How Emrgy is Disrupting the Hydropower Industry
T-L’s Business in New Zealand and Around the World
T
-L Irrigation is a family-owned equipment manufacturer founded in 1955. Based in Hastings, Nebraska, it is active around the world, from the Middle East to New Zealand. Its hydrostatic drive center-pivot system is versatile and easy for clients around the world to use. T-L’s international business puts it in contact with foreign competitors and even intellectual property pirates who seek to benefit from others’ research and development. In this interview, Randy George, T-L’s vice president of international sales, speaks with Irrigation Leader Managing Editor Joshua Dill about his company’s business around the world, with a focus on New Zealand. Joshua Dill: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position.
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and an Irish/Saudi Arabian company offered me a job. The following February, I went back over to Saudi Arabia on a contract. The company had a hard time finding people and had a bonus system in which you got a 12½ percent bonus your first year, a 25 percent bonus your second year, a 50 percent bonus your third year, and a 75 percent bonus your fourth. If you stayed 5 years, you got a full year’s salary as a bonus. I continued renewing the contract and stayed for 5 years. From there, I transferred with the same company to Georgia, in the United States, where it had set up a huge dairy operation to address the deficit of fresh milk in the Southeast in the late 1980s. We installed center pivots and huge wastewater systems, since the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was just learning then what to do with all the waste coming off these dairy confinements. I then went back to Saudi Arabia for a second dealer and helped it set up operations in the 1990s after the Gulf War. I stayed for a couple years, and I have been working at T-L Headquarters since 1993. I took over as vice president of international sales in 2001 and am still in that position today. Joshua Dill: For those who don’t know much about the company, would you give a quick overview of T-L?
PHOTO COURTESY OF RANDY GEORGE.
Randy George: I finished school and started working at T-L Irrigation in 1981, doing production work. I went into the service/spare parts department, and they shipped me to Saudi Arabia. I was 19 years old and had never flown before in my life. I worked there for a month setting up a new dealer with a warehouse, inventory, and stock. Then I came back home,
A pivot point in New Zealand.
