Anyone see that piece on crop circles on More4 News last night (you can watch it again on my blog).

I got annoyed watching it - it banged on about how they were "summer spectaculars" and "art on a grand scale". At no point did it see fit to mention they're acts of criminal damage that cost farmers a lot of money!

 

 

 

 i agree aneyone who is caught making crop circals should be locked up and when the crop is ripe gival a knife and has to harvist the damaged area by hand. As well has having to pay for damages and all that. to put it plain and silpley it is just a big form of vandalisum its no differant to someone in the citty going up and ding grafety on the side of ashop or somthing its the exact same just bigger and cosidrubley more expensive.

 

Never mind making them pay, get one of the bird scaring rockets used in crops and fire that at the little bugger if you see them, they would soon go (i actually know some one who did that in order to get people of his land)

 

 Does this count as a crop circle

"Seighford Village Fete 12 July 1pm"

In reply to my own picture above , it was cut with an 8ft grass topper the O's are 30ft the turning circle of my tractor and the capital letters are 60ft

The photograph was taken by the local glidimg club, from the ground level it is impossible to read

The picture went all the local press

Owd Fred

I just read you email - thats pretty impressive!!

A number of years ago the aliens appeared in our area to write a certain four letter word in some wheat on a hill, They even came back after it had been harvested to dig the message in the stubble before it was culitvated. I guess their probing wasn't going very well. Its when they have them on and then go on about how clever the people are to produce them so accurately and such designs which them makes more think that they should have a try which gets me.

At least if you made a mistake, no-one would know.  It reminds me of an incident at school when some bright sparks wrote 'What we want is Watnenys' (a well known advertising slogan at the time) in white paint on the cricket pavilion roof.

The Beak was so enraged he threatened to keep the whole school in for an hour's detention if the culprits didn't own up.  He carried out his threat the following week and we all reckoned the guilty parties were too ashamed to turn themselves in because they would have had to admit they couldn't spell 'Watneys'!

Although the offending words could mainly be seen from the school, they were also visible from the top deck of passing busses.  To spare the reputation of the school's English department, the whole roof had to be painted over in red paint.

 Talking of  spelling mistakes,

If you look real close , I missed the R out of Seighford, cannot tell you how many times I was told about it . Put it down to my age and dyselecia  ( dyslexia)

 Owd Fred

I'm sorry to trouble you but I wondered if you could help settle a difference of opinion for me. It seemed logical that I pop this question to your forum, being that I'm more likely to get a genuine opinion from the parties affected. Recently a friend of mine has become excited about the prospect of making crop circles. I pointed out that this could be potentially damaging to farmers and their livelihoods, but was reassured that making crop circles doesn't actually kill the crops; it just flattens them but they can still be harvested. Therefore, no damage whatsoever. This didn't quite ring true with me, but I failed to come back with a valid counter argument, being that I have little farming experience and all of the information that I have been able to gather has been biased towards promoting crop circle activities. I decided that I needed to hear the view from the horses mouth, so to speak. Sure, there are instances where some farmers have made a profit from the publicity surrounding a circle that suddenly appeared on their land. But I suspect that these cases are few and far between, and I suspect also that most farmers affected have suffered losses as a consequence. I wondered - do any of the forum members have direct experience of this? Any advice/info/stories etc. would be very much appreciated. Tim / "canadean farm hand": you refer to this as a costly expense. I'd be particularly interested in how expensive you estimate this would cost per typical "work of graffiti". Thanks in advance for your kind comments. By the way, a few arguments *for* crop circles go something like this: 1. "no actual harm is done as long as the crop can still be harvested at the usual time without any significant loss of value" 2. "modern combine harvesters mow pretty low above the ground and like you said yourself, the "croppies" are probably doing the real harm" [i think croppies are the hapless fools who visit the sites looking for alien jism or flying saucer bits - however i don't see how this indemnifies the circle-makers] 3. "as far as i know there has never been a conviction or a even a serious complaint by a farmer" [i suspect that this is not entirely the case] Anyone care to comment?

Flattened crops can still be harvested but it takes a lot more time, diesel and effort than it would if they were still standing. As Canadean Farm Hand said, making crop circles is the equivalent of graffitying someone's wall with the only difference being that no one ever gets prosecuted for damaging a farmers crops.

Hi gmjones.. it's a fair question. The problem is that sometimes crops are so badly flattened (and over such a big area) that they can't be harvested. That's farmers' principal complaint. And there is also the issue of whose crops/land it is to begin with.

Personally, I haven't heard of any farmers making any money out of crop circles - but I can't say definitively say this hasn't happened.

I guess the fact that most are done anonymously (and under the cover of darkness) highlights how the people who do it know that what they're doing won't be appreciated.

Of course, some people believe they are the work of extra-terrestrials (I most definitely don't)