Proposal by GPS

LUXEMBURG, Wisconsin -- Stacy Martin needed a bird's eye view to see her boyfriend's marriage proposal.

Brian Rueckl's proposal came as a 40,000-square-foot message, "Stacy will you marry me?" tilled in a cornfield near the Manitowoc and Kewaunee county line.

"At first I was in shock and forgot to say, 'yes,"' Martin said.

Rueckl, an employee of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Farm Service Agency, persuaded Martin to take an airplane ride with him Monday to take pictures of the land.

The proposal came after a year of planning and 40 hours of work. Rueckl, 23, tilled the message, which included two intersecting hearts, on a farm owned by his boss.

He used geographical software to plot the coordinates of the letters and Global Positioning System data to manually till his message.

"We got bit up by mosquitoes and sunburned, but it was worth it," he said. "It was definitely a good reaction."

Martin, a 22-year-old University of Wisconsin-Green Bay student, said she didn't see the message right away.

"And all this time I was thinking, 'Gosh, I'll never get married,'" she said. "Behind the scenes, he was working on it."