As Halloween approaches, fall activities have kicked into high gear. That includes one outdoor staple: corn mazes. Ohio’s corn maze operators had to be very deliberate to build out this year’s labyrinths.
A seesaw between drought and over-saturation
TourismOhio estimates there are 46 corn mazes in the state this year.
Young’s Jersey Dairy located in Yellow Springs maintains a corn maze, which is its most popular fall activity. Its current maze is nine acres.
“This year is even more different because it's twice as big as we usually have," said John Young, “CIEIO” of Young’s Jersey Dairy. This is the maze’s 29th year.
This year’s design was supposed to create an image of an ice cream cone with Young’s in the middle, along with some pumpkins and corn. But there was a glitch.
“The problem was the planter’s computer went bad while planting, so it didn’t quite look the way it was designed when the corn started growing up,” Young said.
“So we had to go out and modify it the way we did in the early years – mowing over some lines and making some other lines and it turned out to be a much bigger maze than we originally anticipated. That said, it's still a very fun maze this year,” he said.
Some nearby farmers didn’t end up planting corn due to less-than-ideal weather conditions. But Young’s farm caught a good week to plant, he said.
“I would say this year probably was more difficult than other years because there were only a couple small pockets of time where you could have got your corn and still had it yield this much. So we just happened to get lucky,” Young said.
While this year went well for the Young Jersey Dairy Farm, other years forced them to pivot.
“Five, six years ago, we had a real summer drought and the corn just didn't grow. So we had plots of the field that were completely bare, as bare as the path that we're walking on," Young explained. “So we invented a playground in the middle of it. And now, since our customers love that so much, we have it as a part of the entire maze operation.”
Ohio’s weather this year was complex. In addition to drought, there were large, unpredictable rain events. Planting in wet weather can lead to seed rot. Drought can cause plant death in crops due to a lack of water at critical stages of growth.
Trampled paths affect next year’s growth
Pickwick Place in Bucyrus also got lucky with its planting window. The farm planted its corn in late May.
Where they’re located in Crawford County, Ethan Stuckey, co-owner of Pickwick Place, said they were spared from bad drought conditions that afflicted the rest of Ohio. Outside of their own 10-acre maze, they also plant normal corn crops.
“This year was probably the earliest we've gotten to be able to plant things in our area [in] many years, because it dried out [nicely] and it warmed up pretty good,” Stuckey said.
Creating the maze is a year-long effort for their farm, said Stuckey. He starts thinking about designs as early as the winter before.
He usually cuts the maze himself. There aren’t many differences between growing corn for their maze and growing their normal rows of corn, Stuckey said. But people may not know that foot traffic is one extra area of maintenance the farm has to consider.
“The compacted parts do not grow as well. And since our paths are not in the exact same spot every year, we want the corn to grow well there the following year,” he said.
The maze isn’t the end of the story for that corn: both Young’s Jersey Dairy and Pickwick Place sell their maize yields for uses like livestock feed, and grain. Cuts in the corn affect value. But they don’t end up disappointed, as Stuckey succinctly put it for both of them.
“We're gonna maybe take a bit of a financial hit on that side, but we're more than making up for it when we have visitors to our farm to get that experience with the corn maze and the other activities,” Stuckey explained. “And then, the ancillary benefits: maybe they stay and spend some money at our market as well.”
They take care of the corn all the same, said Stuckey, by making sure diseases and weeds don’t arise.
To Stuckey, a successful maze is one that is inviting and well-maintained: “A healthy plant is a healthy maze, which creates a good experience.”
Young’s corn maze is open through Nov. 2..The Pickwick Place corn maze is open through Halloween weekend.
