Originally posted by CINY8
In a couple of other threads people have mentioned wanting to see a hummingbird crop circle - they got their wish!

'It makes me chuckle sometimes," says John Lundberg, gazing across a wheat field in central England. "If somebody had said to me 10 years ago that today I'd be flying all over the world making crop circles for big companies and being paid for it, I'd have said they were mad."

The rewards for the crop circle entrepreneurs are high and growing. The AMD job was the group's most lucrative so far. Mr Lundberg is unwilling to give precise details, but says the contract was worth "tens of thousands of pounds". The budget for the Big Brother campaign was estimated to be £250,000, and for Orange's Wiltshire project about £100,000. "We are doing well," Mr Lundberg said. "We are all earning a very healthy living from crop circles."

Landowners are benefiting too, receiving payments - from the companies or circle-makers - for allowing their fields to be used for the work. The income easily covers the damage to crops, leaving farmers with a profit.

Richard Cowan, who farms 1,500 arable acres in Oxfordshire, has twice - last
year and in 2002 - allowed Mr Lundberg's company to make crop circles on his land for Orange. He was unwilling to say how much he was paid, but another farmer, in Wiltshire, said that the going rate was "at least £500 for each circle and sometimes much more". Mr Cowan said that the circles had caused him to him to lose about £200 worth of crop, giving him a "decent profit" from the deal.

He would be "unhappy" if people crept on to his land at night to make crop
circles - unless he was properly compensated. "Nobody wants damage to their crops, but the key thing is whether you are paid for it," he said. "I'm happy for my fields to be used as long as I know about it and I get compensation. I used to believe crop circles were made by aliens, but there's no money in aliens. It's much better this way."