Warner Farm's corn maze earns a third of its income from 8 of 150 acres

NPR's Salt blog reported in October 2016 on Mike's Maze at Warner Farm in Sunderland, Massachusetts. Mike Wissemann's family and landscape artist Will Sillin had been cutting an 8-acre cornfield maze for 17 years, with stalk-formed replicas of the Mona Lisa, Einstein and Dali. The method resembles a Skill-o-Gram puzzle: corn is planted on a grid, the design is broken into squares and scaled up, and varying the density of corn makes the image darker or lighter, like a giant halftone.

In 2000 the tools were graph paper and an ATV with an inaccurate GPS. Now Jess Wissemann, the family's daughter-in-law, draws the design in Adobe Illustrator, sends it to Rob Stouffer of Precision Mazes in Missouri, and he overlays it on his tractor's GPS so the cutters can track where they are. This cut the time to carve a maze from a month to one day, though the mower cannot cut narrower than 5 feet, so fine detail is pulled by hand while a drone streams video back to her.

The economics are the point: the maze draws more than 25,000 people a year and supplies about a third of the farm's income. 'We farm 150 acres, and the maze is only 8 acres. So the return per acre of the maze is pretty phenomenal', Jess says; it has been 'a crucial way to diversify our farm'. NPR contrasts Treinen Farm in Lodi, Wisconsin, which cuts its 15-acre maze with graph paper and a stake-and-flag grid because it fears GPS would blur its complex designs.

Corn is already planted on a grid, so a picture is simply a pattern of stalks to keep or remove.

A GPS tractor shrinks maze-cutting from a month of work to a day.

Visitors pay per head, so a few acres out-earn their crop; about 25,000 people come every year.

The corn is still harvested in November and fed to the farm's corn furnace, so the land does double duty.

Find a use for the land itself that people pay to experience; a small share of acreage can out-earn the crop it displaces.

The 2016 theme, 'See America', marked the National Park Service's 100th anniversary. Each year's maze is destroyed at harvest, which Jess says does not trouble her, since the visitors do most of the trampling. The NPR piece reports no figures beyond the third of income and 25,000 visitors.