Valley Platform Creates High Switching Costs

Valley is using software and connected hardware to turn a steel irrigation machine into an operating system for the farm. Once a grower is running pivots, pumps, soil probes, flowmeters, weather stations, and alerts inside Valley 365 or AgSense 365, switching is no longer just replacing the pivot. It means retraining staff, reconnecting field devices, and giving up a single screen that controls daily irrigation work.1 2 3 4

• Valley has built this around a very large installed base. Valmont said in its June 16, 2026 Investor Day that it has 250,000 pivots globally, and tied that base directly to recurring parts, service, and technology revenue. That makes software attachment valuable even before a farmer buys another machine.1
• The product is sticky because it reaches beyond the pivot itself. Valley lists remote control of irrigation machines plus connections for pumps, flowmeters, soil moisture probes, weather sensors, and grain monitoring, all feeding into one interface. The farmer is not just buying equipment, they are wiring operating data from the field into Valley’s system.2 3 4
• The clearest comparable is Lindsay’s FieldNET. Lindsay also sells remote monitoring, map based control, water use data, and agronomic recommendations, and it explicitly says FieldNET can work with almost any electric pivot brand. That shows the competitive fight is increasingly over the software layer and mixed fleet control, not only whose metal pivot is in the field.5 6 7

The market is heading toward whole farm water management, where the winner owns the dashboard farmers check every day. If Valley keeps expanding from pivot control into pumps, sensors, diagnostics, and agronomic decision support, its installed base becomes a distribution channel for higher margin software and aftermarket revenue, not just future equipment replacement.1 2 3 5 7