Reflecting Yesterday

By Bruce Shank

Brigham Young's accomplishments in Salt Lake City propelled irrigation to a new level in the second half of the 19th Century. Surface irrigation was the state of the art throughout the 1800's in the United States. It remains the dominant form of agricultural irrigation more than a century later.

According to Robert Morgan's book,Water and the Land: A History of American Irrigation, technology received a boost from state colleges created with funds generated by the Morrill Act in 1862. The first classes in irrigation were taught in 1883 by a young engineer at the Agricultural College of Colorado in Fort Collins, Elwood Mead. Five years later, Mead wrote the first irrigation code for the U.S. Department ofAgriculture. He eventually became a commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation (BOR). The massive lake sitting behind the BOR's largest dam project, Hoover Dam, is named for the first state college instructor of irrigation, Lake Mead.

The most significant aspect of surface irrigation was, and is today, control. As water gained in value and rights to water were spelled out through legislation, farmers employed lift gates and soil preparation to control water flow.

"Surface irrigation depends immeasurably on redesigned soil surfaces and contours for effective water flow," wrote Morgan. The Fresno scraper and the Caterpillar tractor enabled surface irrigators to change grades to achieve consistent water flow across a field. Once graded, the farmer cut furrows, contours, or borders to distribute the water.

"By 1900, concrete pipe feeders with vertical riser outlets were fitted with various valves to control flow," Morgan states. One such valve, the alfalfa valve, could be manually adjusted to discharge water for flooding or supplying strip borders. A simple, yet major development, was the siphon tube, first developed at the turn of the century by a Nebraska farmer Milo V. German, which could deliver water from a ditch to a furrow by gravity.

Gravity was the source of energy used to move water for surface irrigation. Until the power for pumps became available with steam, electric and internal combustion engines, there were no viable alternatives to surface irrigation. Furthermore, the first uses of pump power in irrigation were for surface irrigation.

Applying Pressure

Water, pressureized by pumps, would begin to change the irrigation industry shortly after the end of the century. Pipes would begin to replace canals. Sprinklers and emitters would slowly replace furrows. Pressurized irrigation would launch a whole new dimension of irrigation for commercial landscapes and home lawns.

Museum display of a Skinner Overhead Sprinkler. Water proivided
the energy to turn the pipe containing nozzles.

The first "sprinkler", recorded in 1873, consisted of perforated pipe suspended above the crop. A nozzle was attached to revolving tube by a Maine company in 1890. By 1898, 17 patents for sprinkler inventions had been issued. The most famous of these was the Skinner Overhead Sprinkler patented by Charles Skinner, an Ohio farmer in 1894. The Skinner system consisted of galvanized pipe with orifices spaced every two feet that oscillated above the crop. The analogy with natural rainfall was a powerful one that sprinkler manufacturers used to capture the attention of people on farms and in the cities.

The scale of pressurized sprinkler systems was far smaller than for surface irrigation. Although a Skinner system could irrigation a long strip of ground 60 feet wide, the scale of sprinklers was best suited for urban parks, small truck farms, and the residential estates of industrial leaders. But farmers were not to be left out of the sprinkler business, devising traveling booms as early as 1924.

Sprinklers were essentially oscillating pipes, fixed sprayheads, or water-propelled armatures until the first impact-, gear-, ball-, and cam-drives were perfected. Although L.B. Harris invented his slowly revolving gear-drive "Precipitator" in 1910. He was soon followed by Los Angeles manufacturer Fingel Orr, who made the RocketJet. Buckner purchased the RocketJet technology from Orr.

Pop-up heads were available for turf as early as 1904 thanks to the inventiveness of John D. Ross of Pasadena, CA. The Pasadena area has been the site of many significant advancements in both agricultural and landscape irrigation. Van Thompson started Thompson Mfg. Co. there in 1912. Twenty years later Rain Bird was established by citrus farmer Orton Englehart and Clement LaFetra just a few miles east of Glendora.

One of the most famous early "hoseless" irrigation systems for turf was installed during the construction of Pebble Beach Golf Club near Monterey, CA in 1912. W. A. Buckner, an inventive railroad trainmaster based in Fresno, had patented a slowly-rotating sprinkler that very year. Buckner also invented the quick coupler (train-like concept) and the cam-drive decades later. The company Buckner created would later be part of giant Johns-Manville and is now the latest addition to Storm Irrigation. The golf portion of Buckner is now a component of Hunter Industries'Legacy line.

The search for a highly-reliable, slowly rotating sprinkler continued into the Great Depression. Thompson Manufacturing released a gear-drive, pop-up sprinkler called the "Commander" in 1936. Rain Bird's spring-loaded impact head met the standard of reliability sought by farmers and landscape managers. The size of the impact sprinkler was fine for multiple above-ground agricultural uses and quick couplers. Its size presented a challenge as an underground, pop-up device. Despite these problems, the impact head remained the dominant rotary sprinkler into the 1970s.

