Lindsay Brand Guidelines: The Nebraska Town Name Behind the Zimmatic Pivot

A repair shop in a small farm town.

Lindsay takes its name from the small Nebraska town where it began. According to the International Directory of Company Histories, in a profile written in the late 1990s, Paul Zimmerer founded the business in Lindsay, Nebraska, in 1955 as a farm equipment repair shop, and over the next few years he was joined by his sons Bernard and Arthur. The company’s own history describes the start as a farm equipment business whose first product was an irrigation towline built for rough field terrain.

The turn to centre pivots came at the end of the 1960s. The Directory says the company was incorporated in 1969 and began making its first irrigation system that year under the Zimmatic name. The company says the first Zimmatic pivot was designed and built by Zimmerer’s sons, began work on a Nebraska farm and is still operating; in 2019 it marked the 50th anniversary of that machine. In the 1970s, the company says, it received patents for its uni-knuckle joint and an external collector ring, features it still names in its pivot and lateral-move systems.

The family did not keep the business for long. By 1971 Lindsay was bringing in professional managers; in 1972 the Zimmerer sons bought the company from their father, and in 1974 they sold it to DeKalb Corp., the Directory reports. The Zimmerers left active involvement in 1978, with Bernard becoming a Lindsay dealer in California.

Gary Parker, who joined in 1971, became president in 1984 and led the company until he retired as chief executive in 2000, Wikipedia says, citing the Columbus Telegram.

Zimmatic pivots and the export years.

Lindsay’s farm business was shaped early by exports. The Directory says the company sold in South America, South Africa, Spain, France and Iran from the early 1970s, sent its first sales representatives to the Middle East in 1976 and made its first significant sales to Saudi Arabia in 1983, when the kingdom was subsidising wheat grown in the desert; by 1988 exports were more than 80 percent of its business, across more than 50 countries, and it kept a sales office in Riyadh. When the American farm economy fell in the mid-1980s, the company also took on contract manufacturing, making components for Deere & Company and Caterpillar, and launched a new Zimmatic line called “Generation 2.”

In 1988 DeKalb split itself into four companies and Lindsay was spun off as an independent business, offered on the NASDAQ market in October that year, according to the Directory. Its shares began trading on the New York Stock Exchange on 21 October 1997, Wikipedia says, citing the exchange and a company press release.

Controls became part of the product. The Directory describes a radio-based Remote Monitoring and Control system and, in 1991, the Automated Irrigation Management System, or AIMS, which let a farmer programme a week of pivot movement and water, fertiliser or chemical application. The company dates its FieldNET remote monitoring platform to 2006 and calls it award-winning; it added FieldNET Advisor, which uses a crop growth model for irrigation scheduling, in April 2017, and the low-cost Pivot Watch in 2019.

Growth abroad followed. In 2001 the company moved its headquarters to Omaha and formed Lindsay Europe by buying the Perrot hose-reel business in France; Lindsay Brazil and Lindsay South Africa followed in 2002, it says. Wikipedia records the purchase of Stettyn, a pivot maker in Bloemfontein, in 2004, of the Watertronics pumping-station business of Hartland, Wisconsin, in 2008, and of WMC Technology, the Colyton, New Zealand, maker of Precision Irrigation’s variable-rate system, in 2010. The company says it shipped its 100,000th pivot in 2007 and opened factories in China in 2009 and Türkiye in 2015.

In 1991, the Directory reports, Lindsay lost a court case in which it had blamed a well-drilling contractor for groundwater pollution from a waste pit; the court ruled that Lindsay itself would pay for the cleanup.

Pivots, drip lines and dealers.

Irrigation makers sell machines that are easiest to understand from a distance. A centre pivot is a long pipeline of sprinklers carried on wheeled towers that turns slowly around a fixed point, and seen from the air it leaves a field of green circles; the Encyclopedia of the Great Plains, published by the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, describes how that design took the industry from water-driven towers to electric and hydraulic drives, corner arms for square fields and, in the 1990s, computerised controls.

The industry’s pictures tend to follow the product. Pivot and linear makers show long spans crossing fields and sprinkler arcs against a low sun; drip and micro-irrigation makers show thin lines laid along crop rows and emitters at the root zone; sprinkler and controller makers for turf show lawns, sports fields and golf courses. The hardware often shares the page with a phone or a tablet, as remote monitoring and control apps are part of what many of these companies sell.

Many of the names come from small places. The centre pivot grew out of Colorado and Nebraska in the late 1940s and 1950s, according to the Nebraska Hall of Agricultural Achievement, and the Encyclopedia of the Great Plains placed the four major pivot makers it listed in Nebraska towns and cities: Valley, Lindsay, Deshler, Hastings and Omaha. This guide also covers makers of drip and micro-irrigation from Israel, Italy and India, and other irrigation makers from the American West and from France.

The Encyclopedia notes that the big pivot makers sell through networks of exclusive dealers. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and where it says its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From irrigation to roads and rails.

Since 2006 Lindsay has been two businesses. That year it bought Barrier Systems, founded in 1985 and maker of the Quickchange Moveable Barrier, which adds and removes traffic lanes as rush-hour flows change, Wikipedia says; the company says it also bought the road-safety maker Snoline the same year. Its Road Zipper system, first launched in 1984, was installed on San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge in 2015, the company says. Rail Structures & Signals followed in 2009 and Elecsys in 2015, and Lindsay now also lists road marking tape, railroad products and electronic manufacturing services.

Today Lindsay Corporation, formerly Lindsay Manufacturing Co., is a public company listed on the New York Stock Exchange as LNN, with its headquarters in Omaha. Howard G. Buffett was elected chairman in 2002, The Wall Street Journal reported, and Wikipedia names Michael N. Christodolou as chairman since January 2003. Randy Wood became president and chief executive in 2021, the company says. It describes its plant in Lindsay, Nebraska, as its largest manufacturing facility, where it began an expansion and modernisation in 2024; that year it also took a minority interest in Pessl Instruments of Austria, after buying FieldWise in 2023. In 2025 it marked its 70th anniversary.

Lindsay still sells its pivots under the Zimmatic name, while the parent company carries the town’s name. The Encyclopedia of the Great Plains, published by the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, listed Lindsay among the four major centre-pivot makers based in Nebraska, with plants in Lindsay and in France, all selling through networks of exclusive dealers.

For a design guide, Lindsay shows how a company can carry a small town’s name worldwide while its pivots keep a product name of their own. Compare Valmont, its Nebraska neighbour in centre pivots, and Reinke. For this guide we use a field green, steel grey and sorghum gold with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Lindsay’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.