Procurement News Notice |
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| PNN | 730 |
| Work Detail | There’s a lot of technology behind a fun day at the corn maze. GPS and design software facilitate every step of maze creation, said Don Watts, a maze designer based in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Watts, known as The Corn Maze Guy, got his agricultural experience early, working for Shady Brook Farm in Yardley as a teenager. In the early 1990s, after Watts and his wife had opened a graphic design business, the Shady Brook owners called and asked the couple to design the farm’s corn maze. Since then, “it’s become a full-time job for us,” Watts said. Watts designed 65 mazes this year. He creates mazes for farms all over the Northeast and as far west as Nebraska. He covered 26 states last year. The year-round corn maze work has supplanted the couple’s other graphic design work, he said. Watts designs the maze in Adobe Illustrator, a process that takes 10-15 hours, depending on the size of the field. Then he converts the design into individual points that can be read by a GPS. Watts uses a zero-turn mower to cut the designs in the field. “It’s basically like playing a video game” following the path mapped out on the screen, he said. The GPS is accurate to about 8 inches, he said. Immediately after he’s done cutting the design, Watts takes an aerial photograph of the maze. “I use a drone for that,” he said. The couple mows mazes from mid-June to mid-August. “We’re just about done,” Watts said. Before GPS technology was available, cutting a maze was time- consuming. Watts staked out a grid in the field and plotted the design on graph paper. Now, “cutting the design is actually very quick,” only taking two hours or so, Watts said. The couple spends the rest of the year designing the next crop of mazes and developing new games that farmers can install in their mazes. What makes a good corn maze design? “It’s always a compromise between a good design and a challenging design,” Watts said. An aesthetically pleasing maze — say, a simple tractor with a wagon — would not be very hard to navigate. A really tough design, though, would most likely be a series of dead ends and endless loops with no picture at all. That’s not ideal. “The design is what attracts people,” so you want a design that is unique and fun, Watts said. The designs range from sports to nature. Maze owners request farming scenes more than any other design. Pumpkins are popular, as are vegetables, farmers with pitchforks, and tractors old and new, Watts said. Other designs this year include jungle animals and the presidential election. Watts made Shady Brook a maze based on the Peanuts cartoon strip. One of the common challenges for customers is figuring how much complexity they can cram into their maze. Watts specializes in mazes that are 3-8 acres, but customers often find designs online that are more suitable for mazes several times that size. Those designs are too complicated for a smaller maze, Watts said. On his website, Watts recommends planting corn in perpendicular directions in the maze field. That practice produces a dense stand that discourages attendees from peeking or cutting through rows, and it helps mazes weather storms, according to his site. Between computers, GPS and drones, Watts has found that agritainment is a prime place where technology can improve efficiency on the farm. |
| Country | United States , Northern America |
| Industry | Food & Agriculture Information Technology |
| Entry Date | 02 Sep 2016 |
| Source | http://www.lancasterfarming.com/farming/technology/technology-drives-corn-maze-design/article_75db390b-09a7-55e3-880d-836fb780b6fc.html |
