First of all thanks for being here. So I’ll try to answer your questions in the context of the two possible creators of these designs: man made or “something else” (for the record I think the formation in this post above was man made)

Man made:

As far as I know their method uses planks with string attached to both ends that they hold while they step on the plank to flatten the crop. This flattening causes harm to the plants by either breaking the stems or creasing them in a way that is unrecoverable to the farmer. So naturally the majority of farmers are very much against this. Recently in the 6/23 Owslebury formation the farmer actually dumped a load of manure in the middle of the formation to try to prevent people from coming into the field to check out the formation for themselves.

“Something else”:

So to even begin to suggest a different possibility than the mainstream view of “they’re all manmade without exception”, you need a bit of background information which I would suggest starting with this documentary, but just to sum up some of the buzzwords: bent nodes, expulsion cavities, microscopic metal spheres, chalk aquifers, microwave radiation, energy/magnetism distortions (swinging compass needles/tech failures/drained batteries), “ghost” circles, squaring the circle/perfect geometry/fractal/mathematical theorems, the interactive effect, time distortions, balls of light, shafts of light, etc.

In the case of the “genuine” circles, the plant stems are bent several inches off the ground so that there is an empty gap between the ground and the floor of the formation so that it “crunches” under foot like walking in snow. However the plants themselves are not harmed and eventually start to rise vertically again due to phototropism (the tendency of plants to grow towards the sun), so the farmer can still harvest the plants inside the formation most of the time. In some of the fields that formations frequently appear, the farmer would charge an entrance fee to allow the public to visit the formation which would recompense for any potential damage.

As for videos of one being made, I can’t currently find a video of people making one but NBC hired the “Team Satan” team to make a formation for their show “Unmasked: The Secrets of Deception”. As for the “something else”, well there is no video that directly shows them being made (other than the controversial 1996 Oliver Castle video that is widely seen as being a hoax nowadays). But there’s also this video that shows orbs over a field then cuts to the next morning apparently inside the formation where the orbs were the night before. If nothing else this video shows the intricate ground lay with knots and “nests” made in the formation.