Purpose – This paper aims to identify factors that affect agricultural mortgage default and prepayment.Design/methodology/approach – Using a sample of farm credit system loans, prepayment and default are modeled as competing risks with potentially non‐stationary covariates using a statistical/econometric technique called survival snalysis (SA).Findings – The analysis suggests that the primary drivers of prepayment and default are the rate of interest charged by the lender at origination and the borrower's current ratio at origination. Tests of the existence of a geographic effect indicate that despite bank management belief to the contrary, branches may not be homogeneous.Research limitations/implications – This analysis would be improved if more data were available in an easily obtainable manner to control for unobserved heterogeneity. Unobserved heterogeneity or incomplete specification within a model can be problematic. Inferences among regression coefficients can be problematic in that the estimates h...