw some wrenches in the mix.
(24:08):But I guess there are a few key benchmarks that I think you can look at and track in terms of that are fairly simple and don't take a lot of effort to get to. And one is, I would call it kind of your fixed cost per acre. And what I mean by that, by fixed cost is take your real estate payments, your principal and interest payments and your real estate taxes, and if you own farm ground, you can add those together and divide it by the number of acres that you own or farm off of those, maybe the tillable acres off that. And so you can come up with essentially what is the cost that you have each year to cover from those acres that you own. And so you might have a cost per acre of four $50, and then you can take your rented ground and you can say, well, my average rented ground sharecropping does throw a wrench in the mix on this.
(25:10):But you can take your average cash rented ground and say, okay, well I rent a thousand acres and average of $185 an acre. And then you can kind of blend the two together. Take, say you own 200 acres and then you cash run a thousand, you've got 1200 acres and add the cost together. And what you're looking for in the end is kind of what we call your fixed land cost per acre. And really in the end, whenever you're looking at that, you should be starting to compare it back to what are the average land rents in the area versus the high land rents in your area and you don't want your overall land cost to well exceed what you think the average or typical or maybe your medium high land rent in the area is for the simple reason that if other people aren't willing to pay that in rent, how do you expect to make more than that off of your farm?
(26:07):Now I say that there's some real caveats that come with that is some farms happen to have really good yields and good margins, and so it's not as simple as just looking at that, but that's a really good spot to start. If you do that, you look at your real estate payments and real estate taxes and your land rent and you start blending that out over all the acreage you farm. You say, wow, my real estate cost per AC is $400. You probably have either overpaid for rent or overspent for farms. Again, there's different levels, but if the typical land rent in your area is 200 to 2 25, you probably don't want your overall cost to be much more than 2 30, 2 35 just because there's a certain level of margin above that that you expect to make and then a certain level of margin that you might not.
Phil Young (27:00):Good. Good. Yeah, and I guess the other thing I wanted to touch on, I guess some of the other, I guess, key indicators that maybe a farmer should look at, and I know ag credit looks at these, we've kind of touched on working capital, so we kind of defined that earlier. Another way to say working capital is what we call current ratio. It's just in another form. And so obviously your current ratio, meaning if you're a hundred percent, that means you basically you're flat, there's really not any extra cash out there once all expenses are paid. And then we've kind of touched on net worth or owner equity is another kind, what we use as a percentage. So basically saying of what you own, of what you owe, how much do you actually own of it? And so that's another way, but one other metric we look at is what we call the debt coverage ratio. Can you walk through what that number is and maybe why that's something good to pay attention to?
Jordan Huntsman (27:57):Yeah, so debt coverage in terms of a math equation is basically you take the amount of your payments per year, so that would be your principal payments, that's all principal payments, not just real estate or not just equipment, all principal payments and all interest. And so that's in the denominator. And then your numerator on top is how much income you had for the year. And so that would be whenever we're looking at financials, generally we're making accrual adjustments based off of the balance sheets provided, or I should say ideally that's what we're doing. If we don't have that, we have your tax return information or your p and l information. And so your top line number would be your net income plus depreciation plus interest, and we're taking out a family living amount. So depending on how much you pay for family living and family living can vary wildly depending on off-farm income and various things. But basically that's food, that's rent, personal consumer rent if you pay it for vehicles or an apartment or a house, healthcare, all that kind of stuff that gets pulled out.
(29:21):But the gist of it being we take your income, divide it by your payments, and we want that number to be 1.2 or higher or 120% or higher. That's our standard debt service coverage level. And so whenever we're looking at a projection, again, used the term reasonable year or typical year, ideally we're looking at somebody that has 120% coverage on a projection and probably somebody's asking themselves, why does it have to be 120% and instead of just one-to-one, and we're already building in, okay, we know everybody's going to spend money on equipment and spend money on expansion. So it is building in some of that that is just going to be paid from cash, but also it's just building in a margin. So that one-to-one basically equates to living paycheck to paycheck each year. You make just enough money to pay that bill and that's it. It's a
Phil Young (30:26):Breakeven year, right? Yeah,
Jordan Huntsman (30:27):Yeah, yeah. That's a breakeven year. So it sounds good. Oh, we broke even. But it's like that's not comfortable. It's not comfortable for you as the borrower's not comfortable for us as the lender just because we want people to have a margin there. That way if yields are down 5%, you still make your payment yields are down 10%, you probably do still make your payment, but maybe it's coming from a little bit of work in capital. But again, we anticipate that we understand that it's just a matter of building some of it in to the expectation, just that we don't want everybody living paycheck to paycheck every year.
