 I'm A.N.E.D. and I farm in West Alabama and East Mississippi. I farm with my brother Mike, had the cowboy hat on a while ago, he took it off, and my twin sons, I have Seth here with me today, and I have a couple of my employees, Zach and Frazier, and we have a pretty good team over there. My farm's a family farm. It's owned by my eleven brothers and sisters of myself, so that usually gets like, oh, but only two people on the farm now that own it are my youngest brother and myself, so you can guess like another whole conversation could be like, what's your succession plan? But we don't have that yet. We'll work on it. Our roots go back to 1953, which is even before I was born. My dad and his dad and uncle bought some property in Florida and something that West talked about a minute ago was, you know, water shortages and all that, and we moved to Alabama, and we started farming that farm in, I guess, the late 80s, and then Southwest Florida Water Management District discovered that that's where they must have looked on one of those big maps like he was showing us, and they decided they needed that water holding capacity that that 10,000 acres that we had down there held, and it's just above Tampa and St. Petersburg, so they came and they said, you know, we're going to get your farm. So my dad was a real smart man, and he said, okay, let's negotiate. So anyway, that brought us to Alabama 25 years ago. We weren't raised on the farm, so everything that we know we have learned along the way, so it's maybe sometimes to our advantage because we don't know what dad did, we don't know what granddaddy did because we've had to learn it, and we've had a lot of good help with extension here in Alabama, and we really appreciate it. We have 10,000 acres. We've farmed corn, soybeans, wheat, heavy emphasis on cover crops and no-till, and that's really helped us to be better farmers and build our soil. We're certified USDA beef producers. We have Brahman Angus-type cattle, Brangus. We're a family farm, but we also consider ourselves a business, so we have to try to make a profit. We're looking at the next generation and future generations. We want to protect the environment as well as our financial perspective. It's important for us to have energy efficiency and water efficiency, and Wes talked about that, and we've heard some other people talking about that today. So when we designed our system, that was at the forefront of our system. And we first put in two pivots to see what it worked. It wasn't going to work where we're farming. We're only row-carping about 4,000 acres, but we put in about 300 acres worth of pivots to see what it paid for itself. We had asked some irrigation specialists maybe 20 years ago at Auburn to come and look at it, and they said, you know, what kind of crops are you raising now, and what do you think you'll be able to raise? And we had some real good yields in that time, and it was raining a lot and kind of at the right time. And they said, you know, you'd be better off if you just kept doing what you're doing, because it's not going to pay for itself. Well, as corn got worth a little more, and beans got worth a lot more than we kind of revisited. So the first two pivots that we put in, we made, well, we're in some sandier type soil. The corn made a hundred bushel difference where we had irrigation and where we didn't. And let me say, you know, it was when we had $758 corn. So that system, even building a 25-acre reservoir, paid for over half of itself in that first year. So, you know, like, I didn't get my PhD, but it didn't take me very long to think, ah, I better get with it and hurry up and irrigate everything we can. So the two systems that we put in were independent of each other. One, we hooked to a cow pond, and one, we built a reservoir. So we kind of looked at irrigating as much acreage as we could and trying to make a big plan where we didn't just go over here and make a pivot and over there and make a pivot and drill the well, drill the well. So it took us about a year to make a whole good plan that we felt like we could live with. I don't have to tell you about the seasonal rainfall, because most of you live in Alabama, and you know you get most of the rain in the wintertime. At least we do over in West Alabama. We get most of the rain in the wintertime. And then in the summertime, when we need it the most, it's already gone down the creek and down the Tom Bigby and down the Gulf of Mexico. So we decided we were going to have to manage our risks. If we could capture that water, and we could put it out when we needed it, we could really take out some of the risk that we have. My friend Stanley Walters didn't come today, but we were at an irrigation meeting a couple of years ago, and I think we had the $7 corn. And he said, that's all well and good if you put in that high-priced stuff. But he said, if corn goes to three or four dollars, you're not going to be able to afford to irrigate. And I said, if you don't put in the irrigation, I did some numbers real quick on my calculator. And I said, if you don't put in some irrigation and you have some dry periods, you're going to be out of business in one or two years if you have three or four dollar corn. I guess we never think it's really going to happen to us, but it did. So we found a group to help us kind of like sit down and figure out what decisions did we want