[Question:] "How much do pivots go for now?"
"Too much. [Laughs.] Yeah, it's been awhile since we bought a new one, but if you were to buy a new system it would be over $40,000."
[Question:] "Okay, and that's just the circular [pattern] one, right, without the corners?"
"Yeah, if you go to the corner systems, you're at $50,000, $55,000."
[Question:] "Are pivots worth it? Are they a good investment?"
"Yes."
[Question:] "Why?"
"The efficiency of the water. I mean, we have two issues really battling there. First is the fact that the timing of the event when you want to irrigate. Gravity irrigation takes a lot of time to complete the same amount of work that you get with a pivot. And then also the groundwater concerns. I don't think there's a farmer out there that doesn't want to be efficient in their use of water. Pivots are a lot more efficient that gravity irrigation."
[Question:] "Efficient, what does that mean in that context?"
"Very little runoff. Like I say, the timeliness. If you would happen to catch a rain you can apply what you need for the week, or just stay ahead of the crop. And if you see a rain coming you don't have to you can shut the pivot off. Whereas with gravity irrigation a lot of time you just can't you don't have the luxury of shutting it down to see if it's going to rain."
[Question:] "How did anybody make it on dry land before?"
"Well, everybody was in the same boat so [laughs]. It was, you know Until the first person put in an irrigation well everybody was on the same playing field. So it was probably a struggle at times. I would still say that dry land acres are some of the more profitable acres on certain years than irrigated. There were several years when I started farming that, you know, we would pull 130 to 150 bushel dry land and 170 bushel irrigated. Well, that doesn't take a lot of math to know that the dry land was a pretty good buy that year."
[Question:] "Because?"
"Because of that fact you didn't have any investment in the capital expenditures in the pivots and the irrigation expense. The last four or five years have been The early 2000s have been a little dryer. And the pivots have definitely been a good investment."
[Question:] "Okay, because they give you that much more yield?"
"They give you the luxury of kind of guaranteeing a certain baseline."