Open-pit mining is a surface mining operation whereby ore, or waste, is excavated from the surface of the land. The open-pit design problem is deciding on which blocks of an ore deposit to mine in order to maximize the total profit, while obeying digging constraints concerning pit slope and block precedence. The open-pit design problem can be formulated as a maximum flow problem in a certain capacitated network, as first shown by Picard in 1976. His derivation is based on a restatement of the problem as a quadratic binary program. We give an alternative derivation of the maximum flow formulation, which uses only linear programming duality.