I am in LA for the first time, and on the flight over, I was looking out the window (Rockies - cool! Grand Canyon - cooler!) and as we went past the Rockies, there seemed to be lots and lots of what I can only imagine were farmers’ fields, but they were all round, not what I would think of as ‘normal’ shaped…
Anyone know why this is the case?
We’ve discussed this before, but I’m not going to take the time now to search for the relevant threads.
The short answer is that the sprinkler pipes used for irrigation work from a central hub and rotate around the field, creating a circular pattern.
I’ve seen these in Zambia and Zimbabwe.
It’s due to the irrigation system, which is basically a long pole on wheels that swings around from a central point spraying water, hence the circular shape. It makes sense if land is not an issue so you don’t mind ‘wasting the corners’.
ETA What the fat, bald bloke said above.
If I didn’t have such a slow connection I might have been in with the first answer. Ah, well.
Ah - thanks. I apologize for not searching better for the answer, but I am on a crappy hotel connection that kept screwing up.
I recently read an online alternate-universe SF story set in a small town in Nevada – cropland between ranges. And the author, who had lived there for two years in his teens, leaned over backwards to produce verisimilitude about the area, One of the details he included was precisely this – fields where the crops were in circular patterns because of irrigation. (Note, they also had square fields of alfalfa, which apparently needs less water.)
I work right next door to one of them in NC but never knew it until I saw the aerial view (can’t link to that one but
here’s a close-up side view of one in Minnesota:
http://www.phototour.minneapolis.mn.us/locations/new_richmond/6308
Here’s a neat aerial view of a group in Qatar:
and here’s the straight dope, with comparative costs!:
Obviously, they’re crop circles.
Since this has already been thoroughly and correctly answered …
Because round fields makes it so much easier to rotate the crops, duh!