It has taken lots of practice to perfect our maze creation process... 25 years of it to be exact! Our first maze was created in 1996 with a modified weed whacker and took us three long weeks to complete. With years of experience and thousands of mazes now under our belt, thank goodness it doesn't take nearly that long anymore! Our process begins with a simple concept that we design path-by-path on a computer. Next, after the corn has begun to grow, we transfer our design to the field and cut the pathways. Our exact process is an art form we've tried to perfect over the years, but it essentially comes down to using simple geometry, measurements, and intuition to create the perfect finished maze. By matching points from our computer design with rows in the cornfield , we like to say we are creating the maze in a way that is actually quite similar to a dot-to-dot game on the back of a cereal box!

In most cases, the mazes are created from either field corn or sorghum, rather than the sweet corn most folks eat at their dinner table! Once a farm closes, the crop - what little is often left of it - is typically harvested for cattle or just tilled back into the ground.

There is quite a bit of variety amongst the 280+ mazes we designed around the world this year, with some being as  small as 4 acres and others as large as 40! On average, however, the majority of the mazes tend to fall between 8 and 12 acres.

It all depends on which MAiZE you are visiting and how many wrong turns you take! The average person will finish the maze within one hour, though some have taken a lot longer and a few a bit quicker. For those who are afraid about the time it will take to finish the maze, most farms in our MAiZE family do have helpful maps, interactive games that offer clues on which way to turn once in the maze, or even Corn Cops (a.k.a. friendly staff members) in the maze who can help you find an exit.

We hope so! It's designed to be that way. While everyone does get lost to different degrees, we have designed the maze to be an interactive activity that makes a trip inside the maze more than just a walk through some corn. In many cases, our mazes are designed into multiple phases so that you'll have the option at one or two points to exit early or continue on for the full challenge!