Fields Of Rice Or Museum Worthy Spectacles?

In America, the closest thing that we normally come to "wild rice" is what we can purchase already dried and poured into convenient little packages.

Oh....but before those technicolored grains are forced to submit inside their cellophane strait jackets, they start out living a footloose and fancy free existance in Asian fields. 

Most of us don't realize just how beautiful traditional green leafed rice paddies are...

but they take on new heights of artistic glory when they are interspersed with other colored varieties like purple and yellow-leafed rice.

Inakadate farmers from the Aomori prefecture in Japan have been strategically lacing their rice fields with remarkable artistic images like these since 1993.

The practice gained such great popularity that it was christened as a yearly tradition.

Many other prefectures have followed suit, but fans claim that the works executed by Inakadate farmers will always be the cream of the rice crop.

The images are visible until the harvest in September.

Now THAT is some serious eco-art!!