Cooperative Values

We believe that education is the key to making the best cooperative possible. Through online resources, workshops, community events, our Customer Care team, and more, we never stop supporting our customer-owners and team members.

We’ve partnered with other Farm Credit Associations across the United States to expand our support for rural communities. By sharing Rural 1^st expertise, technologies, and processes across a broad service area, we provide for rural Americans on a grand scale.

Strong communities are a big part of what makes rural living special. That’s why—by fighting food insecurity, growing the next generation of leaders, and responding to natural disasters—we’re committed to supporting rural communities across our service area.

Rural 1^st is a voluntary organization, open to all people eligible to use our loans and services and willing to accept the responsibilities of membership, without gender, social, racial, political, or religious discrimination. This is reinforced by our commitment as an Equal Housing Lender to fairness and equality in lending.

We are a democratic organization controlled by our members—eligible customers who have loans with our cooperative—and governed by a Board of Directors.

Rural 1^st is part of Farm Credit Mid-America, an autonomous self-help organization controlled by our customer-owners. If we enter into an agreement with another organization, we do so based on the terms that ensure democratic control by our members and the autonomy of our cooperative.