Oh, we’ve got a lot to get through in our mid-May 2025 installment of Croppie Gossip. From the ridiculous entry prices at the Sutton Veny crop circle, to Andy Thomas giving away free books and his review of the 2024 season, it’s all on this page. We will try and be brief! Here we go…

We have been surprised to hear that the farmer at the Sutton Veny crop circle has been charging visitors a whopping £10 per head to step inside their field of barley. It makes me long for the June evenings last year when peculiar Paul Jacobs was collecting £3 entry on behalf of the farmer at Wilton Windmill. Sure, we understand that if you don’t want to pay you don’t have to go inside, but £10 is a ridiculous amount for a small formation such as the one under discussion.

What’s more, farmer Kate Phillips then set up a GoFundMe appeal seeking £6,800 to cover the ‘damage caused to our most amazing malting barley crop’. Really? A little time spent studying this page on the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board website will show you the prices of malting barley. Bear in mind that the average yield per hectare of the stuff is 8 tonnes, a generous estimate is that 2 tonnes of crop has been lost. By the most recent prices available, that’s not even £400. So, how do we get to £6,800? Wouldn’t it have been easier to just keep your farm gate shut, keep visitors out of the field for two weeks until the immature barley crop was standing back up due to phototropism? We appreciate that this task may be tough and certainly not foolproof after dark, it would at least keep damage to a minimum. 

Sadly, the money issues around this circle have led to readers leaving comments and sending us messages about the situation, with at least three correspondents suggesting the farmer has been acting out of greed, knowingly commissioning this crop circle in a cynical money making exercise. Whilst we certainly don’t think this is the case, we understand how they’ve come to this conclusion.

Here at The Croppie we have always appreciated the writing of Andy Thomas. He’s a true croppie seeking a true mystery and when we’ve communicated with him we have always appreciated his warmth. We may not always agree with everything he writes, but we’ve always found him to be a thoroughly nice man.

We were delighted to see that Andy has been generous enough to make three of his early crop circle books free of charge in PDF format. They are Fields of Mystery, a look at the early crop circle phenomenon in Sussex; Quest for Contact (which we haven’t read yet) and the whimsical Swirled Harvest, the latter a collection of columns from the old Sussex Circular zine he produced. You can get your hands on them by clicking here. They’re a fascinating insight into the crop circle scene from decades past.

Andy has also made his review of the 2024 crop circle season available (click here to read it). He’s made a great job of covering the most pathetic season of all time, and seeing something in it other than a depressing mess, though we will take issue on two points:

1. The Badbury Rings affair wasn’t a false controversy. What we reported here are the facts. We won’t go into them in depth as they’ve already been posted (click here to read the sad tale) but nobody changed the dates on Facebook posts and the screenshots we showed are completely genuine. The design was Dan Davies’s. He made the circle with the help of Dene Hine and probably one or two others. There are no other active circle making teams in the area and, funnily enough, the team’s useful idiot Billy Breen just happened to turn up on the site with his drone in hand, in the morning. Just how did he know about that crop circle if he hadn’t been tipped off? The Croppie rests its case on this one.
2. It was mentioned that one crop circle website gives formations star ratings. If we’re that website then it would appear there is a misunderstanding. We don’t give any crop circles star ratings. It’s not our job to do that. The stars you seen on posts are essentially a score than readers can leave showing how much they like, or dislike a certain post. One thing we will do, though, is call out bullshit where we see it in and around the fields, such as Badbury Rings and the preceding pantomime of the hoax at the Stonehenge Visitors Centre. 

Anyhow, we hope this clears up any confusion and we look forward to reading Andy’s forthcoming review of the (hopefully better) 2025 season.