Farm Hacking: 7 Amazing Corn Mazes

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If there’s one thing we’ve got a LOT of here in America, it’s corn. In the past few years Corn Mazes have become a wildly popular fall activity for all ages. We’ve enjoyed many ourselves and part of what we like about them is that they’re a hack. Whether made by the farmer down the road or a professional company most now use GPS to ensure a fun, challenging, and cool looking corn maze.

We spoke with [Scott Skelly] who owns Corn Mazes America, read the interview after the break. [digg=http://digg.com/arts_culture/Farm_hacking_7_amazing_corn_mazes]When [Scott] originally started building corn mazes they were using a grid system to layout the mazes without GPS. He knew there was a better way and started looking into some solutions. He spent quite a bit of time looking for software and talking to developers about how to meet his needs. In the end, he designed his own system using both commercial and freely available software, getting everything to talk to each other for his final product. Here’s one of his designs from 2006 at his own farm in Wisconsin:

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A maze starts as nothing more than a large field of corn. The design is created using a computer, then translated into GPS coordinates by fitting it into a field whose outline coordinates were previously captured on foot. Once the field coordinates are reconciled with the map design the data is used in one of two ways; the routes can be made by tilling under a path when the corn is very young, or more commonly it is cut lawn-mower-style when the corn is anywhere from knee-high to full grown. This corn-meets-satellite hack makes for a whole lot of fun!

We’ve collected 7 more of our favorite corn maze aerial pictures and posted them after the break. When you’ve finished building your zombie escaping from the grave load up the family and visit your local maize maze.

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