Behind the ubiquitous fall attraction is an industry grown around technology. Companies design mazes for clients and tour the United States machine-planting corn or whittling away at pre-planted fields.  

Corn maze construction is a niche industry, but the technology behind it, not so much. The key player in the corn maze game is a tool you probably use every day.      

Cheddar Explains

How The Most Elaborate Corn Mazes are Made

This is Mike's maze in sunderland massachusetts, what you're watching is a time lapse of a tractor carving a maze into an eight acre cornfield. The process seems straightforward, but corn maze creation is surprisingly technical. Behind the ubiquitous fall attraction is an industry grown around. Technology companies designed mazes for clients and tore the United States. Machine planting corn or whittling away at pre planted fields. Corn maze construction is a niche industry, but the technology behind it, not so much the key player in the corn maze game is a tool you probably use every day before corn was widely recognized as mais material. The english were cutting through hedges, trapezoidal Hampton court Palace mais, commissioned by William the third around the year 1700 is known to be the oldest surviving hedge maze in the U. K. The first modern corn maze is said to be the brainchild of don France who created the amazing maze that's M. A IZ in pennsylvania in 1993. NPR reported in 2016 that France got the idea on a cross country flight over midwest farmland. As the story goes, he noticed the clean lines of crop fields below and imagined an american version of the english garden maze. There's no one way to make a corn maze, but early maize making often involve drawing the design on a grid and cutting trails accordingly. By the mid two thousand's GPS, technology had advanced and maize makers realized they could use it to shave hours if not days off planning and production time corn mazes became a considerable revenue stream for farms and a widespread attraction at fall fairs and festivals. Today there are two primary methods of creating a coordinates. One is to drive a tractor like machine through a cornfield to carve out a path. The other is to plant corn in the maze formation, then take a roto tiller in to tidy it up Later. Both involved machinery propelled by commercial grade gps. So on our phone, the gps that we have to use for maps in our cars, that is generally plus or minus about 10 ft and so that's perfect for that application, not sufficient in terms of creating a maze when you're designing on such tight constraints. In terms of space gps makes things easy. Weather remains an unpredictable variable that affects the corn crop. Some companies would rather not take responsibility for the corn growing itself and others prefer to plant most of the cases that we create now are done with our actor system. We developed a computerized planter and it drops the seeds just whether they need to be dropped so that the maze design grows up as the maze design, they will have to go back to Whether you plant in maze formation or cut halves out later. The most complex mazes require substantial acreage. Take this mates at Richardson Adventure Farm in spring grove Illinois, two hours outside of Chicago. They came to us with the idea so they told us they wanted to be 60 years upon, they wanted to include the car, they wanted the actors and they wanted to conceive buildings that was in one of the movies. But we actually do drop the design. Richardson started hosting corn mazes in 2001 on an 18 acre plot. So I think it was 18 acres at first year, but now we're at 28 acres. I do know of a couple more that have more acreage, but fewer miles of trails. So definitely the world's largest, most intricately designed corn maze, The bigger the maze, the more detailed it can be price and production time vary with design and planning, often starting months in advance, but no matter the size rob likens the cornfield to a canvas and the tractor like machine to a five ft wide paintbrush for people to comfortably walk through the maze. We've learned that in a five ft wide path is an ideal size and we want to have enough barrier between our paths that when you're standing in one path, you can't see an adjacent path for precision mazes. That barrier is 15 ft wide. That's taken into account when the corn is planted, corn plants are planted on 30 inch rows, so there's 30 inches from the center of one road to the center of an adjacent road. For a corn maze purposes, we recommend clients actually cross plant their field and so the roads will go north and south and they'll turn around the plant in east and west, which then leaves us with a 30 inch grid five ft will take out two rows of corn. So for intricate illustrations to be visible aerially, the canvas has to be proportionally large. Now, when it comes to being a consumer of a corn maze, there are a few things you should know. One google maps won't lead you out, but some corn mazes offer QR codes that bring visitors to a map that shows their location and progress. Other mazes, like Richardson's are organized in sections. It's not a one way and one way out, multiple entrances and exits. But they That's because it is so huge out there that we don't want people to feel hopelessly lost. So when they want to come out within 10 minutes, they just head into that giant tower and they're out of the amazing, go to the bathroom and get a drink, get a donut, go back in and do some more if they want to. The tech has changed over the years. But what hasn't is the multi generational appeal of getting lost or finding one's way in the stocks