Parse Farm Credit Administration Call Report Data into Tidy Data Frames

Parses financial condition and performance data (Call Reports) for institutions in the United States Farm Credit System. Contains functions for downloading files from the Farm Credit Administration (FCA) Call Report archive website and reading the files into tidy data frame format. The archive website can be found at < https://www.fca.gov/bank-oversight/call-report-data-for-download>.

fcall

R package for parsing Farm Credit Administration (“FCA”) Call Report data into tidy R data frames.

Installation

{fcall} can be installed from CRAN using install.packages("fcall"). Alternatively, you can install the development version from GitHub using {pak} like so:

# install.packages("pak")
pak::pak("ketchbrookanalytics/fcall")

Background

FCA publishes Call Report data on a quarterly basis at https://www.fca.gov/bank-oversight/call-report-data-for-download. Ketchbrook Analytics replicates these files in a public AWS S3 bucket, which {fcall} interacts with via its download_data() function.

As of September 2025, this data represents a set of 72 .TXT files. These files represent 36 datasets. The files prefixed with “D_” contain metadata (the column names, data types, etc.) of the associated file containing the raw, header-less comma-separated data. For example, the file that starts with “D_INST” contains the metadata for the file that starts with “INST_”.

Further, some of these datasets are structured in a way that makes data analysis difficult. In these cases, we chose to pivot the data to make it more analysis-friendly. See Metadata File Scenarios for a more in-depth discussion of when and how this pivoting took place.

This package provides 3 utility functions:

1. download_data() allows users to programmatically download (and unzip) data from a specific quarter
2. process_data() parses the data from these unzipped .TXT files into a list of R data frames containing the Call Report data and file metadata
3. compare_metadata() compares two sets of Call Report data from different quarters

Check out the Getting Started vignette to learn more about these three core functions.

Database

Ketchbrook Analytics has also created a PostgreSQL database to store historical FCA Call Report data in a traditional, relational schema that aligns with the output data frame structure resulting from running process_data(). This database allows users to execute SQL queries to easily analyze Call Report data across multiple quarters.

Please reach out to [email protected] if you would like access to this database.