to make. One of the big people influential to Mike and I on deciding all this was Dennis Bragg, and he's going to talk in a few minutes. So we went, Seth loaded up with us. We went up to North Alabama and we saw what Dennis was doing. Now, Dennis has a degree from Auburn University in engineering. And I said a few minutes ago to Dennis, I said, now, how long did it take you to draw your plans up? And he said, well, I started drawing them in college. So he was sitting in his classroom and he was drawing on his maps. He was drawing his irrigation pivots well. I didn't start drawing them in college and I'm really not that good at drawing circles. Mike probably is better. He could draw the reservoir in there. But anyway, we decided we needed to hurry up and get some expert advice. And we needed somebody to help us get it right because we were going to have such a big investment if we didn't get it right the first time, we were going to be all the way out of business. So first of all, we don't have very much labor. So we decided we needed to have it as automated as possible. Now, Dennis is real smart and he's engineered his, remember he's an engineer, he's engineered his where he turns on this valve and opens it a little bit and he does something else and he guts on the radio to the other guy and he says, do this, do that. And it all works as long as Dennis and his number one man are there. But I said, look, no one of us, Mike or I or Seth want to be at the farm nonstop where we all have to go and turn this and turn that. So we work to automate our system where our system, the pumps and the pivots can all be turned on by the phone or the computer or wherever we are. So by automating it costs us considerably more up front but I think it saved us more in just the ability to be able to accomplish when we need to. Where we live on the Alabama, Mississippi state line we don't have good cell phone coverage. Anybody else have that in Alabama? So without good cell phone coverage we wouldn't be able to turn it on with our computers and our systems. So we had to actually put in a Wi-Fi tower at our own expense for, we have a 25 mile radius that that Wi-Fi will carry now. So we had to do that. But we weren't going to be able to automate that without that. We tried a couple different things. Tried going to AT&T and said, you know, y'all help us boost across the state line but that didn't happen. So we needed it to be efficient. We needed it to be energy efficient as well as water efficient. I told you we needed a whole system approach. We didn't want to just go here and there and figure out later if we should have done this or that. And we were looking for a partner and experts that knew this stuff and that were going to be there to help us all along the way when we got finished and then in the future to help us grow. And it was going to have to, they had to show us a good financial return right from the start. So they came back to us with this. They got that little map like Wes was showing us a minute ago and they drew a bunch of circles, a little half circles. But we ended up with this one and it's a pretty good system. Let's see if I can see how to do this. This right here is our biggest one. I'm not that happy with that one because you see this little line through here? Well, that's a big ditch. I'm not sure that we wouldn't have been better off putting in four smaller systems. That's more efficient what we have there. But it stayed stuck a lot this year. You know if it stayed stuck, if we took that phone and we clicked it on and it went out there and it got stuck and it didn't go and we didn't get it out for a couple days or something else happened, something else happened. So this winter we just went through that ditch and straightened it out and leveled it out a bit and shallowed it up a bit and now we put in some heavy use areas if any of you have used any heavy use areas within RCS you put that fabric down you put rock down and see will it go through there. So you can ask me next year am I happy with that big pivot? I mean certainly it's more efficient if you get one big pivot and you can make it do what you want. But if you can't, I mean it's like just sitting there, it's just kind of in the way. This is where our reservoir is. Some of it's back in some trees. That's about 110 acre reservoir. That's the one Mike drew up in college. So he and Dennis were the same kind of folks that were drawing some stuff up in college that later they got to see come true. We had the 110 acre reservoir. We put in five water tronics pumps. This is our pump station right here. This big pipe's coming out of the reservoir and then it goes out this way and goes in different directions. We talked about one big pump, certainly it would be cheaper up front but what these pumps are like I brought my chauffeur otherwise known as my brother Mike if you ask me any hard questions I'll refer to my chauffeur over there they're variable rate pumps and they'll come on one at a time as the demand needs up to five pumps so if we turn on one or two pivots maybe only one pump goes and it ramps up to the variable rate to how much pressure it needs and goes on and it keeps track of the hours on each pump and it rotates them so when we need to rebuild them we rebuild them all at the same time so it took a whole bunch of thinking and talking and figuring out that really we could put in