What do Professional Athletes, Rappers, and Farmers have in common?

We make it RAIN!  Although farmers don't use dollar bills they use center pivot irrigation systems.  In Western Kansas you will hear these systems called a lot of different things: pivots, sprinklers, circles, etc... 

I discussed our irrigation wells in one of my previous posts, but the wells are only half of the irrigation equation.  After the water is pumped out of the ground it has to be delivered to the crops.  We do this by using sprinkler systems.

Most of our sprinklers have anywhere from 6 to 10 sections.  Each section has a tower with a control box, cabling, and a section of pipe with hoses and nozzles dropping down.  Below is a picture of the bottom half of a sprinkler tower.  I have circled the electric motor that moves the tower section.  All of our sprinklers use 480 volt three phase electricity to power the electric motors that move the sprinkler towers.  The electric motors have two drive shafts on either side attached to gearboxes which turn the wheels of the sprinkler.

One of my first projects on the farm was stripping all the wires out of sprinkler control boxes and completely rewiring them.  In the below picture there is an example of a control box.  I rewired 8 of these for one of our new sprinklers.  It was kind of like hooking up a new TV and surround sound 8 times except that I didn't get to watch a movie afterwards...  I'd like to report that after rewiring all the control boxes and hooking them all up.  The sprinkler ran like a champ the first time we fired it up.

This season we setup three new sprinkler systems all during one of the hottest and driest years on record.  We had an irrigation contractor leave us high and dry (pun absolutely intended) with some of the wiring and underground work that needed to be done but we were still able to get them setup in time.  This year some of our best corn is growing under the new sprinklers. 

Being a farmer has changed my perspective on a lot of things.  I never really though it would change my perspective from 30,000 feet though.  Now when I fly over farmland I spend my time checking out other farmers' circles: "That circle is HUGE!  That guy has four 1 section sprinklers right next to each other; he must have great water."

Wow.  Who am I?

-Rain Maker Ryan