The cost of crop circles

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Let me recommend a fascinating book about crop circles: "Round in Circles," Jim Schnabel, Prometheus Books. It's a history of the phenomenon from the beginning of the modern age to Doug & Dave, with an epilogue about the author's experience swirling circles.

The book includes this interesting paragraph about the cost of crop circles:


Now first of all, I should point out that the act of making a crop circle causes little or no material damage. I have heard it said countless times by circles-prone farmers that, unless a formation has been severely trampled by tourists, it can be harvested without loss merely by lowering the blades of the harvesting machine. Anyone who doubts this should hire a plane and fly over an untouristed or even a moderately touristed formation, just after the harvest, and observe how its downswept stalks have disappeared with the rest of that field's crop. Only the formations which draw crowds up until harvest time will be so flattened as to be unreachable by the harvester, and these will have amply compensated the farmer for the damage caused. For example, the formations in and around East Field in 1991 could not have amounted to an acre of flattened wheat altogether. An acre of wheat sells for about 350 pounds. The receipts from the thousands of tourists who visited East Field that year, at 1 pound per head, must have run to at least ten times the value of the lost wheat.


~~ Paul

[Goshawk]

But, that's only assuming you're lucky enough to be able to get people to pay to see your crop circle, and you can cash in by selling tickets. Not all farmers are that lucky.

[Soapy Sam]

It also assumes the crop is ready to harvest when "circled" or nearly so. Corn flattened before the seeds are ripened is surely unlikely to ripen?

I doubt the actual cost is huge, compared to natural wind damage, but I know I'd be pretty irate if I saw people deliberately trampling my property.

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Certainly not all farmers manage to attract enough media attention to end up with lots of sightseers. But the book would have us believe that a goodly portion do, at least in the UK.

I don't think that most circles are made in cornfields, corn being rather tough. It's usually wheat or rape or something similar. I bet it will ripen just fine.

Paragraph 4 here:

http://www.circlemakers.org/radiofourmation.html

~~ Paul

[neutrino_cannon]

Originally posted by Goshawk
But, that's only assuming you're lucky enough to be able to get people to pay to see your crop circle, and you can cash in by selling tickets. Not all farmers are that lucky.

They have shotguns to ensure that they do.


Regardless of the problems involved, I'm sure it's better than cow tipping.

Perhaps there should be some crop-circler's code of ethics?

[Soapy Sam]

Paul - In the UK, "corn" tends to mean any cereal crop, especially to a non agrospecialist like myself. I imagine you take "corn" to mean "Maize" ("Indian Corn"?) . It's still a quite rare crop in the UK. Most of our cereals would be oats, wheat or barley.

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

You Brits! What cards. Using corn to mean crop.

Anyway, I'd bet that non-maize crops would ripen fine after being swirled, as long as they weren't then trampled for weeks afterward.

~~ Paul

[Rolfe]

Originally posted by Soapy Sam
Paul - In the UK, "corn" tends to mean any cereal crop, especially to a non agrospecialist like myself. I imagine you take "corn" to mean "Maize" ("Indian Corn"?) . It's still a quite rare crop in the UK. Most of our cereals would be oats, wheat or barley. Sam, "corn" in Scotland was traditionally oats, and in England it was wheat.

I think this is getting a bit fluid though, especially since there's a lot more barley than oats grown in Scotland these days. Maize? Never saw that till I went to Germany, and never found out where the seed-heads hid till last year when I strayed into a field of the stuff in the south of England. Don't think they grow it north of the Thames!

So since the whole crop circles thing is essentially English, I suspect the commonest crop is wheat.

Rolfe.

[Goshawk]

Whether or not a crop of wheat is salvageable depends totally on what growth stage the wheat was at when its stems were broken, and how badly the stems were broken.

These are reports from hail and severe weather damage, but the principle is the same.

http://cropwatch.unl.edu/archives/1999/crop99-16.htm
Some wheat heads on downed plants may have stayed intact and be harvestable, depending on the plant stage, although significant losses are expected.

< snip >

For wheat where the heads are intact but the plant's down, a pick-up reel or stripper header may help save some of the crop, Smith said. A pick-up reel, also know as a Hume reel in some areas, has fingers that go under the downed wheat and tend to lift up the crop as it engages the cutter bar. Smith said stripper headers have been reported to be very effective with downed wheat. With the stripper header, the reel turns backward from a conventional reel, catching the wheat in a groove and stipping the grain from the head as the reel rotates. This system takes little straw and can increase combine capacity by 20%-40%. Notice he's talking about saving only "some" of the crop.