Reinke Brand Guidelines: The Family Pivot Maker From Deshler, Nebraska

Rafters and chicken houses before pivots.

Reinke Manufacturing dates to 1954, when Richard F. Reinke began building on his family’s farm in south-central Nebraska. The company says the farm lay just outside Byron, and that its first products were structural components — chicken houses and laminated rafters — rather than irrigation equipment. Potato Grower, profiling the company in July 2021, describes the same beginning: agricultural and commercial equipment made on the family farm. Bill Ganzel’s Living History Farm history of center-pivot makers, first published in 2006, places the 1954 start in Deshler, the small Thayer County town where the company is headquartered today.

Ganzel describes Richard Reinke as a Nebraska farmer’s son who taught himself to be an engineer and draftsman, and that self-taught engineering is the thread the company’s own history follows. Its timeline runs decade by decade through pipe joints, gaskets, trusses, drives and control panels.

Irrigation came in the 1960s. A center pivot is a long water pipe carried on wheeled towers that turns around a fixed point in the field. To avoid infringing Valley’s patents, Ganzel writes, Reinke had to come up with new ideas. Ganzel dates Reinke’s first center pivot to 1966; the company dates the Electrogator to the 1960s and calls it the first reversible, electric, gear-driven circular system on rubber tyres, with a collector ring that allowed it to keep rotating.

Ganzel credits Richard Reinke with a series of firsts: electric drives that could be reversed so a farmer could back the system up; an electric motor in the middle of each tower base, with drive shafts to gearboxes on each wheel; a patented bow-string truss under the pipe spans, a design Ganzel says most pivots now use; and an electrical collector ring that carried power from the pivot point down the spans, so the wiring did not wrap up as the machine went round. In all, Ganzel writes, he patented more than 30 innovations for center-pivot design.

A family of “-gators.”

Reinke’s product names share a pattern. The Electrogator was followed, the company says, by the Minigator, with a four-and-a-half-inch water pipe for low water supplies and smaller fields; the Alumigator of the 1970s, which it describes as the first successful aluminium system; and the Maxigator, a two-wheel-drive lateral-move machine that travels in a straight line across rectangular fields instead of turning in a circle. The suffix still runs through the range: the current heavy-duty center pivot is the Electrogator II, and the newest, introduced in the 2020s, is the Electrogator 3, shortened to E3.

The later history is about control as much as steel. The company lists a Drop Span and its Reinke Automated Management System control panel in the 1990s; in the 2000s, Navigator GPS guidance, a touch-screen main control panel, variable rate irrigation and the Reinke Precision Management panel series; and then ReinCloud, a web platform for watching and running several machines remotely. In the company’s standard description it was the first to bring GPS, satellite-based communications and touch-screen panels to mechanized irrigation management — a claim it makes about itself.

One product carries outside recognition. In December 2020 Reinke announced that ESAC, its electronic swing arm corner — the hinged end span that reaches into the corners of a square field — had won an AE50 award from the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers and the Irrigation Association’s New Product People’s Choice Award for agricultural irrigation. ESAC uses GPS positioning to run six or twelve zones along the corner arm, the company says. Potato Grower also noted in 2021 a partnership with CropX, whose soil sensors feed data into Reinke’s irrigation scheduling.

The business has not always been irrigation alone. In 2006 Ganzel noted that the company had diversified into trailers and chassis for over-the-road trucks.

Irrigation makers and their image.

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.

Deshler first, then Romania.

Reinke describes itself as family-owned since 1954 and headquartered in Deshler. Its president is Chris Roth; Russ Reinke is first vice president, according to a company announcement reported by World Agritech in October 2025. When the company announced investment in robotic production and new buildings at Deshler in September 2024, Nebraska’s governor, Jim Pillen, was quoted calling it “a great family-owned success story for Nebraska.” The company calls itself the world’s largest privately held maker of center pivot and lateral-move systems, with hundreds of dealers in more than 40 countries; that is its own description.

Manufacturing is centred on Deshler, the company says, and it has expanded in Europe. Forbes Romania reported in July 2021 that a Reinke warehouse in Constanța, on the Black Sea coast, had opened in spring 2020. On 15 October 2025 World Agritech reported that Reinke had opened a facility in Năvodari, Romania, as a regional hub for manufacturing, assembly and distribution serving Europe and Central Asia. The website reflects that reach: it is offered in English, Spanish, French, Hungarian, Romanian, German, Ukrainian, Italian and Portuguese.

Reinke is one of a small group of Nebraska pivot makers. Ganzel wrote in 2006 that only six center-pivot manufacturers were left and that the four largest — Valmont, Lindsay, Reinke and T-L — were all in Nebraska.

For a design guide, Reinke shows how a family manufacturer can turn engineering details and a single naming pattern into a recognisable voice. Compare T-L Irrigation, another family-run Nebraska pivot maker, and Lindsay, the Zimmatic maker from the same state. For this guide we use a field green, a galvanised grey and a wheat tone with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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