Thereâs a saying in corn country: âKnee high by the Fourth of July.â The adage refers to a farmerâs goal for their crops if they hope to make the October harvest. And while most Midwesterners are familiar with the axiom, Tim Fitzgerald knows the folksy refrain lost its relevancy decades ago.
âThat hasnât actually been true since prior to modern fertilizers. Nowadays corn is about six feet or taller by the Fourth of July,â Fitzgerald, a farmer in Lafayette, Indiana, tells Popular Science.
Fitzgerald, however, still adheres to the classic timeline. Thatâs because his farm is no longer strictly in the agricultural business. After a 22-year career in industrial trade show designing, Fitzgerald has since spent nearly that long overseeing ânorthwest Indianaâs largest corn maze,â Exploration Acres.Â
Commercial farmers often finish planting by mid-May, but Fitzgeraldâs team starts sowing the first week of June. By the time Fourth of July fireworks are shimmering overhead, Exploration Acresâ corn is inching towards your waist. The strategy isnât out of a reverence for tradition, however.
âWe plant later because we want to have corn thatâs as green as possible for as long as possible. We also use really late-maturing corn that matures at around 113 days,â he explains.
Once Fitzgerald opens the maze in September, its winding walls are well above the heads of the estimated 45,000 seasonal visitors that trek its miles of pathways. But ensuring the proper height is only one component of the monthslong mazebuilding endeavorâa process thatâs equal parts logistics, agricultural science, technological coordination, and artistry.
The olden days
Fitzgerald was already well-suited for the labyrinth business when he transitioned careers and converted his familyâs dilapidated farm into a regional attraction in 2008. During his time away, however, much of the nearly century-old property had started to crumble.
âIt was literally falling apart,â he remembers.
As the agricultural industry continued its shift away from smaller farms to corporate megafacilities, places like Exploration Acres transitioned into the agritourism business. These repurposed farms offered schools seasonal educational opportunities, as well as the chance to turn fields into symbolic celebrations of Americaâs favorite cash crop.
Ahead of fall 2008, Fitzgerald reached out to Shawn Stolworthy at MazePlay, an Idaho-based company specializing in all things corn maze, to plan out his first labyrinth. The maze designs at Exploration Acres today range anywhere from 18 to 23 acres depending on the season, but Fitzgerald settled on a comparatively modest 15-acre arrangement for the inaugural year.
Just as farming has modernized over time, so has the process that goes into preparing a corn maze. As Fitzgerald explains, the early strategy relied on a subtractive approach. Step one was to plant and grow your corn at the appropriate time. Meanwhile, Fitzgerald decided and created an artistic theme himself. Once the pathways were finalized, it was a matter of creating the mazeâs vector files in Adobe Illustrator. No, really.
âMazePlay developed proprietary software that lets you cut mazes using GPS. At that time, it was all vector-based,â he says. âYou were basically creating a center line where the paths would be, and then you used steer-track technology on tractors that allowed the tractors to autonomously follow the vectors. You set your ground speed, and it goes.â
During that era, a tractorâs turning radius and other factors limited the mazeâs complexity. In an ideal world, Fitzgerald would have simply planted corn only where needed and left the rest barren for visitors to walk. It took nearly a decade for the technology to catch up with that idea. Enter: SpeedTubes.

âPrintingâ pathways
SpeedTubes are designed so farmers can customize the spacing between crops as a way to increase growth while minimizing the risk of disease. But Fitzgerald and his collaborators saw another use for them.
âWe wouldnât need to use as much corn because we wouldnât need to plant the entire field. Weâll just plant corn where we need it,â he says. âBasically what they do is they have this little vacuum servo on it that will hold onto the little grain of corn until you want to drop it precisely.â
Exploration Acres began experimenting with the new strategy in 2017. The results were immediately noticeable. Instead of ten seed bags, the SpeedTube-assisted design required only seven. (A single bag of seed can plant around two-and-a-quarter acres of corn.)
