Rice Field Art

I got this in a email from my mom.  No source. Really awesome.

 

 

 






Stunning crop art has sprung up across rice fields in Japan,
but this is no alien creation. 
The designs have been cleverly PLANTED!

Farmers creating the huge displays use no ink or dye. Instead, different colour rice plants
have been precisely and strategically arranged
and grown in the  paddy fields.

As summer progresses and the plants shoot up,
the detailed artwork begins to emerge.


A Sengoku warrior on horseback
has been created from hundreds of thousands of rice plants.
The colours are created by using different varieties of rice plants,
whose leaves grow in certain colours.
This photo was taken in Inakadate, Japan.
Napoleon on horseback can be seen from the skies. This was created by precision planting
and months of planning by villagers and farmers
located in Inkadate, Japan.
Fictional warrior Naoe Kanetsugu and his wife, Osen,
whose lives are featured on the television series 'Tenchijin' appear in fields in the town of
Yonezawa in the Yamagata prefecture of Japan.

This year,
various artwork has popped up in other rice-farming  areas of Japan,
including designs of deer dancers. Smaller works of 'crop-art' can be seen in other rice-farming areas of Japan
such as this image of Doraemon and deer dancers

The farmers create the murals 
by planting little purple and yellow-leafed Kodaimai rice   along with their local green-leafed Tsugaru, a Roman variety,
to create the coloured patterns
in the time between planting and harvesting in September.

The murals in Inakadate cover 15,000 square meters of paddy fields.

From ground level,
the designs are invisible,
and viewers have to climb the mock castle tower of the village office
to get a glimpse of the  work.  

Closer to the image,
the careful placement of the thousands  of rice plants in the paddy fields
can be seen.
Rice-paddy art was started there in 1993
as a local revitalization project,
an idea that grew from meetings of the village committees.
The different varieties of rice plants
grow alongside each other to create the masterpieces.

In the first nine years,
the village office workers and local farmers
grew a simple design of Mount Iwaki every year.

But their ideas grew more complicated and attracted more attention.
In 2005,
agreements between landowners 
allowed the creation of enormous rice paddy art.
A year later,
organizers used computers
to precisely plot the planting of four differently colored rice varieties
that bring the images to life!
TRULY A WORK OF ART!!