During the 1970s and 1980s forces in the sector and the financial markets have significantly influenced the cost and availability of financial capital for farmers. Farm income has experienced periodic shocks that in the early 1980s created one of the deepest and most widespread recessions in agriculture since the 1930s. In financial markets, the unprecedented high and volatile interest rates and profound regulatory changes for financial institutions lessened the insulation of credit from national and international markets. These conditions have impacted the hardest on the owners of and lenders to larger farms that, while relatively few in number, hold substantial debt and are highly leveraged (USDA). Consistent, current, and valid information about the farm credit crisis of the early 1980s is not available. Moreover, an objective assessment is often obscured by the media's tendency to highlight the most serious cases. Nonetheless, as data to follow will show, credit problems can likely be considered very serious but still manageable. The incidences of delinquencies, loans being liquidated, customers discontinued, foreclosures, bankruptcies, and workouts all appear to have accelerated from past experiences (Shepard and Collins). In turn, these conditions cause higher lending costs, greater lending frustration, and reevaluations of credit standards and loan policies. In this paper, we focus on financial stress for major agricultural lenders, arising from agricultural and financial market forces. We first establish the lenders' risk setting, and then review the credit problems and their impacts on commercial banks, the credit system, government credit programs, and other lenders. Managerial and policy implications are also considered.