Crop Circles

glennmac · Sep 19, 2000

Are not just supernatural phenomena in England.

I have been traveling by air a lot the past two weeks all over the country, and looking down at our beautiful country with the eyes of a new tractor owner. It is amazing how much of our country is farmland. It seems like almost everything that is not mountain, desert or water is farm.

As I was looking down at eastern Colorado I remembered the first time I ever flew to the West. There are thousands of square miles in this region covered by huge (at least an acre) circular patterns. Some of these are green with some type of crop; others are brown with nothing growing. These circular crop areas diminish as you move eastward, and are completely gone when you reach Illinois. They are replaced by the square/rectangular farm outlines that we see in the East.

I have always assumed these circular areas are created by some sort of irrigation device. Now that I am beginning to work my own land, I am curious as to the details of this irrigation methodology.

What is used? A really long pivoting pipe? What moves it? How is it supported on the ground? Wheels? Does this mean that the crops are grown in circular rows?

A New Englander's ignorance.

Bird · Sep 19, 2000

glennmac, I don't know how well I could describe them, but yes, in many areas of the west that were once too arid to farm, they sometimes have a well at the center of that circle, other times water pumped to the center, the vertical pipe, and the sprinkler is a very long horizontal pipe supported by a series of wheels, sometimes 6' to 8' tall steel wheels, sometimes pairs of pneumatic tires and the whole thing turns in a circle around the well or vertical pipe. Of course, there are also somewhat similar sprinklers that are not attached to a solid pipe at one end, just a flexible hose, and the entire rig rolls across a field on square or rectangular fields. There are a lot of irrigation wells out west that are powered by old car, truck, or tractor engines, some gasoline, some diesel, some natural gas, in addition to the wells that have electric pumps. I did some gas leakage surveys in west Texas and eastern Arizona and found their irrigation systems to be fascinating.

Bird

gordon · Sep 19, 2000

Glenn I'm no expert on this by all means but I'll give it a shot. The crops are planted straight line. The reason for the circle showing up is that part of the crop is getting the proper amount of water.

The systems that are installed in this area pivit from the center and are 8'-12' off the ground with spray heads going along the center pipe. The center or supply pipe can be hundreds of feet long depending on size of field and also water supply. The center pipe has small sprayer heads every 6-10 feet. The pipe is supported by a triangles going down to the ground with the wide part of the triange having a tire at each of the lower points. Some of these tires are driven by electric moters. That is what makes the system move and also dictates how fast the system moves as well. Usually at the end of the supply pipe there is a whirlly bird that throws water out to get maximun reach after the framing of the system stops. The pumps that pump the water are 4" to 12" dia pumps with diesel moters with 4-6 or 8 cylinders.
That is the main style used in Delaware.
Hope this helps
Gordon

scruffy · Sep 20, 2000

Glennmac, in Oregon, they were referred to as 'pivot wheel irrigation' systems. Two methods were mentioned above as the water source. First, the deep well, sometimes as much as 15,000 feet to hit a good aquafer. The second is the irrigation water supplied by some entity or other, and piped to the pivot in the center of the field. Cost is totally dependant on length, and water source. Most were leased due to the cost quite frequently of a mil plus for the size of 'tract' to be irrigated. OUT of My BALLPARK! Even the pump for one of those deep wells is out of my league! Hope this helps some.

gordon · Sep 20, 2000

Wow 15,000 feet thats a deep well. In Delaware 120' is the average deepwell depth. Then again we are at sealevel.
Gordon

scruffy · Sep 20, 2000

Gordon, the only reason I know those particular facts is we looked very very closely at buying 360 acres out in Christmas Valley, Oregon. It had the pivot wheel, and a 15000 foot deep well, the pivot wheel was leased from Columbia River Irrigation over in Hermiston, cost to buy? Just over a mil. We backed out of the deal at the last moment, as that well just scared the dickens out of me. I could see nothing but a heartache with it. Many areas had shallower wells, but they generally went to bad from saline.
Another problem in the area. All in all, it was just a little to insecure for long term farming in my opinion.

RobertN · Sep 22, 2000

Is it possible it was a 1500' deep well?

A 15,000' deep well would work out to over 2-1/2 miles deep!

RobertN in Shingle Springs Calif

scruffy · Sep 22, 2000

RobertN, that's what I asked when we were dickering with the Real Estate, the answer I got was the 15thousand. A mighty deep aquifer if you asked me! The 1500 seemed a much more reasonable figure, but I was told that at that level, it had a tendancy to be saline, or would turn to saline loaded water. The cost was out of the question for a replacement if anything went belly up with the current irrigation well. The real estate could have been wrong, (due to incorrect information), but they sure didn't want to back off from that point. At $200 grand for the place, I wasn't willing to go any further. Had a Rye crop on the ground, but Alfalfa was the norm for the area.