Flying over southwest Kansas, you will see luscious fields of sorghum and corn, but in the summer, you will see something else over Ormiston Farms.
Rocky Ormiston took a new twist on precision planting this year, turning his sorghum fields into head-turning works of art. Ormiston says that it all started with a little liquid courage: “Well, actually some beers at a bar. I’m sure a lot of stories start like that, and we have the technology to do this, and we’re like, ‘hey, let’s throw something together.’”
Some of his artwork includes the 2019 Super Bowl champions, the Kansas City Chiefs; the K-State University Power Cat; and presidential campaigns.
He works with a crop consulting and ag production company to make the magic and build his precision planting prescriptions.
According to Ormiston, “After we decide what we were going to do, we work with Crop Quest in Dodge City and they create a shape file from an image that I send them, and they’ll create that file, move it into a geo-referenced circle and in those you’ve got these points, GPS points, through the image, and they’ll assign that variety...It’s just that simple. You tell the computer to ‘giddy up,’ and it turns out like it did.”
He says that it took awhile for the world to get out. He kept it a secret at first.
What is in store for next year? That is also a secret. Ormiston says that he will spill the beans on twitter, along with tips on how you can turn your farm into a canvas.