An astounding 28 million acres—approximately 53% of all irrigated acres in the United States—are irrigated by irrigation pivots, according to the USDA’s 2023 Irrigation and Water Management Survey, making irrigation pivots the nation’s leading agricultural irrigation method.
Yet virtually every electrically driven irrigation pivot in operation today remains fundamentally based on the original 1969 drive architecture embodied in U.S. Patent No. 3,608,826, with remarkably little change to its underlying electromechanical design in more than half a century.
Integral to this more than 50-year-old legacy architecture is the “start-stop move” irrigation pivot operation of multiple intermediate wheel towers, which maintain alignment and propel the overhead pipe spans in a circular pattern around the field.
Remarkably, virtually all of the more than 500,000 irrigation pivots operating worldwide are fundamentally standardized across OEM brands around the same electromechanical drive architecture, relying on the same decades-old start-stop move drive method.
This single point of standardization creates a unique opportunity.
Each intermediate wheel tower of the vast majority of conventional irrigation pivots maintains alignment between the pivot’s approximately 180-foot (55-meter) pipe spans—typically approximately seven spans in total—through a simple electromechanical “microswitch” that cycles a fixed-speed electric center drive gearmotor on and off at full torque approximately once per minute, or 1,440 times per day, in a follow-the-leader arrangement.
The result is an outmoded and mechanically abusive drive method that produces a slow, unreliable, and imprecise watering system with inherently limited capability and intelligence—built on 50-year-old drive architecture that every incumbent irrigation pivot OEM continues to embrace today.