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You can park about 100 to 120 cars per acre if the space is properly organized and marked. Allow 20 feet of depth for the car to park and 25 foot aisles between the rows of parked cars. Mark the rows by tying ropes to posts, laying cedar logs on the ground (anchored by reinforcing rod), or using feldstrip. The problem with feldstrip is it can be ruined by rain. Space will not be used effciently if it is not well delineated.

Make sure your choice for the parking lot is high and dry. Nothing will annoy city people more than getting their car all muddy, or even worse, stuck in a farm feld. Also establish a good

sod that will withstand a lot of traffc. One suggestion would be annual rye grass.

Producing and running a corn maze requires equipment. Some of the following can be outsourced to avoid buying specialized equipment.

• corn planter or hoe drill seeder • boom-type weed sprayer • backpack weed sprayer (apply herbicide to the pathways) • combine (if you plan to harvest the corn after the maze is done) • tillage equipment (land preparation) • fertilizer spreader (if you aren’t having it custom applied) • GPS system or fags to mark the feld

• rototiller (some people use a walk behind rototiller, others use a small tractor with a tiller behind to cut and maintain the paths)

Because we are just budgeting to get you started, we’ll budget for a walk-behind rototiller. Prices ranged from $600 for the walk-behind to $5,000 for the tractor mounted model. We will budget $600 in the calculator, but you can change that in the summary.

• Aerial photograph (this is very important for publicity). • First aid kit.

• Emergency action plan (what staff are to do in the case of an emergency – heart attack, fre, lost child, etc. See Managing Risk on Farms Open to the Public in the links at the end.)

A rule of thumb is to have enough parking to handle two per cent of your projected visitors over your season. So if you expect to have 10,000 visitors, you will need 200 parking spaces on your peak days.

On your busiest days, a farm that expects to have 10,000 visitors could have 1,200 people visit the maze over the day.

But they don’t come all at the same time (noon until 3 p.m. are the peak times) and they won’t all park nice and uniformly. So you would need about 200 parking spots or about two acres of parking.

This is assuming you have organized rows so people know where to park and you have parking spaces that are 20’ deep and roadways between parking rows of 25 feet. If you don’t designate where the nose of the car is to park, parking will be much less organized and the area will be used much less effciently.