Harvest of Ideas

Nebraskans know a thing or two about reaping what they sow. The Cornhusker State, also known as the Beef State, routinely ranks at or near the top of national rankings in production of row crops and livestock. Beyond those commodities, many of the agricultural seeds planted by innovative Nebraskans have grown to benefit farms and ranches far from Nebraska and around the world. Take pride in this brimming bushel backet of Nebraska’s contributions to modern agriculture.

Center Pivot Irrigation

Frank Zybach didn’t care much for doing the farm chores that came along with growing up on the family’s land near Columbus in the early 1900s. Far ahead of his time even though he left school part way through the seventh grade to help on the farm and his father’s blacksmith shop, Zybach was only a teenager when he invented a driverless tractor to plow the ground in concentric circles. That contraption didn’t catch on with the ag community, but Zybach was still seeing circles when his next innovation revolutionized production agriculture worldwide.

Inspiration struck Zybach after keenly observing a farmer awkwardly irrigate crops by towing a long pipe equipped with sprinkler heads around a field. Zybach got to work.

By the late 1940s, he’d engineered and assembled a five-tower irrigation rig on wheels capable of irrigating a 40-acre field. By the early 1950s he’d received a patent for an irrigation setup equipped with a 600-foot-long boom capable of watering an entire section minus the corners. The center pivot was born, and bountiful crop circles of green began sprouting up across Nebraska and the Great Plains. They now appear on six continents.

Valley Manufacturing improved the design after securing Zybach’s patent. Now known as Valmont Industries, the Omaha-based company sells to hopeful farmers everywhere who thank the heavens for Zybach’s Nebraska invention while still optimistically praying for rain.

Rowse Hydraulic Rakes

“Necessity is the mother of invention,” is an oft-cited proverb. In rural Nebraska, invention is a way of life. Statewide, farmers and ranchers devise contraptions, machines, or jigs to get the job done for their own operations. Many of these creations never go beyond a workshop, never see a showroom floor. Such was almost the case for Freeman and Betty Rowse of rural Burwell.

Freeman (Fee) Rowse spent about a month and a half back in 1959 converting an old dump rake into a hydraulic hay rake. Having figured out what needed to be done, the second hay rake only took him a week to complete. Both of his rakes were intended for use by the Rowse family.

Somehow word got out about the unique inventions, and visitors began showing up to watch as the Rowses put up their summer hay (they could have at least offered to help!). Before long, Fee was building hydraulic rakes for his neighbors. Betty did her part by painting each of the implements with a paintbrush.

In addition to its signature hydraulic hay rakes, the company soon began producing double sickle bar mowers. In 1976 they designed and patented a trailing mower. Bale movers, windrow fluffers, wheel rakes, and calf cradles joined the growing product line. The dirt scraper Fee built for use while building a house eventually made it into the product line, too.

Rowse Rakes’ Ultimate V-Rake turns 20 in 2024. Implements produced in the original plant 22 miles north of Burwell, and in the newer O’Neill location, are sold through implement dealers in 32 states. Still in the Rowse family, grandsons and great-grandsons are at the helm of the Nebraska family company today.

Square Turn Tractor

Nebraskans being at the forefront of agricultural innovation is nothing new, and we’re not talking about the famed World’s Largest Plow that has been an attraction in Gothenburg since 1988.

In 1913, as American agriculture was transitioning from beasts of burden to the use of internal combustion powered automotive implements, farmer A.T. Kenney and machinist/engineer A.J. Colwell began building a machine of their own in Norfolk.

The ability of their K-C tractor to plow clear up into the fence corners of fields and then negotiate tight maneuvers to turn around led to the name the machine is known by today. Controlled by levers mimicking the motions farmers of the time used to direct their horses, orders began rolling in by 1914. Production of the machine powered by a 510-cubic-inch Climax four-cylinder engine soon outgrew Colwell’s shop space and moved to a facility on Seventh Street in Norfolk.

Kenney and Colwell sold their company to Illinois-based manufacturer Albaugh-Dover, and in 1917 that company founded the Square Turn Tractor Company. A new facility was erected on a stretch of 11th Street in Norfolk known today as Square Turn Boulevard.

The company’s executives hoped to pay 400 workers as much as $3 per day, a hefty wage at the time. Weighing in at an equally hefty 7,800 pounds when equipped with an Oliver brand three plow gang, a new Square Turn tractor cost farmers $1,385.

Production of the Square Turn tractor ceased during World War I and never recovered. Still, the Square Turn left its mark. Colwell’s innovative “Giant Grip Drive” transmission is credited for hastening the end of the widespread use of the horse as a draft animal.

The only example of a Square Turn Tractor on public display in Nebraska is parked in perpetuity at the Elkhorn Valley Museum in Norfolk, only blocks from where the ahead-of-its-time agricultural innovation was invented.

