By now, the cornstalks in Patrick Rodgers' Green Spring Valley field have grown yellow and brittle from a summer of too much sun, too little rain. The 250,000 stalks stand by the side of a busy, two-lane suburban road looking a little forlorn, as if they know they are past their prime.
But inside the 5-acre cornfield lies the secret to how Rodgers, who is 24 and fresh out of the University of Maryland, College Park, with a degree in agriculture, plans to survive as a family farmer. Early this summer, he cut a maze in the shape of a 264-foot-wide Maryland blue crab into the field. And on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays from Labor Day through the weekend after Halloween, Rodgers is charging visitors $6 a piece for the chance to get lost.
"It's a fun activity for families and it gives people a chance to do something they wouldn't normally do," said Rodgers, who raises a herd of 40 registered Black Angus cattle on the 66-acre North Run Farm on Greenspring Valley Road next to Villa Julie College in Stevenson. "With the farming situation, I had to find a way to keep farming on this land."
Since he opened the maze on Labor Day weekend, about 800 people have been through. One mother-and-daughter team took 50 minutes to find their way without using a map; another team took a more leisurely two hours and 20 minutes with the map. And a pair of 75-year-old women stopped by after a visit to a nearby decorator's show house and tromped the maze's dirt pathways, gleefully bragging that the task was one their friends couldn't complete.
Although the maze is crafted from a material that's older than the nation, the method for creating it is completely high-tech. Rodgers planted the pasture in April and mailed images of Maryland blue crabs to Shawn Stolworthy, a corn maze designer based in Firth, Idaho.
Stolworthy arrived in Stevenson in early July and entered the coordinates of the field and the details of the design into a Global Positioning System satellite computer. He walked the field using directions given to him by the GPS equipment in his backpack and Rodgers followed behind, mowing a 50-inch-wide patch to create the crab image.
The process took one afternoon to complete and Stolworthy's design services, provided through his company, Great Adventure Corn Mazes, cost between $3,000 and $6,000. Rodgers won't say exactly how much he spent on the maze. But Stolworthy noted that some farmers spend a minimum of $30,000, including advertising.
