There’s a saying in corn country: “Knee-high before the 4th of July.” The adage refers to a farmer’s goal for his crops if he hopes to achieve the October harvest. And while most Midwesterners are familiar with this axiom, Tim Fitzgerald knows that this popular refrain lost its relevance decades ago.
“This was no longer true before the use of modern fertilizers. Nowadays, corn is about six feet or taller on the Fourth of July,” says Fitzgerald, a farmer from Lafayette, Indiana. Popular science.
Fitzgerald, however, still adheres to classical chronology. This is because his farm is no longer strictly agricultural. After a 22-year career in industrial show design, Fitzgerald has since spent almost as much time overseeing “Northwest Indiana’s largest corn maze,” Exploration Acres.
Commercial farmers often finish planting by mid-May, but Fitzgerald’s team begins planting the first week of June. As the Fourth of July fireworks sparkle overhead, the corn at Exploration Acres grows closer to your waist. The strategy, however, was not born from a respect for tradition.
“We sow later because we want to have corn as green as possible for as long as possible. We also use very late corn, which matures around 113 days,” he explains.
Once Fitzgerald opens the maze in September, its winding walls will be high above the heads of the approximately 45,000 seasonal visitors who walk its miles of trails. But ensuring the right height is just one part of the months-long maze-building effort — a process that includes equal parts logistics, agricultural science, technological coordination and artistry.
The old days
Fitzgerald was already well suited to the maze craft when he changed careers and transformed his family’s dilapidated farm into a regional attraction in 2008. During his absence, however, much of the nearly century-old property had begun to fall apart.
“It was literally falling apart,” he recalls.
As the agricultural industry continued its transition from small farms to mega-corporate facilities, places like Exploration Acres pivoted to the agritourism sector. These converted farms provided schools with seasonal educational opportunities, as well as the chance to transform the fields into symbolic celebrations of America’s favorite cash crop.
Before the fall of 2008, Fitzgerald contacted Shawn Stolworthy of MazePlay, an Idaho-based company specializing in all things corn maze, to plan his first maze. Exploration Acres’ maze designs today span between 18 and 23 acres depending on the season, but Fitzgerald opted for a relatively modest 15-acre arrangement for the inaugural year.
Just as agriculture has modernized over time, so has the process of preparing a corn maze. As Fitzgerald explains, the first strategy relied on a subtractive approach. The first step was to plant and grow your corn in a timely manner. During this time, Fitzgerald decided and created an artistic theme himself. Once the routes were finalized, it was time to create the vector files of the maze in Adobe Illustrator. No, really.
“MazePlay developed proprietary software that allows you to cut mazes using GPS. At that time, everything was vector-based,” he explains. “Basically, you created a centerline where the paths would be, and then you used steering technology on the tractors that allowed the tractors to follow the vectors autonomously. You set your travel speed, and off you go.”
At that time, a tractor’s turning radius and other factors limited the complexity of the maze. In an ideal world, Fitzgerald would have simply planted corn only where necessary and left the rest barren for visitors to wander through. It took almost a decade for technology to catch up with this idea. Enter: SpeedTubes.
“Printing” course
SpeedTubes are designed so farmers can customize spacing between crops to increase growth while minimizing disease risk. But Fitzgerald and his collaborators saw another use in it.
“We wouldn’t need to use as much corn because we wouldn’t need to plant the whole field. We’ll just plant corn where we need it,” he says. “Basically what they do is they have this little vacuum servo that will hold the little corn kernel until you want to drop it precisely.”
Exploration Acres began experimenting with the new strategy in 2017. The results were immediately noticeable. Instead of ten bags of seed, the SpeedTube-assisted design required only seven. (A single bag of seed can plant about two and a quarter acres of corn.)
Gone are the days when tractors plowed a field to lay paths. Now they simply roll from one side of the surface to the other, turn around and repeat the process. With the design integrated into the on-board software, the rapid tubes did the rest, dropping seeds only when necessary.
“Every time one of these lines crosses a [maze] way, the speed seeder will turn off until it gets to the other side, then it will turn back on. There are actually these little LED lights on the back of the hoppers that change from red to blue, red to blue,” Fitzgerald says.
He likens the new approach to when everyone replaced their dot-matrix printers with inkjet printers. Not that the first year wasn’t without complications.
Trial and error
“It’s really quite simple technology, but what we encountered in 2017 was that every time the tractor made a turn, it changed direction,” he recalls.
This meant that when he returned, everything was off by several feet.
“We had a fuzzy picture,” Fitzgerald says.
Of course, since the seeds were planted underground, the workers were not immediately aware of the problem. It was only after a few weeks, when the first corn sprouts emerged, that they noticed something was wrong.
“It created a huge headache,” he recalls.
They eventually corrected the asymmetrical design by planting additional seeds at an offset distance. They then came back with the trusty tiller and removed the extra stems they didn’t need.
“You are Popular science. Part of science is trial and error. You have a hypothesis and you try to prove and disprove it. So we learn things,” he says, laughing.
With a valuable lesson learned, Fitzgerald put the new system to the test the following year and made national news. Remember, Netflix approved Stranger Things a corn maze in 2018? It was Exploration Acres.
“I actually had to sign an NDA, and they explained to me what the season was going to be. So we initially designed a whole maze for the next season,” he says.
Other mazes have celebrated the Apollo moon landing, dinosaurs, zombies, pirates and other topics. This year marks Lafayette’s bicentennial, so Exploration Acres partnered with city officials to design an ode to the city. This season, visitors will stroll through portraits of the city’s founder, William Digby, as well as its Revolutionary War namesake, the Marquis de Lafayette. Although the 2025 theme requires a little more outside guidance, Fitzgerald keeps some general rules in mind when he sits down to plan his next creation.
“I always try to have good composition, good use of positive and negative space,” he says.
It is also important to rotate the maze between fields. Fitzgerald’s farm features four mazes, always near their annual pumpkin patch. When not used for orange squash, workers also plant soybeans for the free nitrogen they produce, minimizing the need for fertilizer.
Charting a route forward
After nearly two decades in business, Exploration Acres has got the maze process down to a science. But its owner knows that there will always be a need to experiment with new approaches. This is inevitable as the climate crisis continues to make its presence felt. Normally, the farm’s trees would already have littered the ground with nuts, hickories and acorns, but this year’s prolonged drought has dried out the soil and made it a haven for pests.
“I have rodent pressure,” Fitzgerald says. “I have voles, moles, chipmunks and squirrels. They all dig up and eat my tulip bulbs. There’s nothing else for them to eat, it’s so dry.”
And then there’s the heat. The first weeks of the 2025 season were marked by a dramatic drop in the number of participants due to record temperatures.
“It’s been a major change since we started in 2008,” he explains. “Back then, people would go out and drink hot chocolate. They wore mittens, gloves and a winter jacket. It was 38 or 40 degrees outside and windy.”
Fitzgerald even ditched the hay bales that normally line their wagon rides. While it’s easy to sit on the straw if you’re wearing long pants, it’s a much more irritating experience in shorts.
“The price of straw has gone up, almost no one plants wheat here anymore. So I just said, ‘To hell with it,’ and put benches in the carts. A lot of things must have changed over time,” he says.
There is, however, at least one detail you can count on in Exploration Acres’ gigantic corn mazes. As complicated as the trails may seem, there is no need to be afraid if you find yourself back among the trails.
“We rarely lose anyone in there. We have an escape route that lines the perimeter with several exits,” assures Fitzgerald.
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