Valmont Brand Guidelines: The Valley, Nebraska Home of the Valley Centre Pivot

A farm-equipment shop and a pivot patent.

Valmont began with a small business near Valley, Nebraska. The International Directory of Company Histories, in a profile written in the late 1990s, says Robert B. Daugherty, a young Marine back from the Second World War, invested his savings in a small farm-equipment maker called Valley Manufacturing Company. The company dates the purchase to 1946; its Valley Irrigation history says the firm sat on a farm just west of Valley, was owned by an inventor named Sam McCleneghan, and started out building farm elevators.

The idea that made the company came from elsewhere. The Nebraska Hall of Agricultural Achievement, which inducted him in 1982, says Frank Zybach, then a tenant farmer on a dryland wheat farm near Strasburg, Colorado, set out in 1947 to find an easier way to irrigate than carrying hand-moved pipe. By the summer of 1948 he had a small two-tower, water-driven centre-pivot machine in field tests; he filed for a patent in June 1949 and was granted it in July 1952. With A. E. Trowbridge, a car dealer in Columbus, Nebraska, he built ten systems in a rented machine shop between the spring of 1953 and September 1954.

In September 1954, the Hall says, Daugherty, as president of Valley Manufacturing, negotiated exclusive rights to manufacture the system until the patent expired in 1969. The company dates Zybach’s prototype to 1947 and the licence to 1954, and says its engineers spent the next decade making the machine sturdier, taller and more reliable and changing it from hydraulic power to electric drive. The Encyclopedia of the Great Plains, in an entry written by a Valmont Irrigation author, says Daugherty went on developing the concept for ten years, “perfecting it into a strong, durable design and establishing an entire industry”; according to the Hall, centre pivots began to catch on with farmers in the late 1960s.

Valley pivots, pipe and a new name.

The pivot pulled the company into steel. Large quantities of pipe were needed, the Directory says, so Valley began making its own; the company dates its steel pipe and tubing business to 1959, and that pipe led it towards poles and structures as well as farm equipment.

The name changed in the 1960s. Valley Manufacturing became Valmont Industries, a name taken from the nearby towns of Valley and Fremont; the company gives the year as 1966, while the Directory says 1967. The company says it went public in 1968, made its first international sale in the 1960s to a dealer in Lyon, France, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange as VMI in 2001.

The farm products kept the Valley name. The company’s history credits the 1970s with electric-drive pivots on rubber tyres, a corner option for pivots, which it calls the industry’s first, and a Valley gearbox made in Valley, Nebraska; the 1980s with the cams management system for programming irrigation and fertiliser application, and linear machines for irregular fields; and later decades with the Valley 8000 series pivot, the Valley Precision Corner, GPS guidance and, in 2010, variable rate irrigation. It formed Valmont Irrigation in 1990 by combining its North American and international irrigation units, opened in Beijing in 2010, built a gearbox plant in Waverly, Nebraska, in 2013 and took a majority interest in AgSense of South Dakota in 2014.

The pivot business also sold heavily abroad. The Directory describes Valmont’s irrigation work in Saudi Arabia, where it made the technical components at home and the structures near the installation site, and the Encyclopedia of the Great Plains listed Valmont plants in Valley and McCook, Nebraska, and in South Africa, Spain and the United Arab Emirates.

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.

Poles, towers and coatings alongside the pivot.

Valmont’s second business grew out of its pipe mill. The Directory says machinery for tapered metal light and traffic poles was developed from the 1960s; the company bought the service centre Gate City Steel in 1981, entered Europe through the French pole maker SERMETO, added Nolte of the Netherlands in 1991 and took a majority stake in Lampadaires Feralux near Montreal. When the farm economy slumped in the early 1980s, the Directory says, poles and structures gave it a second footing. The company says it built galvanizing plants in West Point, Nebraska, and Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the early 1990s, and Wikipedia records its purchase of Shakespeare Composite Structures from Philips in 2014.

At the top, Mogens C. Bay, born in Denmark, became president and chief executive in 1993, the Directory says, and Daugherty retired in 1996, the company’s 50th year, while remaining a director. In 2022 the company reorganised into two segments, Agriculture and Infrastructure, and in 2023 its former finance chief Avner M. Applbaum became president and chief executive, it says.

Today Valmont Industries, Inc. is a public company with its headquarters in Omaha; Wikipedia says its irrigation plant remains in Valley. The company says it employs more than 11,000 people with facilities in 21 countries, and in 2026 it marks 80 years since Daugherty’s purchase. Its own pages present utility structures, lighting and transportation poles, telecom structures and coatings alongside Valley irrigation and farm technology.

For a design guide, Valmont shows how a parent company and a product brand can share one origin story: the town of Valley names the pivots, while Valley and Fremont together name the company. Compare Lindsay, its Nebraska neighbour in centre pivots, and T-L Irrigation. For this guide we use a prairie blue, galvanised grey and corn yellow with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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