USDA Rolls Out Training For Meat/Poultry Industry

The meat and poultry processing industry is a unique business with its own language; its own set of risks. Many bankers and other lenders may not be familiar enough with that business to want to loan money for meat and poultry processing projects. So to help fix that problem, the USDA has come up with, "the new credit ready meat and poultry lending initiative," according to Doctor Karama Neal who runs USDA's Rural Business Cooperative Services.

"We are collaborating at USDA with the University of New Hampshire to provide training and peer support to lenders, so they are better able to effectively deploy the capital and support businesses that are engaged in processing.  And so through this, we want to strengthen capacity of lenders that are already involved in this sector, in the meat and poultry financing sector, and an ideally also attract new lenders to this sector."

Doctor Neal says the credit ready program will hopefully make it a bit easier for small meat and poultry processing businesses to obtain needed credit for start up or expansion.

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