The video provides an in-depth look into the construction and functioning of center pivot irrigation systems, which are commonly seen as large green circles from above agricultural fields. It explains how these systems transfer groundwater to crops efficiently by describing the intricate processes and engineering involved in their construction and operation. Viewers are introduced to the various components that make up the irrigation system, such as pipes, pivot points, drive trains, and sprinklers, with detailed explanations about their assembly and the physics that allow them to function.

This content is captivating because it not only demystifies the workings behind a common agricultural machine but also highlights the intelligence and skill involved in farming, presenting farmers as "geniuses" due to their technological and scientific knowledge. The video captures the practical process of assembling an irrigation system, adding a personal touch by involving a local farmer and his family in the demonstration while emphasizing the collective effort and expertise required to complete such a project.

Main takeaways from the video:

Please remember to turn on the CC button to view the subtitles.

Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. pivot [ˈpɪvət] - (noun) - A central point, pin, or shaft on which a mechanism turns or oscillates. - Synonyms: (axis, fulcrum, hinge)

It's a center pivot irrigation system.

2. irrigation [ˌɪrɪˈɡeɪʃən] - (noun) - The supply of water to land or crops to help growth, typically by means of channels. - Synonyms: (watering, sprinkling, hydration)

It's called an irrigation pivot.

3. mechanics [məˈkænɪks] - (noun) - The branch of applied mathematics and physics concerned with motion and forces producing motion. - Synonyms: (engineering, dynamics, kinematics)

This is mechanics.

4. hydrology [haɪˈdrɒlədʒi] - (noun) - The scientific study of the movement, distribution, and quality of water on Earth. - Synonyms: (water science, aquatic science)

You literally have a master's degree in hydrology.

5. truss [trʌs] - (noun) - A framework, typically consisting of rafters, posts, and struts, supporting a roof, bridge, or other structure. - Synonyms: (framework, structure, skeleton)

So we're building trusses, and I am the inexperienced man on the job.

6. economist [ɪˈkɒnəmɪst] - (noun) - An expert in economics, especially one who studies, develops, and applies theories and concepts from economics and writes about economic policy. - Synonyms: (financial analyst, economic expert, market analyst)

So farmers are economists, weather people, scientists.

7. yield [jiːld] - (noun) - The amount of crop produced in a given field or by a particular farmer or farming enterprise. - Synonyms: (output, production, harvest)

Trey is driving the combine here. This is the non irrigated portion of the field. And our yield is around 60 bushels per acre.

8. Roi (Return On Investment) [ˌəʊ.aɪ] - (noun) - A measure used to evaluate the efficiency or profitability of an investment. - Synonyms: (profitability, return, gain)

How long would it take a pivot like this to pay itself off? Based on the rainfall this year on this return, this increase in yield, probably about five years would be the ROI.

9. cropped [krɒpd] - (adjective) - Pertaining to the cultivated plants or agricultural produce harvested. - Synonyms: (cultivated, harvested, gathered)

And then after that it's cropping.

10. control scheme [kənˈtroʊl skiːm] - (noun) - A planned and structured course of action designed to regulate and manage an operation or activity. - Synonyms: (management plan, regulation system, supervision strategy)

It's a carefully choreographed control scheme, and I think it's awesome.

Everything About Irrigation Pivots (Farmers are Geniuses) - Smarter Every Day 278

If you've ever been flying in an airplane and you look out the window and you see these big green circles in the middle of a field. What is that? Today we're going to build the thing that makes this happen. This is my buddy Trey. He's a farmer. Farmers are geniuses. We established that in the last video we did together about grain bins. Today, I have a question. I want to know what these big things are that I see in the fields. What is that? It's a center pivot irrigation system.

A center pivot irrigation system. So it's a way, a tool we use to transfer, in this case, groundwater out to the field and then use a circular pivot to apply it to the crop when they need it. If we don't get sufficient rain from Mother Nature, we can cut the pivots on and give the crop what it needs. We're building two pivots, right? That's right. Okay. And one in that field and one in this field. And I'm just gonna. I'm basically just gonna do whatever Trey tells me to. Sounds good. Let's go get smarter every day and learn about irrigation pivots.