Vise-Grip

Danish immigrant William Petersen tried his hand at farming after moving to Nebraska in the early 1920s. Eventually, he opened a blacksmith shop in DeWitt. The automobiles that this inventor at heart tried to engineer didn’t last, but one of his inventions is a staple of farm and ranch repair found in most toolboxes in Nebraska and beyond.

Needing a simple, portable way to secure the metal he was working on, Petersen came up with the innovative idea for a set of locking pliers. He made prototypes of cardboard and wood before hammering a working example into existence on his dented forge. Patents were awarded in 1921 and 1924 and Petersen began selling his Vice-Grip Pliers to area farmers and others from the trunk of his car. Soon, his Petersen Manufacturing Company opened a production facility in a former drugstore in downtown DeWitt.

Military contracts helped keep the family company going during World War II. The company incorporated in the 1950s, and innovations such as the “easy release lever” that was added in 1957 fueled the company’s growth.

In 1998, in anticipation of the company’s 75th anniversary, gold- and chrome-plated collector’s versions of the famous tool were released. A decade later, DeWitt’s grip on the landmark invention slipped when changes of ownership led to manufacturing moving to China and 330 workers from DeWitt and the surrounding area losing their jobs.

Hometown hope was renewed when a Minnesota-based company reopened the DeWitt plant and began producing a similar locking plier. The venture didn’t last, but the sign on the edge of DeWitt proclaiming the community as the “Home of Vise-Grip Tools” remains. The brick monument stands as a symbol of small-town Nebraskan ingenuity that continues helping hard workers everywhere with an honored place in shops and toolboxes around the world. 

Graingoat

Farms in Nebraska and across the Great Plains continue to grow larger. Some farmers now plow, plant, and harvest thousands of acres. Farm equipment has grown, too. Convoys of commuters routinely but unintentionally line up behind 12-, 14-, or even 16-row combines each fall.

As harvest time approaches, farmers drive those behemoths from field to field so that their on-board sensors can measure the moisture content of a field and determine if it’s ready for harvest. That process is time consuming and burns fuel, and unproductive if the grain is too wet and a return trip is necessary. Venango inventor Martin Bremmer thought there had to be a better way.

Bremmer and his wife, Patti, live on land that has been in his family since the late 1800s. While growing up, he would work summers on the family farm. After college he moved to the farm, married Patti, and began his own farm operation. He remembers so many hours wasted driving to fields in a combine only to learn that the field was not ready.

“Many of the older farmers would chew a few grains of wheat to see if their field was ready, and I often wondered why someone hadn’t invented something to revolutionize the moisture testing method,” Bremmer said. After complaining to Patti for the umpteenth time, she said, “Why don’t you be the one to invent the darn thing?” So, he did.

The GrainGoat is a 17-pound labor saver that hangs by a strap from a farmer’s shoulder. The handheld machine – essentially a mini combine – isn’t practical for harvesting our state’s fields of gold. But the device can be tossed in a backseat or the bed of a pickup and taken from field to field to efficiently test the moisture content of crops. The GrainGoat uses battery power to do its thing – collect, clean, and test the sample – while farmers’ fuel-guzzling combines stay parked in the ready until needed.

Settings can be adjusted for the type of crop to be sampled. The invention marketed through the Bremmers’ Windcall Manufacturing holds the first U.S. Patent ever for a hand-held combine for small grain. Bremmer has always been a tinkerer.

“I’ve always thought there was a way to build a better mousetrap. My mind leans that direction with everything I do,” Bremmer said. “I build things around the farm to make our lives easier. I think most farmers are guilty of that.”

“Beef…it’s what’s for dinner in Nebraska” is a well-known slogan thanks to a popular radio and TV campaign. Our state’s connection to beef cattle is stronger than most. After all, Nebraska is “The Beef State.” Cattle outnumbered Nebraskans more than five to one in 2023. So it should come as no surprise that one of the best-selling cuts of beef of all time originated in Nebraska.

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Dr. Chris Calkins spent more than 40 years on the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s meat science faculty. For three of those years, Calkins bullishly studied cattle carcasses and extracted cuts that professional butchers had overlooked.

From the chuck portion at the front of the animal, well beneath the shoulder – a portion commonly ground into hamburger or used for roasts – Calkins found a particularly tender and flavorful chunk. The small slab was thinner than the thick and juicy popular steaks of the day. Calkins was hopeful but uncertain if the toothsome cut would catch on.

Calkins got his big break when more than 100 meat industry executives ga-thered at UNL dined on Calkin’s cut – what became known as the Flat Iron Steak. Marketing efforts and early support from restaurant chain Applebee’s put the Flat Iron Steak on the public’s menu. From its introduction in 2002, to 2009, the new cut added an estimated $50 to $70 to the price of a single beef animal.

Calkins retired from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2022. The savory steak he helped pioneer more than two decades ago has Beef State carnivores licking their chops and Nebraska’s cattlemen fattening their bottom line.