Phil Young (31:08):And if you're consistently hitting a hundred percent, you're not filling that working capital bucket. And that's what we talked about earlier is you got to feed that beast to build it up too, so you can't constantly be spending it. So if you're constantly tight, if you're constantly sitting in that 100 to 1 0 5 range and adversity hits you, you're probably not building that working capital like you should or you're maybe burning through it with unexpected repair bills or you name it, health issues, whatever comes up. If it's a personal expense,
Jordan Huntsman (31:41):Yeah, definitely. You can't even plan for all the things that would come up. Some things you can plan for it, maybe kids, and there's weddings coming up and that's going to be a large expense or whatnot. Or maybe have a kid going off to college and you're helping them by funding a portion of that or something. Those can be large expenses that are coming. It's usually the ones you don't know are coming or the purchase that you thought you would make, but you ended up spending more than you thought. You thought that tractor would be like 150 and it ended up being 200,000. And so it tends to be stuff like that.
Phil Young (32:21):Any other final thoughts here? I guess one thing we didn't really touch on is external variables like marketing conditions and interest rates and weather patterns and all that stuff. When you're looking at your financials, there's factors you can control and we talk factors you can't control. I guess any final thoughts maybe on that topic right there?
Jordan Huntsman (32:40):Yeah, probably it's a saying that I've been told and I've told other people throughout my career. Sometimes you don't know what you don't know. Is the weather going to be good in 2025? I have no idea, not my job to know, frankly, if I could tell you with 90% accuracy, I should be doing something else for a living, is the honest truth there. Interest rates, again, it seems like at this particular moment, October of 2024, it seems like interest rates are at least the Fed has reduced rates. It seems like we are at least headed towards what should be a decreasing trend, but we don't know Inflation comes up again, they could raise rates right back up if they wanted to. I think planning, I said plan for a reasonable year. Planning for a reasonable year would include taking into account, well, maybe the first year out the gate does not have great weather, maybe the first year out the gate we have higher interest rates that we're planning for.
(33:45):So I think that definitely comes into play. Can you exactly plan for it though and do you know it? No, you don't know what you don't know. At times that's difficult. There are things, and maybe this has more to do with expansion and that side of the world, but if you're expanding, if it's something that you're building, if it's a dairy or livestock facility, you can plan for things like cost overruns. You can budget in, we have this cash or this working capital set aside to cover us. If costs get more expensive than what we think. If you're buying a piece of real estate, usually that's not as big a factor there obviously. But yeah, definitely weather and interest rates, those types of things. It's planning for the unexpected and having that working capital there for the day that you need it.
Phil Young (34:36):Yeah, I guess my big encouragement to borrowers is account officers are skilled in financial analysis, credit analysts at Ag Credit, that's all they do is financial analysis. So tap, tap into that resource. So that's something that maybe you haven't done before. You're like, I send my balance sheet in and I don't really ask for a meeting, but maybe this is the year you do it. Hey, hey, I actually want to sit down and make sure in that March timeframe, I send my balance in. We have your updated taxes, what do those numbers look like? And then you just kind of maybe get in the habit of sitting down with your account officer and going over that way. Number one, you're informed, and number two, you are ready for a loan request. That's the year you decide to buy that 40 acres that comes up for sale across from you and you're ready, that you're ready to do it, and an ag credit's ready to help finance that if that's the case. So Jordan, extremely thankful for you to join us today and I think he gave some really good tips. So thanks for joining us.
Jordan Huntsman (35:28):Alright, well thank you for having me on.
Phil Young (35:29):Yeah, thanks for listening to Ag Credit Said It. We appreciate your support of the podcast. Look forward to bringing you more episodes. Be sure to subscribe to AgCredit, set it in your favorite podcast app so you don't miss any new episodes. We'll talk to you soon guys.
Speaker 1 (35:49):Thank you for listening to Ag Credit. Set it. Be sure to subscribe in your favorite podcast app or join us through our website at agcredit.net so you never miss an episode.