If you get lost amid the maize at Connors Farm later this month, you may have farmer Bob Connors smiling like the image of a scarecrow growing in his cornfield.
Since June, an elaborate corn maze featuring the shape of a smiling scarecrow has been growing on seven acres of his farm right along Route 35, across from the farm stand and bakery.
It's a new attraction Connors said he installed to keep the farm stand going.
"That's what we have to do to survive," said Connors, who has 40 acres under cultivation. Connors is the fifth-generation owner of a farm that began in 1904 as a "truck farm" sending produce to be sold wholesale in Boston.
Connors said he no longer wholesales corn except to a few places and mostly grows his crops and fruit to feed his farm stand. The maze is a way to bring in more business.
From Valley Road, the field containing the maze looks like any other corn field.
From the air, however, pilots taking off from Runway 34 at Beverly Airport have been treated to a view of it as it filled in, said Ace Chase of Danvers, a friend of Connors who runs CAT Aviation at Beverly Airport.
"They have all noticed the (scarecrow) face coming out of the ground. It's pretty pronounced," said Chase, who has been hitching rides on planes and blimps to take digital photos of the maize maze for Connors.
"We've been photographing it like a baby," Chase said.
"Everybody's talking about it over at the airport," Connors said.
Connors did not grow the maze just to please pilots, however. It's a new business venture that he plans to open up to the public on Sept. 13 and run through Halloween, when the maze will be "haunted."
Connors did not cut the maze himself but hired a Utah-based company called The Maize, The World's Largest Maze Company.
The company was founded by a Brigham Young University graduate in agribusiness, Brett Herbst, in 1996, according to the company's Web site.
Herbst's first corn maze in American Fork, Utah, drew 18,000 people in three weeks, and from that, the company germinated.
This year, the company plans to carve more than 200 mazes in the United States, Canada, Italy, Poland and the United Kingdom.
Connors got the idea to grow a maze from a friend and fellow farmer in the southeastern Massachusetts town of Plympton, Scott Sauchuk, who grew up in Danvers, worked for Connors' dad in the summers and who installed one on his farm for the first time last year.
Yesterday was a media day for Sauchuk, who rented a helicopter and brought some reporters and photographers up to view the maze.
"I had a bunch of land that I rented so there is no way I can sell all this corn on this land," Sauchuk said about how he came up with the idea. He found they're rare.
"It was just a really good thing, and I encouraged him to do it," Sauchuk said.
To make the maze, a crew of three GPS-wielding "guys" arrived at Connors Farm in June and "banged it through in four hours," creating it from corn that was about 10 inches high, Connors said.
The speed at which the maze was created had Connors skeptical until he started hearing from pilots who could see it from the air.
"I walked it when it was 3 feet high, and I got lost," Chase said.
Connors said he should take in more than if he sold the corn as a crop. The corn in the maze is a type fed to cattle that has a sturdier stalk and grows to be 9 feet tall.
Connors Farm has a 25-mile exclusive with the company, with the other The Maize corn mazes in Massachusetts in Plympton and Fitchburg.
A spokeswoman for the company said its founder grew up on a farm and is sympathetic to a farmer's plight.
"They all work with us on a percentage basis," said Kamille Combs, marketing director for The Maize. "That makes it a low-risk situation. ... He didn't want them to be heavily invested."
Entertainment is one way farmers can branch out, Combs said.
"It's helped to give traditional farmers an additional source of income," Combs said.
But a corn maze is not foolproof: As with commercial crops, foul weather and competition can be bad for corn mazes, she said.
"I'm worried about the hurricanes coming up the coast," Connors said. "It would look like a steamroller rolled the field."
Watching with interest is Mike Marini, owner of Marini Farms on Linebrook Road in Ipswich, who plans to open his sixth-annual corn maze on seven acres in the coming week or so.
"He's got a serious investment in there now," Marini said. "It's a whole new ball game."
Marini said he shapes the maze himself from a drawing, and he has been debating if he should hire a company instead.
"My problem is I never really monitored it," Marini said.
While Connors will be charging admission, Marini opens the maze to anyone as a draw to the farm stand. After a while, the kids run free in the field and the maze fades.
"It becomes a corn run instead of a maze," Marini said.
"It's a lot of maintenance that goes on," said Sauchuk, who must employ four people to monitor it to make sure people follow the rules.
Once the maze closes, Connors will plough it under so that it acts as a natural fertilizer for next year's maze.
A Corn clue
The maze contains over four miles of trails and can take the average person an hour to navigate. To help people out, Connors will pass out an interactive passport, many of them based on a theme, from American history to scripture. Answer a question right, and you get a clue about how to turn when you come to a certain number in the maze.
Here's your first clue if you reached No. 1 in the maze.
Who was the second president of the United States?
a. Andrew Jackson (turn right)
b. Abraham Lincoln (turn right)
c. John Adams (turn left)
If you go
What: Corn maze at Connors Farm.
Where: 30 Valley Road (Route 35) Danvers.
When: Saturday, Sept. 13, through Friday, Oct. 31.
Hours of operation:
Saturdays in September: 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Saturdays in October: 9 a.m. to 10 p.m.
Sundays: 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Monday through Friday: Group appointments only.
Columbus Day: 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Singles night: Oct. 10, 6 to 10 p.m.
Halloween night: dusk to 10 p.m.
Admission: Adults and children 12 and over, $8; seniors (60+), $6; kids 4-11, $6; toddlers (3 and under), free; singles night, $10; maze night, $10; Halloween night, $15.
For more information: 978-777-1245.
