Crop Art

Also known as landscape art and is essentially coloured rice crops which can only be seen from an Ariel view and take months to grow. The canvas is the size of the fields that it occupies.Images are created on large areas of land, beginning with planning and design commencing many months in advance. Planting, mowing and on occasions burning or plowing is carried out in the latter stages.

Crop Art used by marketers falls under Guerrilla Marketing because these creations make for engaging experiences, generating buzz and publicity. The artistic Guerrilla stunt uses experts in the field (literally), who are equip with the relevant knowledge and use highly specialised techniques and tools. They Crop Art also utilises highly specialised equipment and intelligent ideas and design.

The impressive photos and video above display ‘murals’ grown by farmers in Japan, Inakadate, using different coloured rice plants. The crops were produced in summer months after they had a chance to grow and are created by planting purple and yellow-leafed kodaimai rice along with their local green-leafed tsugaru roman variety.

These japanese pieces of art cover 15,000 square metres and anyone interested in seeing it either can view it from the air or locals can climb the village's castle tower.

Using computers, farmers can draw the design and calculate a precise layout and plan for planting rice. Many coloured variations of rice were used for this particular project and the village’s Crop Art attracts more than 15,000 visitors to the area every summer (Inakadate is only home to around 8,700 people).

Creating enormous images and placing them upon the earth is not novel. The Nazca people of ancient Peru created vast geoglyphs of animals and geometric shapes by scratching lines into the Earth's surface as did other ancient peoples.

Crop Art is a creative Guerrilla Marketing technique which has inspired many brands and musicians to produce similar large scale artwork on areas of land, across the world. Although these imitations of Crop Art use less specialised techniques and equipment they still make impressive Guerrilla Marketing stunts. See ‘The Streets’ creation within the images above.