So I see these things while driving around all the time. They look like big bridges or cranes kind of on their side. Okay, this is our field, this is our dirt, and this is a pipe. We're going to put water out in the field with a pipe. It's called an irrigation pivot. So we've got a pivot point here. We have to rotate the pipe around the pivot point. So there's tons of questions here. Like, for example, when the pipe fills up with water, it's going to get heavy, and it's going to want to sag. Right. So how do we support that pipe from below? And are there different sections to this thing, or is it just one long run of pipe? And what do the sprinklers look like when crops are in the field? How does it move without damaging the crops? And how does this thing even move?

All this started to become clear to me once we went out there and started building the thing. The first thing that we did is we poured a pad for the pivot itself. After that, we spent a lot of time literally digging ditches so that we could run the pipe out to the pivot point. This was a family affair. Trey got the whole family involved. My job initially was to lube up the pipes and connect them together as Trey's brother used the trackhoe to dig the ditch. And Trey kept me supplied with new Sections of pipe. We also ran wire all the way through the ditch beside the pipe, all the way to the pit pivot point itself, which tells me that's where the power for the whole pivot comes from.

The next big step came a few weeks later when a crew arrived led by a father son team. You got Andy or Andreas and Jose. Jose is who I like to call the jefe. These guys are experts at assembling irrigation pivots. How many of these have you built? You. Me? Yeah. Here In Alabama, maybe 400. Wow. 400. Wow. Can I help? No, no. You don't want me to help? No. Stay out of the way. So I've got to figure out how to establish myself as a trusted individual. You want me do them three on each side? Yeah. Don't they Long and three short. Okay, got it. Three long, three short. Each occasion. My first job, I think I'm in.

They grew more tolerant of me and started letting me do more stuff. So we laid out all the parts for what ended up being the first of three 200 foot sections of the pivot. After laying all that stuff out, we started putting together this pyramid that would eventually be the center of the pivot. Uno momento. Lisa, come in faster when I get out of the way. Next, we assembled an electronics box that would eventually run the whole pivot. And we attached that to the side of that pyramid. Jose then picked up the whole thing with a forklift and drove it over to the cement pad where he put it down and bolted it to the concrete. Meanwhile, we jumped back over and started stringing together the large rods that would eventually support the whole pivot arm. These rods are in tension, and I thought it was really cool the way we clasp them together with these little bracket mechanisms.

All right, teach me what my next job is. Andy. Yeah. He's got a gasket on each one. See, he's got a flat. Flat? Yeah. Inside on the bottom is different. Okay. Just make sure not to pinch it. Yeah. All the bolts on one side. Okay. That all the way down. Right. So I've learned what happens is there's like one task you learn and then you do it 100 times. That seems to be the way this works. When we finished organizing the pipes, the tension rods and the structural supports that holds it all together, we then unspooled electrical wire and attached it along the length of the pipe.

We then started connecting these plastic tubes, which I'm pretty sure is how we're going to attach the sprinklers. I was a little upset because these things are soft, right? And so they're cross threading when you put them in the metal, which is difficult. But Jose was explaining to me that that's on purpose, because if there's a storm and this whole irrigation system flips over or something, these things will break off and you won't damage the pipe. So that's on purpose. Another thing that I'm observing here, this pipe has a little spigot in every hole. This pipe does not. It's empty. It's got one there. It's empty. It's got one there. And so at this point, I'm starting to understand. I'm thinking as this arc sweeps around the field, the arm that's closest to the pivot center, this one's not going to move as much as those out there. So if you have the same flow rate in each location, you're going to water the inside of the field more than the outside of the field. And that's bad.

Oh, no. We have hoses. What does this mean? And these are the sprinkler heads. Oh, they've got numbers. So it feels like we're going towards this. There appears to be a weight on the nozzle, the sprinkler head. So that holds it down over the crop, I guess. I guess I was wondering what those were. They're weights. At this point, stuff started to get serious. Jose was on the forklift, and he picked up one of the spans of the pivot, which I learned they call towers. We'd been hustling all day, but there was a definite increase in the expected pace coming from the bosses. Come on, come on, come on, come on, Come on. Come on, guys. Come on.

How do you do it? I couldn't get the bolts in because I didn't know what parts of the truss were in tension and what parts were in compression. Jose, of course, understood everything. Man. That's a man that's done that a lot. So we're building trusses, and I am the inexperienced man on the job. This feels stressful. Boy, this is happening fast. The gloves are in the way. Coming in, come in, coming in. Just a whole pile of them.