Gone were the days of tractors plowing through a field to carve out walkways. Now, they simply roll from one side of the acreage to another, turn, and repeat the process. With the design keyed into the onboard software, the speed tubes did the rest by dropping seeds only where necessary.
âEverytime any of those rows intersect with a [maze] path, the speed planter will turn off until it gets to the other side and then it turns back on. There are actually these little LED lights on the back of the hoppers going red-to-blue, red-to-blue,â Fitzgerald says.
He likens the new approach to the moment everyone swapped out their dot-matrix printers for inkjets. Not that the first year wasnât without complications.
Trial and error
âItâs really pretty simple technology, but what we ran into in 2017 was whenever the tractor made a turn, it reversed direction,â he recalls.
This meant that upon its return runs, everything was off by several feet.
âWe had a blurry image,â says Fitzgerald.
Of course, with the seeds planted underground, the workers didnât immediately realize the issue. It was only after a few weeks when the first baby corn sprouts emerged that they noticed something amiss.
âIt created a huge headache,â he remembers.
They ultimately fixed the skewed design by actually planting additional seeds at an offset distance. They then returned with the trusty tiller and removed the extra stalks they didnât need.
âYouâre Popular Science. Part of science is trial and error. You have a hypothesis and you try to prove and disprove. So you learn things,â he says with a laugh.
With a valuable lesson learned, Fitzgerald put the new system to the test the following year and made national news. Remember that Netflix-approved Stranger Things corn maze in 2018? That was Exploration Acres.
âI actually had to sign an NDA, and they shared with me what the season was going to be about, so we originally designed a whole maze for the next season,â he says.
Other mazes have celebrated the Apollo moon landing, dinosaurs, zombies, pirates, and other subjects. This year marks Lafayetteâs bicentennial, so Exploration Acres partnered with city officials to design an ode to the town. Visitors this season will wander through portraits of the townâs founder, William Digby, as well as its Revolutionary War namesake, the Marquis de Lafayette. Although 2025âs theme required a bit more outside guidelines, there are some general rules Fitzgerald keeps in mind when sitting down to plan out his next creation.
âI always try to have a good compositionâa good use of positive and negative spaces,â he says.
Itâs also important to rotate the maze between fields. Fitzgeraldâs farm includes four maze locations, always near their annual pumpkin patch. When not used for the orange gourds, the workers also plant soybeans for the free nitrogen they produce and thus minimizing the need for fertilizer.

Mapping a route forward
After nearly two decades in operation, Exploration Acres has the maze process down to a science. But its owner knows there will always be a need to experiment with new approaches. Itâs inevitable as the climate crisis continues to make its presence felt. Normally, trees on the farm have already littered the grounds with walnuts, hickory nuts, and acorns, but this yearâs extended drought has dried the ground and made it a haven for pests.
âIâve got rodent pressure,â Fitzgerald says. âIâve got voles and moles and chipmunks and squirrels. All of them digging up and eating my tulip bulbs. Thereâs nothing else for them to eat, itâs been so dry.â
Then thereâs the heat. The first few weeks of the 2025 season have seen a dramatic drop in attendees due to record-setting temperatures.
âThatâs been a major change since we started in 2008,â he explains. âBack then, people would come out and theyâd drink hot cocoa. Theyâd wear mittens and gloves and a winter jacketâitâd be 38 or 40 degrees out and blustery.â
Fitzgerald has even jettisoned the hay bales that normally line their wagon rides. While straw is easy to sit on if youâre wearing long pants, itâs a much itchier experience in shorts.
âThe price of strawâs gone up, hardly anyone plants wheat around here anymore. So I just said, âTo heck with it,â and put in benches in the wagons. A lot of things have had to change with time,â he says.
There is, however, at least one detail you can count on at Exploration Acresâ gigantic corn mazes. No matter how complicated the trails may seem, thereâs no need to get spooked if you find yourself turned around among the pathways.Â
âWe rarely get anyone lost in there. We have an emergency path that lines the perimeter with several exits,â Fitzgerald assures.