Skinner, the industry leader, jumped quickly into the impact market. Like Orton Englehart, Skinner was an inventive farmer. Manufacturing and marketing were not his passions. He handed these over to Walter Coles of Dayton, OH, much like Englehart handed the marketing of his invention over to Clem LaFetra. Cole recruited his son-in-law, Bud Friedmann, who became the first president of the forerunner of the Irrigation Association, the Association of Sprinkler Irrigation Equipment Manufacturers in 1949. Friedmann ran Skinner and influenced the irrigation industry powerfully into the 1960s.

Upon Clem LaFetra's untimely death in the 1950s, privately held Rain Bird passed over to his children. Anthony (Tony) LaFetra has presided over the growth of Rain Bird into the world's largest irrigation manufacturer at the end of the 20th Century. Skinner shipped his last product in 1976.

Gaining Control

As the irrigation approached World War II, impact rotary sprinklers and fixed sprayheads dominated the market. They provided the reliability needed to operate an irrigation system without a "waterman." Farmers, golf course greenkeepers, and park superintendents could rely on irrigation to provide the right amount of moisture in a uniform manner. What they could not rely upon was how long sprinkler "zones"would operate to deliver the correct amount of moisture. This led to the development of early irrigation controllers.

The need for control was greater on the landscape side of irrigation because turf and landscape runtimes are much shorter and frequent than agricultural. All types of automatic irrigation controllers were hydraulic until the 1950s. John Brooks, a Detroit, MI inventor, proved in 1921 that a large park could have its turf irrigated on a regular basis without human intervention. His work Roosevelt Park in Detroit led to a relationship with Henry Ford and considerable publicity. Pop-up sprayheads, a clock-activated controller, and a carefully designed network of pipes leading to the controller, provided an impressive display in the Roaring Twenties.

Brooks'controller was a large piston that traveled in a cylinder once activated by a clock. Openings in the side of the cylinder fed water to the individual stations as the piston moved forward. The speed of travel of the piston was determined by the flow of water and the backpressure on the piston. Each cylinder had to be custom constructed for the project. The clock only mechanically started the piston moving.

The first automatically sequencing hydraulic controller was manufactured by Moody Company of Los Angeles. Hydraulicvalves, connected to the controller by small tubes of pressurized water, were activated by a mechanical clock in the controller. The runtime for each station could be set individually and changed by the operator as needed. Although the tubing was prone to damage and expensive to install, it provided a control system relatively safe from damage by lightning.

The hydraulic technology used for irrigation was borrowed from steam boilers used for heating buildings and propelling ships and large machinery. Electric switches were still based on alternating current and carried a high degree of risk. Much of the work that would change electric control was developed during the effort to win World War II and would not be applied to other industries until the fifties and sixties.

Hydraulic technology remains very important to the irrigation industry. A partnership between John Brooks and Fred Reinke lives on in the name of FEBCO, a manufacturer of backflow prevention devices located in Fresno.

Large, Portable Ag Irrigation

The Great Depression took its toll on agriculture, but it demonstrated the need for supplemental irrigation in regions within consistent rainfall. Adding wheels to irrigation distribution pipes dates back to 1917. Steam- and combustion-driven pumps provided pressure to sprinklers regardless of the contour or slope of the land. Sites not suited to surface irrigatior could be planted.

The scale of agricultural irrigation dwarfs turf and landscape. Quarter-mile long lengths of pipe are common. Such long lengths of pipe required reliable connectors to link sections together. The pipe, the pumps, the connectors, the mobility, and the control of large systems were all challenges for agricultural engineers following the Depression.

The rolling terrain of Oregon, Nebraska, Texas, Kansas and Michigan did not make sense for surface irrigation: but, it did for portable hand-move, wheel-line, pivot and linear systems. Such systems require a reliable source of water, a means of pressuring water, coupling devices for lengths of pipe or hoses, distribution devices with reasonable uniformity, and a combination of control and supervision.

The limiting factor before World War II was the weight of galvanized steel pipe. Electric motors had not yet arrived that could move a tower supporting thousands of gallons of pipe and water. Hydraulic motors were in infantile stages of development before the war. Aluminum and plastic would later assist pressured irrigation in its growth.

However, surface irrigation was no less labor intensive. Methods of improving control over surface irrigation were developed by the Agriculture Research Service, surge, border, and cablegation. Sprinkler irrigation's advantages were not yet evident.

Recovery from the Great Depresssion spelled opportunity for companies such as Wade Manufacturing in Portland, OR. Wade Newbegin, grandson of founder Robert Wade, promoted portable sprinkler irrigation in the Willamette Valley with the help of pump manager Crawford Reid. In 1936, the two began demonstrating their system across the Northwest. Great grandson Ed Newbegin is the current president of the Irrigation Association.

Other early companies promoting portable sprinkler irrigation included Modern Irrigation in the Midwest; C.G.Crockett in the Carolinas; Perfection Sprinkler in Michigan; and Rainstorm and Wesco in the Southwest. Miles of pipe, thousands of pumps, and millions of connectors were cast to deliver water to farmland before the War. The War effort provided a major boost to irrigation. We will explore the impact of engineers under the gun in the August issue of IBT.

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