For students looking for a unique fall experience, local farms offer a variety of fun activities for a weekend afternoon.
Alan and Angie Treinen's farm on Highway 60 in Lodi is one of the more well-known farms in the area. It offers a six-acre pumpkin patch, hayrides on horse-drawn wagons and two corn mazes: one that covers 10 acres and is in the shape of a fire-breathing dragon and a smaller castle-shaped maze for kids.
At the start of the dragon corn maze a team receives a map in which key pieces are missing. Inside the maze are mailboxes containing the missing pieces.
\You can't just walk in there and expect to come out in any reasonable amount of time,"" Angie Treinen said.
There is also a series of eight cutouts throughout the maze. These are found at dead ends and odd places in the maze. If a team finds four they get a prize and if they find eight they receive two prizes such as a bottle of water or a bag of popcorn. Everyone who successfully gets out of the maze gets a piece of candy.
The maze usually takes an hour to an hour and a half to conquer, longer if you take the time to find all the cutouts. So far the fastest time has been 22 minutes, which was done during a teambuilding event lead by an ex-military member. However, Treinen said there was also a group who wandered the maze for three hours and never found a single mailbox, so there is a wide range of map-reading skills between teams.
Rather than navigating the maze, some people choose to stand on the wooden tower looking over the corn and heckle the people in the corn. Each team carries a colored flag which can be seen above the corn from the tower.
They charge visitors $7 to challenge the corn maze and Treinen said 5,000 people will have visited by the end of this year. They often host school field trips with up to 200 kids at a time. Entertainment attractions such as these can be lifesavers for a family farm.
""It can be difficult at times to make a profit on a field of corn,"" Treinen said.
In addition to the maze revenue, the corn used in the maze can still be harvested at the end of the season and sold as feed.
Some farms use global positioning systems to plan out their corn mazes, but the Treinens do it manually.
A professional corn designer draws out the map of the maze on a grid of five-foot squares. Then Alan Treinen, the farm owner, makes adjustments to the design and creates the solution to the maze. He puts flags around the field spaced 60 feet apart. The corn, usually planted in lines, is instead planted in a grid. During the first few weeks of growth Treinen gets out his tiller and mows down the corn that is in the way of the paths. The process can be completed in three days.
""It took a long time the first year,"" Alan Treinen said. ""But now it's down to a science.""
Each year Treinen farm tries to add something different. This year it's the pumpkin slingshot. Visitors use the contraption to fling small pumpkins across a pond. If they hit one of two floating tires covered with blue tarps they get a prize: a free pumpkin to take home for carving. The price is three shots for a dollar.
""It's very addicting,"" Angie Treinen said. ""But we give away 20 to 30 pumpkins on a busy day so it is possible to win.""
UW graduate student Ryan Bannen visited a corn maze in Minnesota with some friends last weekend.
""It was kind of weird because it was more of a scavenger hunt maze,"" he said. ""You had to search for things in the maze.""
Most corn mazes will close in the next few weeks, before the winter snows come.
""It's an autumn thing to do,"" Bannen said.
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