five pumps that cost a little more up front we toured the factory they tried to show us what was going on there and they had a little wet pit there and they said we'll test them for you before you come and when we first got started with this big project we just put in five pivots that we could put in real fast because we finished digging that reservoir in March so we really were going to miss most of the rain we needed that year to irrigate so we really only needed two pumps or maybe three so we talked about if we wanted to go ahead with the financial expense of buying all five pumps at once or just paying for what we needed up front and somehow I'm the one that has to watch the checkbook but somehow they convinced me to go ahead and just get those five pumps you'll have them, you'll have them you'll be ready when you're ready so we did and when we got them on they brought them and unloaded them and it's one of those turnkey systems that they worked like they said it would you know they brought all that stuff they installed it, they hooked it up we turned it on, we did a few things just a little bit of time and a little bit of irrigating they could see that it was drawn too many amps was that the right word Mike? Amps? they found it before they shipped it so it was still at the factory so anyway I think they had to take them apart and trim on them they had to get a hold of the manufacturer and trim on them pellars and adjust it to test them on their wet pivot before they sent them to us so we were glad otherwise they wouldn't have known that five of them were going to pull too many amps and cause us too many trouble so that worked out really well for us after we put in the second year that we the year we finished the reservoir we put in five pivots real fast that we didn't have to do any ditching or clearing any trees but after that we had the major part of our infrastructure in place and we already had had to pay for it so we decided to hurry up and get the rest of our pivots in and pipe and stuff that we needed in so this following year we put in 16 pivots so now we're up to 18, 19 pivots I told you about the Wi-Fi tower the broadband Wi-Fi tower and we control all of our work with a field net and we have great support and knowledge from our local Lindsay dealer Black Prairie tractor and I'll just say the great thing about them is no matter what happens we call them and they come and it's their problem whether it's we don't have good connectivity because I can't turn it on right here with my phone or something's wrong with the pivot or something's wrong with the pump or something else so if you use somebody and you put in a big system and they're responsible for all of it they don't say no that's somebody else's that's the pump people or no that's population people or no that's this people so that has really been a great help to us to just have a one stop the lessons we've learned are the timeliness and reliability of water application have improved our yield I'm going to say even with the I haven't gotten to work on the figures that we've come up with this year for irrigated and non-irrigated but I'm going to say within five years we will have paid the return over irrigation compared to not irrigating we'll have paid for all this whole system the reservoir the pump station all the pivots all the pipe everything else that we've had it's really makes a difference in that short amount of window the last couple years that we've even needed to add the water but it's really made a difference having the reservoir we control the water ourselves we have a five to one watershed there five inches of rain one inch of rain will give us five inches runoff into there and that's made a difference we talked about irrigating out of the Tom Bigby River we're a couple miles from the river but the pumping cost would have been would have probably taken about two years to pay for that reservoir there's a creek that feeds into the river we talked about pumping out of there and we weren't sure that we always had water there and either the creek or the river we're going to give us a real hard time being able to hold our pumps that we get when we get a big rain of inner the trees or just being able to protect us so I was the last holder out on building that reservoir just because of the financial cost but I was wrong about that that's really that's been just a great asset on our farm and now we control the water nobody's telling us at some later date that don't you can't pump that because that's coming out of the groundwater our future plans are to leverage the Lindsay Advantage they help us keep up with the latest technologies we're going to improve our efficiency in our irrigation knowledge and like Wes said he's been over to the farm Paul Mass said we're going to get a guy he said we're going to get a person to help us with irrigation in Alabama and Georgia and he said the test will be if he'll go over to Annie's farm because it's 200 miles from here and he's another hundred or two miles so he's been over there he's going to help us become more efficient and help us with some scheduling we don't have that down perfect yet what we know it's going to do is help us preserve the farm for now and for our future generations with that I'm going to let my partner Dennis Bragg come up here and share with you some of where he thinks irrigation is going in the future