Daily Times

LOS CONDORES: Lionel Messi has been immortalised in tributes ranging from tattoos to murals after leading Argentina’s national football team to win the football World Cup. Now his face can be seen from the heavens too on a specially designed cornfield. The field in Los Condores in central Cordoba province was sown using an algorithm that calculated where seeds would need to be planted so that when the corn grew it created a huge visual image of Messi’s bearded visage. “For me Messi is unbeatable,” said Maximiliano Spinazze, the crop farmer who planted the unusual crop formation as a celebration of the team’s victory, their first World Cup since Diego Maradona led the team in 1986. “Now they are world champions, I am delighted this can be expressed by planting the crop.” The soccer-mad South American country is a major agricultural producer and the third-largest global exporter of corn. Farming is its main export driver, though football may be its top claim to fame. Carlos Faricelli, a farming engineer, designed the coding for the machines sowing the seeds that enabled them to plant in a precise pattern to create the eventual image, with certain areas denser with seeds than others.