A-mazing field awaits show visitors
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| Finding your way through the Boiler Mazer looks relatively
easy from the air. But wit only two entrances and one exit (at right),
visitors could spend hours wandering through the elaborate cornfield
set up at the Farm Progress Show. |
By TOM CAMPBELL
They have built it, this field of greens, and now, just as in the
movie Field of Dreams, they will come. Most definitely, they will come.
From Sept. 25 to Sept. 27, more than 300,000 people are expected
to visit Prairie Farmer Magazine's Farm Progress Show. Many of those
visitors will walk through a five-acre cornfield on Jerry Smit's farm
that has been meticulously cut to resemble Purdue University's Boilermaker
Special.
Called the Boiler Mazer, this corn maze could keep show visitors
blissfully lost for hours at a time.
Smit and neighboring farmer Alan Kemper are the hosts of the Farm
Progress Show on their acreage just south of Lafayette in Tippecanoe
County. (See Priebe story)
"It's just amazing," Smit says of the maze. "From the ground, it
looks just like a normal cornfield. But from the air, you see this giant
train. I don't really know how they did it all, but it's really cool."
A committee of Purdue specialists calling themselves maze masters
created the Boiler Mazer. Using the ground as a canvas, the "artists"
utilized seed corn, a Global Positioning System, spray paint and stakes
as markers, and lawn mowers as their ultimate tools of creativity.
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