Courtney Eelman

Courtney Eelman joined the AgAmerica Lending team in July 2017. She is the Chief Strategy and Risk Officer and her focus is to align strategy, processes, people, technology and knowledge as AgAmerica manages risk throughout the lending process. Courtney holds more than 20 years of experience in agriculture lending. Since joining AgAmerica, Courtney has created efficiencies and processes that have led to improved loan volume with an overall increase of 150% since 2016. Courtney has established both the Credit and Servicing departments and was instrumental in obtaining Central Servicer status with one of the agriculture GSEs.

Prior to AgAmerica, she worked at Farm Credit of Central Florida for more than 15 years. She started with the agriculture lending company as a Credit Analyst intern while earning a bachelor's degree in finance at the University of South Florida. Upon entering the USF graduate program, Courtney worked in the credit department at AmSouth, now known as Regions Bank. Shortly after earning her Master of Business Administration (M.B.A.), Finance, International Finance, and Marketing, she was offered a Senior Credit Manager position at Farm Credit of Central Florida and three years later became the Chief Credit Officer in 2012. Her responsibilities included credit risk management, loan portfolio compliance, and credit policies and procedures implementation. She also assisted in the development of a centralized credit department for the Central Florida ACA headquarters. During her time there, Courtney completed the Graduate School of Banking program at Louisiana State University.