“I don’t care too much if it rains after I get the crop up to a big, you know, big enough that it’s shading the ground, but this year, we’ve been watering it the whole way.”

And what a difference a year can make.

“Between the two years, it’s been totally different.”

“Last year we didn’t, no irrigating. This year we’ve been irrigating, oh, about a month now, our soybeans, cotton, milo. The crops really look good, even though we’ve had a lot of input costs.”

Even if a producer has access to ground water, watering is expensive.

“The real problem this year with the watering is the cost of the fuel. We’re spending, I think just from preliminary things we’ve done, I think we’re going to be around a hundred dollars per acre in fuel costs alone.”

“Every input cost is up unbelievably. Fertilizer more than doubled in cost, like I say, the price of diesel has more than doubled, so yeah, it’s gonna be real iffy, if we make any money, even at these prices.”

Yields seem to be a little better when water falls from the sky to plants.

“We go in and like on cotton say, it’s been stressed, and then we hit it with water at one time, it’ll shed some of its fruit, where it doesn’t do that as bad typically with natural rainfall.”

“The salt levels are high in our water here, so you do probably cut the yields some because of that.”

If you make your living as a farmer, you have to be able to deal with whatever Mother Nature throws at you.