Yes, getting water to the field remains important, but today’s growers are looking to the technology for efficiency as well.
By Eric Sfiligoj, Editor, CropLife
Driving across parts of the Midwest or flying over some Western states, observers are likely to see plenty of circular crop fields with irrigation equipment installed on them. Many of these are center pivot irrigation systems, and their role has grown in importance for agriculture over the past decade or so.
That’s the view from Reece Andrews, Product Manager, FieldNET and Zimmatic Controls for Lindsay Corp., Omaha, NE, as the needs of today’s grower-customer have adapted to the changing environmental climate. “Center pivot irrigation is important, because getting the water where it needs to be is critical for farm operations,” Andrews says. “But now, growers need to be able to apply water by considering such factors as the crop or terrain, with corn requiring more water to grow than soybeans for instance. And by utilizing today’s technology, center pivot irrigation allows for this to happen, by being a highly precision-controlled tool for growers to use.”
To appreciate how the center pivot irrigation marketplace has changed, it’s helpful to look back at some history. As Andrews points out, agriculture’s reliance on irrigation goes back decades, with the same goal driving development. “In farming, your land either has access to water or not,” he says. “If not, you as a grower had to figure out a way to get water to your crops. Back in the day, many growers used flood irrigation to do this, slowly flooding one field and then channeling that water to another field, and so on, using such equipment as syphon tubes or gated pipes. But this was not very efficient, with a lot of water wasted along the way.”
Instead, many growers began looking for a way to better control water usage in their fields. This led to the introduction of center pivot irrigation systems. As Andrews points out, this industry really exploded onto the agricultural landscape during the 1970s (with some 40 manufacturers springing up in Lindsay’s home state of Nebraska alone!).
“Using the sprinkler technology from center pivots, growers were able to walk the water around the fields to exactly where it was needed,” he says. “This increased water efficiency in a big way.”
Soon, center pivot irrigation systems were a common sight in crop fields across such states as Idaho, Indiana, and, of course, Nebraska. “These are places where rainfall tends to come in bunches during the early parts of the year,” Andrews says. “But there isn’t much rain in these areas during a typical growing season, so center pivot irrigation offers an answer to this problem.”
Lindsay Corporation’s Reece Andrews suggests today’s advanced technology could allow center pivot irrigation to play a role in agriculture’s sustainability efforts and focus on taking advantage of carbon credits
Jumping ahead to 2021, Andrews says that center pivot irrigation has continued to evolve. In particular, he adds, growers have taken to using irrigation systems to deliver more than just water to their crop fields.
“When you as a grower can control where the water you use goes with this kind of accuracy, why not start putting fertilizer onto your fields using the same system?” Andrews says. “Growers couldn’t do this using flood irrigation, but center pivot did allow for this to happen.”
In turn, this fertigation movement led to the nation’s ag retailers playing a role in center pivot irrigation — by not only supplying the liquid fertilizer being used in the irrigation systems themselves, but also providing valuable data to grower-customers to help them make informed decisions on how to best utilize their center pivot systems from crop year to crop year.
“I have two family members that work at Central Valley Ag Cooperative here in Nebraska,” Andrews says. “They not only provide tanks of fertilizer for their customers to use but offer up plenty of information on how the center pivot irrigation is working in the different crop fields.”
As the role of center pivot irrigation expanded across agriculture, Andrews says, growers began looking for more efficient ways to not only manage getting water and crop nutrients to their crop fields, but also for ways to save time and effort with the center pivots themselves. This led to companies such as Lindsay to introduce ever-more advanced remote controllers and digital-based tools for center pivot irrigation systems.
“Recently, there has been a shift in the segmentation of agriculture,” says Andrews. “Bigger growers have kept getting bigger and smaller ones have largely gone away. So, there is much more demand today on us and other irrigation equipment providers for technology. This makes the large growers irrigation managers, to help them save time and be able to handle more systems themselves. Since finding and keeping labor in agriculture is a key issue right now, this definitely helps in these efforts.”
An example of this kind of technology would be FieldNET from Lindsay. According to Andrews, FieldNET allows growers to view and control their irrigation systems from any handheld device such as a smartphone. Plus, he adds, by utilizing FieldNET Advisor, growers can receive daily recommendations to adapt to changing field irrigation needs.
Moving forward, Andrews anticipates center pivot irrigation growing in importance for agriculture. For example, he thinks it might play a role in the industry’s recent flirtation with carbon credits, with today’s advanced technology heavily involved.
“If you are pumping water into a crop field, you are using energy in some way, either through an electric or diesel-powered generator,” he says. “But using center pivot irrigation, a grower can reduce the pressure, so they can downsize the pump size, which will mean using less energy. Also, using the remote technology, growers can put down less water, which will save water in the end. And since growers don’t have to visit the irrigation systems in person in their trucks, they are saving on not only fuel usage but engine emissions as well.”
In addition, he adds, center pivot irrigation could help agriculture in its efforts to feed an ever-growing world population. “I think center pivot irrigation will be a key to helping growers provide crops for more people moving forward,” Andrews says.
