Center-pivot irrigation
Riego por pivote central
- Date
- 1948 · confidence high
- Place
- Strasburg, Colorado, United States
- Credited to
- Frank Zybach (patent in 1952)
- Field
- Life & health
What it is
System of sprinklers on wheeled towers that rotates around a well, watering circles up to a kilometre wide. It turned arid plains into farmland visible from space.
What it led to
- Industrial agriculture on the Great Plains and in the Middle East
- The depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer and fossil water
- Precision agriculture with variable-rate irrigation
Built on
- Aluminium1825
- motorised water pump
- sprinkler
Made possible
- Modern drip irrigation1959-1965
- precision irrigation
- farming in arid zones