Corn maze in Lodi, Wisconsin, designed as a modernized Vitruvian Man
© Treinen Farm

Get Lost in  a Wisconsin Corn Maze

Angie and Alan Treinen’s corn maze in Lodi, Wisconsin, is, well, aMAZing. I had to find out how they make a field of stalks into the perfect canvas for their creative ideas.

The Kernel of the Corn Maze Idea

About twelve years ago, the Treinens wanted to expand their third-generation farming business. Families already came to their 200-acre property in the fall for hay rides and a pumpkin patch, but the Treinens considered adding a corn maze to draw more teens and young adults.

They visited other corn mazes and attended the corn maze convention (yes, there is a convention for corn mazes, and all corn maze creators know one another!). Then they decided to make their own maze.

With their decision in place, Angie was determined to make their maze a destination in Wisconsin. At first, the family worked with a designer to plot out their ideas, but they quickly learned that Angie had the talent to make the design herself. So she turned away from her veterinary practice to devote her time to the maze.

Designing a Corn Maze

Every May since then, when Alan plants the seeds, Angie sits down and works through design ideas. In past years, she found inspiration in stained glass—the lead between the colored glass is a little like the paths in a corn maze. That yielded corn mazes with mermaids and Tiffany-style dragonflies.

Angie talks about  the pattern:

“It really needs to be a striking and beautiful maze.”

“It needs to be instantly recognizable.”

“You can’t have any dead ends. People get really angry and frustrated.”

The trails are usually about five feet wide; the main design has ten-foot wide trails. The Treinens have also learned to keep ten feet or more between trails so that visitors can’t see from one path through the corn to the next—otherwise, people tend to crash through the corn rather than follow the trail.

For this year’s design, Angie chose da Vinci’s Vitruvian man as inspiration simply because she finds it interesting. She modernized the figure in several ways:

• She added a ray gun in one hand and a mechanical wing.
• She surrounded him by a hypercube.
• She included gears (a nod to steampunk) and a knotted carbon nanotube.

Angie and Alan worked through the details of the design together, as they always do. Nevertheless, his first reaction to the pattern was, “Are you kidding me? You’re going to make me cut this?”

Planting and Cutting the Corn to Match the Design

After the maze is designed, Angie prints it out on a grid. The corn is planted in a similar, much larger grid with very distinct rows. Alan starts cutting after the seedlings are fully emerged but before the stalks are about knee high—high enough to see where the plants are, but not so high that he would get lost in his own maze.

Alan marks the field with stakes. He flags and counts the rows to transfer Angie’s design to the field (each grid on the plan is fifteen rows in the field). Then he works with a crew to cut the field accurate to within a few inches of the design. This process takes three to four days.

The Treinen maze is unusually intricate and precise because Alan cuts it by hand. Angie says one year, when the field was over-planted and the seedlings were too thick to see the rows, they tried using GPS tracking to cut the design into the field.

That year’s design was a gecko with a mathematically-precise curved tail. But the GPS wasn’t accurate enough, so the tail came out as a series of straight lines! Alan has cut the field by hand ever since.

Capturing the Creativity in a Photo

Another unique thing about the Treinen’s maze is, quite frankly, the photo. Every year, Alan goes up in a plane early in the morning or late in the day to capture the perfect image. Sometimes it takes more than one trip.

Often farmers don’t go to this extreme to photo their mazes—they simply photoshop the design on an aerial photograph of their field. The Treinen images are real.

So, What’s It Like to Go Through the Treinen Maze?

Cell service isn’t reliable in their field so, while other corn mazes use QR codes or texting to provide clues along the pathways, the Treinens take a more traditional approach. When visitors arrive, they receive a map that shows the entrances and about 1/8 of the field. If they can stay focused and follow the map precisely, they will get to the first mailbox and get a map to the next mailbox.

On the first day that their first maze was open, Angie visited the maze and learned that there was a very distinct trail of footprints from one mailbox to the next. She didn’t want the path to be so obvious.

To encourage people to explore different paths, she added ten secret locations within the maze where visitors can collect paper punches. The more punches they collect, the bigger prize they can receive when they emerge. One prize is a compass, which Angie laughingly admits, is a bit after the fact.

Oh, I see so many creative ideas in this cornfield. I can’t wait to get to Lodi, Wisconsin, and get lost in the creativity!

For more about the Treinen maze, visit Angie’s blog.

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