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Profits? 16 are a pay as you go proposition. That does not make them any less painful to pay but they are not carried over from year to year. The fixcd investment costs generally have a time period attachcd to them. If wc assllme that a farm has 640 acres for production the following would be true. Increments of capital investment of $10,000 at a 9% rate of interesr would require an annual repaymellt of around $2,358 on a five year note. That would require that in each of the five years, every acre generates approximarely $3.70 to payoff rhe note. If the time period were ten years, the annual payment would bc around $1,429 and the per acre requirement would be around $2.25. A fifteen year note would mean an annual repay- ment of around $1,138. The eontribution per acre would be about $1.75. If the loan were for twenty years, the annual charge would be a little over $1,000 and the charge per acre would be approximately $1.60 Le t us put rogether a rough exam pie and estimate some costs of doing business. If we set the value of agricu]turalland at $500 per acre and con- tinue to use the 9% rate of interest, the rent in perpetuity on the land would amount to $45 per acre. If other investm~nts were calculated at $250,000, a 9% rate of interest and a ten year note would result in a charge per acre of around $56. The total would be around $101. That doesn't include variable costs or proprietary return. If we go back and look at the average dryland earnings for the state in 1974, we see it is $112 per acre. However, jumping over to Morton County gives a figure of $69 per acre. It becomes apparent that not all farm operations are doing business at thesc prices and interest rates. It is also apparent that sOme farmers are going broke because of these prices. It should also be noted that these are prices from a good year in agriculture. The year was 1974. Since that year thc average earnings attributable to irrigation have dropped off from a figure of $244 to a figurc of $136 pcr acrc. The average earnings from dryland havc dropped off from $112 to $69 per acre and the average earnings from irrigation have dropped from $150 to $85 per acre foot. The level of activity in 1977 gave rise to total earnings of around $1.3 bil. lion from dry land agriculture, a decline of approximately $0.8 billion from 1974. This represents approximately two.thirds of the total income earned from the production of crops. Thc other third of the total income for 1977 Came from the production of irrigated crops. This generated a little over two- thirds of a billion dollars of revenue, a fall from the $I billion 1974 figure. In 1977, there wcre approximately 22 million acres of land from which crops werc harvested. A Iittlc more than 3.3 mUlion of those acres were ir- rigated. This implies that about onc.third of the total revenucs from the pro. dunian of crops came from about one.seventh of the land dedicated to crop production on a statewide basis.