Corn Maze 2.0
Midwestern tourist attractions jump into the 21st century with the aid of new technology
Cottonwood Farm's election-themed maze.
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With just a few days left before the election and an endless stream of political ads on TV at all hours, it’s only natural to look for a diversion, and running through a corn maze would be a natural choice.
The only problem is that many corn mazes outside of Chicago are embracing the political season, too. You can get lost in Sen. John McCain’s lips or Sen. Barack Obama’s ears in part of the 32-acre maze at Cottonwood Farm in Crest Hill, or you can challenge yourself to election-themed trivia at stops throughout the 10-acre County Line Orchard corn maze in Hobart, Ind. For the nonpartisan, there’s the 28-acre “Race to D.C.” maze at Richardson Farm in Spring Grove, a maze rendering of Capitol Hill capping one end of the field.
Vanquish whatever images you have of farmers painstakingly sketching their corn mazes on graph paper or slashing into a field with machetes in both hands. Corn maze-making is a big industry. The planning starts up to a year in advance with sketches of possible designs. Most farms turn to outside help to refine those designs and turn them into mazes complete with dead ends. Computer programs do a lot of the heavy lifting and depending on how the maze is going to be carved, those computer drawings can get loaded onto a GPS.
Farmers with big mazes or who just want to laze out can hire companies to do everything from planning the maze to cutting it out with GPS-guided tractors. “We tried to do it ourselves one year and worked on it for three days and then called them to finish it,” confides Mike Williams, the corn maze manager at County Line Orchard. If that sounds a little like cheating, farmers say most visitors don’t mind, even when they find out the secret. “People are usually very interested in how it’s all done,” Williams says. “You would be surprised by the number of people who think we actually plant it in that design.” This year’s design at County Line features the outlines of Illinois and Indiana, with roads connecting the major cities and the names of the two states shaped into paths.
“I could come up with a basic design, but as far as making a maze and having the dead ends and the turns and the trick paths and all that stuff, the computer is much better,” Williams says. Then comes the corn planting. Usually corn gets planted by machine in rows that run either north-south or east-west. But corn maze fields get planted double, meaning the machine goes through once planting east-west rows and a second time seeding north-south rows. That eliminates the gaps between rows and makes for a denser field that you can’t see through.
Once the corn is a few feet tall, it’s time to rip the design into it. There are two main ways to do it: Take that computer drawing and load it into a GPS-equipped tractor, or pull out a whole bunch of stakes, flags, paint, and buckets of Roundup weed spray.
Using a GPS to make a corn maze isn't much different from following the soothing British voice in your car’s GPS. Except, of course, you’re sitting in the caged driver’s seat of a Bobcat plowing down paths of corn for eight straight hours. “You don’t even look at where you are, you just sit there and look at the computer screen and you go forward, you go backward,” says Paul Siegel, who owns Cottonwood Farm with his wife. It may not sound glamorous, but doing it that way lets corn maze designers carve perfect curves in paths that would be hard to accomplish any other way.
“We basically have no straight lines in the whole thing,” says Robert Richardson, one of the owners of Richardson Farm. “Everything is curving and bending in order to make what I think is a more true picture.” Perfectionists will be pleased to know that mazes made this way are also accurate to less than a foot. So while you may be lost in the maze, paradoxically, the GPS maze-maker knows exactly where you are.
The other option relies less on high-tech tools but doesn’t take any less time, Siegel says. Workers split the field into a grid, marking the corners of each square with stakes and flags. Then, working on one square at a time with copies of the computerized drawings in hand, they paint each sprouting stalk that needs to go. While that sounds painstaking, it can go quickly with several people working on different parts of the maze. Then comes the Roundup, sprayed on each baby corn stalk that got a paint mark.
Siegel has been doing it this way for the last two years, and it gives him a leg up in one noteworthy way: The view from the air can be more detailed. That’s because people walking through the field can cut out small sections to make, say, an eyebrow, without needing to connect a pathway to it. The brute force of the GPS-equipped Bobcat can’t do that.
Either way, a good roto-tilling down all the paths a few weeks later smooths out the dirt and knocks down any weeds that may have popped up. The agriculturally attuned may have figured out that Siegel had to cut out Obama’s visage in late May, before the Democratic primary race had been decided. “When we had to decide what’s it going to be this year, who are the candidates going to be, we kind of took a chance,” Siegel says. “One way or another, Obama was going to be a popular figure.”
So what happens to the maze at the end of the season? Most of the time, it just gets plowed under. “We make more money on the corn that’s not there, the corn that’s cut out,” says Margaret Richardson, Robert’s mother at Richardson Farm. “We make more money on the people walking on the paths.” Williams, at County Line Orchard, harvests what’s left of the corn and sells it for feed. “In this day and age it all goes to an elevator and it gets sold from there,” he says. “It may end up in ethanol or E85.” Yes, the gas you burn driving to one of these farms to cut your Christmas tree next month could be made from the corn maze you’ll get lost in this weekend.
