I just purchased an 80 a year ago doing the same thing that you are considering.  The biggest thing that I learned is that you have to have a parcel of land identified and a purchase price agreed upon to get the paperwork started.  In my case, luckily, we were able to buy the farm private (no auction, realtor)  and have a contract in place.   It is definitely not something you can get preapproval on and then go to a land auction and start bidding.  Another thing that helped me was that I worked with a lender for the rest of the loan that had went through the process with FSA several times before.  That helped immensely.  He and the FSA loan officer already had rapport with each other and could guide me through the process.  The paperwork was time consuming, but not as bad as some make it sound.  I just kept thinking when I was filling it all out that it would save me $100K in interest in 20 years and that made it easier!!