Our Corn Maze Struggles

This season we grew two corn mazes in what turned out to be an especially difficult season for growing corn due to the weather.

We grew a six-acre maze that we called the Microbe Maze. The art was created by Aaron Draplin and “Mike the Microbe” as the art was nicknamed, was supposed to be a monster-like-creature like something you’d see in The Wild Things – a creature that is actually lovable and doing great things in the soil.

After coming up with this art, local animation/movie studio Laika approached us about us growing a ParaNorman maze for them to celebrate the movie’s 10th anniversary. We really wrestled with this because growing and maintaining two mazes would be tough. But they promised to get the word out about the regenerative farming we are doing on the farm and a bunch of our staff was really excited, so we decided to go for it.

We waited to get the seed into the ground until July 7, a week later than usual, so that the corn wouldn’t be as mature when we opened the maze. We hoped this would help the corn stalks be smaller and lighter, helping the corn stalks stay upright longer – especially if we experienced heavy rains and wind like last year. We also planted lots of white clover to prevent muddy pathways because we assumed October would bring mud (last year, we had to close our maze for part of October because it got so muddy folks couldn’t safely get through some areas).

For weeks, we spent every morning marking our field like a giant piece of graph paper and marking where the design/paths would go. We then mowed the paths and started watering.

At first everything went great. But after a while we realized the corn wasn’t growing anymore. The weeds were winning. We talked to a number of other farmers who were experiencing the same thing with their corn. After such a wet spring, so many weeds were growing and the weeds were stealing much of the moisture and nutrients in the soil — so the corn didn’t have a chance. A couple farmers told me the only way they could grow corn this season was to, “spray, spray, spray.”

Using spray isn’t an option we’re willing to do. That said, we did have debates on what we should do. This type of corn is “field corn” aka silage - it’s not sweet corn and won’t be eaten by humans. Should we reconsider what we used? We count on the revenue from folks coming to the farm in October to help pay for the farming the other eleven months. With every week going by, watching the corn not grow, we debated what was the right decision.

Our soil guru, Cuauhtemoc Villa, was adding seaweed extract to fish hydrolsate with biochar and other amendments to the compost tea we feed the fields with. In addition to adding molasses and compost tea in our irrigation twice a week, he was out there in the fields with a backpack sprayer feeding the corn fields daily. We also brought in our agronomist to give her input. By the time she came, the fields were not only short but they were yellow, a telltale sign of not having enough nitrogen. She recommended even heavier amounts of nitrogen. Keep in mind every time we moved the pipes into the field to water and feed, it required 6 to 8 of us to move pipes for a few hours in 80+ degree heat. Twice a week we had an “all hands on deck” for a few hours to move the pipes back and forth between the two mazes.

Finally in September the maze was turning a healthier color green. Parts of the mazes were tall, however parts of the mazes were very short. We lost our growing window, tassels had formed and we were done. We were all wrestling with our emotions. We collectively spent so much time working on this one crop that it was hard to process it not turning out the way we had hoped. Do we mow it down? Do we just call it a kid’s maze? It’s really tough to spend so much time (and money) working on a field for months, and no matter what you do, you just can’t get the crop to grow the way you hoped. I felt defeated.

When Cuauhtemoc and I recorded this video (below), the maze had not yet opened. He and Luis were doing their best to tell me to cowgirl up. Farming comes with failures. Not everything will work out every year.

On October 1st we opened the ParaNorman maze as planned and advertised it as a “Kid’s maze.” Something magical happened. The first family that came out of the maze told me how much fun they had. The dad told me he loved that the entire maze was NOT tall, because he hated how he felt being in tall mazes where he felt claustrophobic and couldn’t see where he was. And then the next family came out, and they had a great time, and the next . . . it wasn’t all rainbows and sunshine, despite advertising it as a kid’s maze we did get a one star review that said “They shouldn’t have opened the maze yet, it’s not done growing.”

Tomorrow we are going to open the second maze. There are areas that barely come up to my knees. There are other areas that are way over my head. I don’t know how people are going to feel about it. But the time the entire team put into it was so special, it just didn’t feel right to not see it through.

We are already implementing things based on what we learned. We are planting cover crops right now where the field will be next year. We are planting Daikon in some areas, oat/pea and crimson clover in others. And we will be asking everyone to drop off their Christmas trees so we can make more biochar to get into the soil.

I don’t know how Jim and I got lucky enough to be here, surrounded by amazing folks; both the people we get to work with and the families that come out. We are learning every single day. With each year, I think we will get tougher. Hopefully the losses will be easier to process and hopefully we will have more wins.

This is the second year in a row that our pumpkins have been super big and healthy. The molasses we add to the water twice a week has again made for really large pumpkins. And the stems are so strong from the extra fiber. In fact, this year our strawberries, cucumbers and tomatoes have all been the best yet with tons of flavor. It makes dealing with the short corn easier : )

XOXO

Kat