I am pleased to announce that John Peters will succeed Bill Heath as the Association’s Senior Vice President/Chief Credit Officer, effective 10/01/12. Bill’s last day in the office will be Friday, Sept. 28th. (This is one month later than previously announced.)
John has 39 years of experience with Farm Credit, having started in 1973 following graduation from UVM with a BS in plant and soil science. His initial position was fieldman in the South Burlington office of the Federal Land Bank Association (FLBA) and Production Credit Association (PCA) of South Burlington. John was branch manager of the Middlebury office from 1974 to 1986. From 1986 to 1993 he held a variety of positions in credit, financial services, appraisal and training, and also managed the St. Albans office for a time. John moved into appraisal full-time in 1993 and still maintains his license as a certified general real estate appraiser.
Shortly after Yankee Farm Credit was formed in 1995 John became our first Director of Quality Control, in charge of internal credit and collateral review (ICR) and internal audit. He also continued to do fee appraisal work for a time. In 2006 John became Vice President/Operations and Corporate Secretary. The Association hired out the ICR work 2006-2011, but John resumed this job in 2012.
Some northeast Farm Credit history: When John started with Farm Credit in 1973, the northeast training program for newly hired college graduates was called START; later that program evolved into the Career Development Program (CDP). There were eight people in the 1973 START class. John is the last remaining member of that class to be working full time for Farm Credit, but three other members of that class also had long careers with Farm Credit and only recently retired: Bill VanEe, appraiser for Farm Credit in western New York; Dick Baldwin, most recently employed by Farm Credit Financial Partners, Inc. (FPI) as director of training for northeast Farm Credit; and Bob Egerton, most recently employed by CoBank as eastern region president.
Please join me in thanking Bill for his service to Yankee (summary here) and in congratulating John on this promotion.
UPDATE 8/04/12: My bad! Dick Baldwin hasn't retired yet. FPI convinced him to put off retirement for a year.
