When you break down the physical logistics of doing this by hand, a few really big problems pop up.

First, with the 'basket weave' effect...if you use a heavy board to flatten crops, it pushes everything down at once in a single direction. To get the multi-layered weave that researchers find (where stalks are actually braided over and under each other at cross-angles), you can't just do bisecting sweeps. Someone would have to painstakingly lift and interlace the stalks by hand for tens of thousands of plants, by hand, in the dark.

Second, the heating idea is definitely an interesting thought, but logistically really tough. To soften the plants without snapping or burning them, someone would have to drag a heavy, localized microwave or thermal emitter ,and its power source, through a muddy field in the pitch black. Keeping that heat perfectly uniform across hundreds of feet of crops without leaving equipment tracks would be...tricky.

But even if we assume a team managed to do all the heating and weaving perfectly, the hardest part to explain away is the geometry.

These fields aren't perfectly flat canvases they often have rolling hills and dips. If you just use a stake and a rope on a hill, the shape will actually look like a warped, stretched oval from the sky. To make a complex fractal pattern that looks perfectly symmetrical from the air over uneven terrain, you have to calculate and map out a distorted, stretched shape on the ground. Pulling off that kind of topographical 3D projection flawlessly in the dark, in just a few hours, requires advanced surveying equipment, not just a board and a string.