Each year, the First Pioneer Board of Directors adopts a plan for keeping First Pioneer’s capital sufficiently strong to ensure continued access to very competitive interest rates in the national money markets as well as maintaining the ability to stay with borrowers during good times and bad in the farm cycle.  Part of the capital plan is Allocated Retained Equity (ARE) which is distributed to each member based on the amount of interest they paid in the prior year. After five years, the Board may elect to distribute this ARE in cash to each member-owner, as it has done again this year.

“Steady as she goes is our goal for First Pioneer,” states J. Scott Markham, chairman of the board. “This year, many major financial institutions are scrambling for capital and sometimes restricting access to further credit to their borrowers. We at First Pioneer are proud to be operating business as usual – meeting our customer’s full credit needs in an inflationary economy and making this seventh annual cash payment of customer equity that is no longer needed to capitalize our cooperative.”