Corn and the Center Pivot

From the air, central Nebraska looks like a painting done by a compass. Perfect green circles, edge to edge, extending from horizon to horizon. The circles are fields, and they are round because the machines that water them move in arcs.

The center-pivot irrigation system was patented in nineteen fifty-two by a Colorado farmer named Frank Zybach, who grew up watching crops die in drought years and concluded that water could be brought to the land rather than waiting for rain. His invention was simple in concept: a long pipe mounted on wheeled towers, rotating slowly around a central well, dragging a spray of water across a quarter-section of ground. It worked. Within a generation, it transformed the agricultural economy of the Great Plains.

Nebraska became the most irrigated corn-growing state in the country. More acres of Nebraska corn are watered by center pivots than in any other state. The crop thrives in the sandy soils of the Sandhills and the loam of the Platte Valley because the machines deliver water directly to the root zone regardless of rainfall. Drought years that devastate rain-fed operations to the east and south barely register here.

Nebraska typically ranks among the top three states for total corn production, and in irrigated corn it leads. The center pivot made it possible to farm land that the homesteaders of the eighteen seventies abandoned as unworkable. The circles you see from the road are not a landscape feature. They are the shape of a decision made seven decades ago by one man who thought the Great Plains deserved better than the rain it was given.