Proposal etched in corn

Brian Rueckl wanted his marriage proposal to be unique.

So after a year of planning and 40 hours of work, he asked Stacy Martin to marry him Monday using a cornfield.

Rueckl, 23, had tilled a 40,000-square-foot message, "Stacy will you marry me," and two hearts into a cornfield near the Manitowoc and Kewaunee county line.



Rueckl, an employee of the Farm Service Agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, used his educational background, the fact that his fiancée grew up on a farm and his love for computer-mapping programs to create the message in the 5-acre farm owned by his boss.

He had persuaded farmers to plant the corn there more densely than usual to make it easier to pick, researched corn mazes and received permission from his boss to use the field.

With spray paint and stakes as guides, Rueckl used Geographical Information System software to get the coordinates of the letters and Global Positioning System data to lay out and manually till the land, making the letters feet high and 5 feet long and the hearts 125 feet high. Tilling the message took 10 hours.

"We got bit up by mosquitoes and sunburned, but it was worth it."

And she said yes.