Once the tower started coming together, it was amazing to see how the pipe is an integrated part of the mechanics of the overall structure. So it does two things. It provides the water and it also provides structure. I'm jealous of the aprons. Very jealous of the aprons. At one point, I made a mistake and complained about the 90 degree heat. Nice. Not hot. This is not hot. The next big Step was to attach the axle. Come on. No, no, no. Come on. Oh, yeah. At this point, one of my big questions was answered.

We attached the drivetrain and an electric motor that would turn the wheels. And next, of course, we had to attach the wheels themselves. Interestingly, there was a second set of temporary wheels, which we had to bang into some piping so that we could pull this thing across the field at the end here. So we gotta have the water flow from one section to the other. It's my understanding that this is gonna go up top, and this is gonna be the interface between one section and the other. The next question, though, is, how do you keep one section of the pivot if you're swinging around the field that way? How do you keep them lined up? So there's gotta be limit switches in there somehow. I just don't know what those look like, so I don't know. Look at him. He's about to pull this whole thing. We should probably get ready to walk.

Jose pulled the first completed tower section all the way across the field and had to do quite a bit of a dance to back it up perfectly so that the connection point was right where it needed to be so we could bolt it up. That's it. That's it. Okay. It looks like the pipe is going to have to come up and over and then plumb straight up into this. Power is going to have to go through that box right there, the control box. These slip rings are fascinating to me. So these slip rings, you can see there's the brushes right there. Obviously, I would not want to be touching that if it was electrified, but that is providing the power for the whole thing. Man. And those are. Those are thick copper.

All right, let's head down. First Corinthians 3, 7. Trey had that put in. So back to work. We had two more tower sections to build, which by now, I kind of understood the process a little bit more, and I think I started to be helpful. I even got to wear one of those little aprons which carries the nuts and bolts. And I don't know if they were just being nice to me, but it made me really happy. Anyway, we got the wheels up and running on the second one, and then we took it over and attached it to the first. It's literally coming together. I'm starting to understand it.

And then we got to build the third and final tower section, which had a wrinkle to it, which the first two sections didn't have. Oh, it's the end that goes on. The end. All Right. I was wondering what Jose was getting. He's getting the big spooty thing on the end. So this being the outermost section at the end, it's essentially a large type sprinkler. You know what I'm trying to say? It shoots water way out beyond the end of the pivot. It's really fun to see the engineering involved in this little contraption. If you look, it goes to one side, and then it cams over and it reverses direction, and it's all completely mechanical, and it's controlled by these little weights on the side. So it goes. This is going to hit. That throws the cam, throws this back.

When we came back the next day, I received what was the final blessing from my jefe. Forget the nail apron. He let me drive the forklift, which, in my heart, was the best gift that Jose could have ever given me. After everything was in position, Trey just needed to finish connecting all the electrical lines and then run the well pipe up through the center of the pivot point. And a few months later, I was able to come out and see how they actually performed an action. So I haven't seen this thing operate yet. I spent a lot of times work working on these things in your field. All right, here's the wheel. And the wheel makes its own little path here, right?

That's correct. Knowing you farmers aren't lazy, but farmers are technologically advanced. So I would assume that you have the ability to turn this on from your phone right now. I do. We haven't talked about this. Whoa. Almost through your phone. I want you to see the phone. So we're going down into the beans. Okay, so this is how you set it. That's correct. So you're setting. It's in polar coordinates. So you're setting. Start 22 degrees in 93 degrees. And that's cardinal directions, right? That's right. Okay. Zeros north. Okay. Right. And so you just. You just uploaded that. Yep. And so. Well, do I hear it? What do I hear?

Oh, it's moving. Say the water coming out of it. No, I don't. Oh, it's coming towards us. So it's priming it. It's priming it. And so. So there's air right here, and there's water down there. That's right. Check out this view from the pivot point. You can actually see the pipes get heavier as they fill up with water. It's coming towards us, and it's spraying a lot wider than I anticipated. That is a lot of fl. That is way more Water than I thought. Can I run up the leg? You can. Oh, man. Golly. Don't touch those boxes up there.

