Over twenty Argentinian farmers and massive fans of football legend Lionel Messi, grew a giant portrait of the popular player in their corn fields, as a tribute.
Lionel Messi has millions of fans all around the world, but nowhere is he more beloved than in his home country of Argentina, where most people see him as nothing less than a god of football. Messi recently led the Argentinian national team to win the 2022 Cup, which made him even more popular than before, but his true fans were sure this was going to be his year even before the tournament started. For example, shortly before last year’s Cup kicked off, more than 20 Argentinian farmers used a farming engineer’s planting algorithm to create giant portraits of Messi in their corn fields.
“I had the idea to make a code that goes in the seeders with Messi’s face as a tribute,” farming engineer Carlos Faricelli told Reuters, adding that he then freely made it available to any farmer brave enough to use it. In the end, more than 20 farmers in different provinces of Argentina joined him.
“We all risked it, because we ‘tattooed’ Messi’s portrait in the middle of the drought,” Faricelli told TN Argentina, but at least some of these risks paid off, as Messi’s iconic portraits started rising up literally from the ground as the corn plants sprouted.
The farming engineer explained that thanks to his special algorithm, the machinery knows how much seed per square meter it has to plant in certain places to create the contrast for various parts of Messi’s face.
“So when this corn grows and an aerial shot is taken, where the plants are closer together and the ground is less visible, a more intense green contrasts with where there are fewer plants and then this kind of agriculture art is created,” Faricelli said.
Planted before last year’s Cup, the “agricultural tattoos” of Messi recently started taking shape, and photos and videos of different fields from all over Argentina have been making their way online.
