Growing experience

Before Jim Reid, CAIS, CID, was president of Reid Brothers Irrigation & Equipment, Americus, Georgia, he spent years working on his family’s farm, picking up experience in the field.

When the opportunity arose to take charge of an irrigation equipment dealership, he and his brother scaled back their farm work, something they’d been part of for about 25 years. To make sure he had the tools he needed to provide expert insight to farmers, he went to design school.

“I’ve been irrigating since 1978. I thought I knew a lot about irrigation,” says Reid. “I tell people that if a ruler represents everything you could possibly know about irrigation, I realized I knew about 1/28.”

His degree was in business, and the work he was taking on required the understanding of an engineer. When he asked his instructor about how he could learn what he was missing, they directed him toward the certification programs at the Irrigation Association.

Learning the basics

Reid worked with IA instructors Ronald Sneed, CAIS, CIC, CID, CLIA, and Gene Rochester, signing up for the Principles of Irrigation IA University course, gaining technical expertise and refining what he had already learned from his work on the farm itself. He went on to get both his certified agriculture irrigation specialist and certified irrigation designer credentials, which helped him be better prepared for the systems he was designing.

“So often, people do these things by the seat of their pants,” he says. “It made me a better designer.”

One immediate result he found was that putting what he had learned into practice made the entire goal of effective ag irrigation much easier to reach. For years, he would get home from a long day on the farm and tell his wife, “You know, farming wouldn’t be so bad if I didn’t have to irrigate,” he says.

“As I farmed for years, I put up with all these issues,” says Reid. “I got to realize that all these aggravations that I had put up with all my life, most of them could’ve been designed away. It’s because of my dislike of aggravation and irritation that I feel like I’ve been so successful.”

Part of his drive to learn came from a need to understand how to make irrigation systems work the way they’d always been explained to him when working with dealers, he says. For instance, he quickly found that one of the reasons he’d always had trouble with the system at his farm was using pipe that was too small for what was needed.

“How much money did we waste on diesel fuel energy overcoming friction loss because the pipe was too small?” he says.

Before that point, he hadn’t put much thought into friction loss or feet-per-second, he says. He learned how using a pipe that was too small affects other parts of the irrigation system, such as increasing the need for higher horsepower to draw the same amount of water. He learned how to read pump curves and use that information. At the Irrigation Show and Education Week, he spent time studying every night after the IA University classes to lock in what he had picked up throughout the day.

He credits what he learned from Sneed and Rochester in learning about the right parameters for an irrigation system that delivers the correct amount of water right where it needs to go without additional stress on the equipment.

“They taught me how to design an efficient irrigation system,” he says. “That means water efficiency, energy efficiency and labor efficiency. In the process of doing that, you design the aggravation out of the system because it’s poor design that contributes to aggravation.”

Good design makes for successful, hassle-free irrigation, and the opposite is also true, he says.

“If I did my design well, it’s like a Christmas present that keeps on giving. But if I did that design incorrectly, it’ll cost you every month and continue to do so. Every month when you pay your energy bills, you’ll pay for my mistake. And every fall when you harvest your crops, they will make less than what they could’ve made.”
– Jim Reid, Reid Brothers Irrigation & Equipment

“If I did my design well, it’s like a Christmas present that keeps on giving,” Reid says. “But if I did that design incorrectly, it’ll cost you every month and continue to do so. Every month when you pay your energy bills, you’ll pay for my mistake. And every fall when you harvest your crops, they will make less than what they could’ve made.”

Education benefits

Not only did he learn how to correctly design a system to get the most out of it while supporting a longer life cycle on equipment, he learned how to use it to diagnose problems in other systems.

“I could work in reverse and use the math and equations and everything we used for design to figure out what the problem was,” he says.

It also gave him a new way to appreciate technology coming into the industry. With the knowledge you have to have in order become certified, “you can better understand what the new technology is,” he says. “You have the background and understanding of how to appreciate it. And then as new things come down the road, you’ve got the opportunity to learn how to sort out something that’s legitimate from the snake oil.”

As new technology is brought into the industry, even the best new devices won’t change the problems caused by a poor beginning design, he says.

“All this technology is great,” says Reid. “But you’ve still got to get the pipeline, the pump, the pivot or whatever method of application you’re using — you still have to get that correct. Otherwise the technology is useless.”

Though he’d always considered himself a professional because of his background, the additional education helped him reach another level, he says. “The certification program took me from farmer to certified irrigation designer, to the point that I served on the IA’s Certification Board for nine years and served as chairman.”

It all goes back to the work he did in the education courses through the IA with Sneed and Rochester, he says.

“I have an eternal gratitude to those two gentlemen,” he says. “I consider myself very fortunate that they had an impact on my life and taught me so that I could be successful in being known as a good designer.”

Kyle Brown is the editor-in-chief of Irrigation Today and can be reached via email.