Don't touch the boxes. I will not, dude. So those things spin? Yep. Do you like your pivot? I do like it. Do. Do you? I do like. This is. There's more to this than I thought. Look at all that. There were two more big questions for me with this pivot. First, how do they distribute water evenly? Since the sprinklers at the end of the pivot would be covering a lot more ground while it makes a circle than the ones near the center of the pivot, how do they take that into account? I had noticed earlier that they spaced out the sprinklers closer together as they got further out. And there were gaps up towards the center of the pivot. But was that all?

But basically, each nozzle's got a regulator in it. A 10 pound regulator. The further you get from the center, the bigger the orifice is on the nozzle up there. You have the same pressure, but the orifice is smaller. This plant needs to see the exact amount of water as that plant up there near the circle. That's right near the pivot. Excuse me, near the center. Yeah. And so the way they do that is by varying the flow rate on each of these. That's right. And that was why it was so important for each nozzle to be numbered and go in its correct place. They needed to be assembled in the correct order.

The second big question is how exactly do the pivot sections stay in line with each other? And usually slow mo footage is what I like to do to learn something new. But in this case, I had to speed it up to see what was happening. This is a camera placed back at the center of the pivot. And I'm looking down the whole length of the line now. I'm speeding it up. And can you see what's going on here? The sections don't seem to be moving continuously, do they? They're kind of walking. They're starting and stopping. So what's happening here? We're on the second to last tower. So that tower down there is the last tower. That's the furthest point away from the pivot point.

The pivot point is back up there. So we've got the. The box lid off here. We're not going to touch that because that's AC power and that's a no, no. But if you look down here, you can see this bar right here on the left is connected to the far tower. Okay. As the far tower moves in relation to the tower that I'm on, it adjusts this linkage right here. That linkage on that tower goes to this switch right here, and it's rotating that switch on the inside of the box. That arm is connected to this little black cam, which rotates depending on the angle of that cam. It turns these little brown limit switches on and off, which then starts the wheels driving this particular, particular tower section.

So this little cam is the magic. It's telling this tower section whether it needs to move or stop in order to keep up with the next tower down the line. So what that means is that farthest tower is controlling the tower that we're on. And trey, they're all controlled by the one further away from the pivot point, right? That's correct.

Going back to this shot, you can see the entire control system at work. It's basically a game of follow the leader. The tower at the far end sets the pace, and everything in closer to the pivot follows suit with what engineers called bang bang controls each limit switch along the way, tells the wheels when to turn on and off, and that ends up aligning it in what looks like, to the naked eye, a perfectly straight line. But it's not. It's a carefully choreographed control scheme, and I think it's awesome.

We are harvesting beans here. You can see them over the shoulder. Trey is driving the combine here. This is the non irrigated portion of the field. And our yield is around 60 bushels per acre. Is that right? That's right. Okay. And so we are going into the outer arc. What do you call the part that sprays? The end gun? The end gun. So we're entering the irrigated portion of the end gun and we'll see how our yield goes up. And so right now this is irrigated beans now? That's right. All right, irrigated beans. What's our yield up here? We're mid-80s on the beans. So that's about a, what, 25% increase.

So what does 25 more bushels per acre mean? That's a big deal, right? That's a big deal, yeah. How long would it take a pivot like this to pay itself off? Based on the rainfall this year on this return, this increase in yield, probably about five years would be the roi. And then after that it's cropping. Right. But we had some corn that was irrigated this year that basically the irrigation system made a lot more money because of the way the weather failed with the rain. So it's all about the weather. It's all about the weather, yeah. So farmers are economists, weather people, scientists.

You literally have a master's degree in hydrology. I know this about you. So this is mechanics. mechanics, yeah. Farmers are geniuses, and this is why you got food on your plate today. So thank a farmer. So I hope you enjoyed learning everything about pivots with me. It was fun building it, laying the pipe that feeds the thing with water, learning about the wells, and then ultimately getting to see the beans that the pivot helped make.

So hope you enjoyed this episode of Smarter Every Day. I'm destin. Feel free to subscribe if you're into this sort of thing and consider supporting on Patreon if you're interested in that. Farmers are geniuses. Go say thanks to a farmer. They feed us. I'm destined. You're getting smarter every day. Have a good one. Bye.

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