Simple Corn Mazes Can Be A-maize-ing Sometime

We have a suggestion for you if you are getting bored this summer, pack up the family or friends, drive out to a nearby farm and start exploring a labyrinth made in a cornfield.

If you're extra lucky, your maize maze -- as they are called in England because "corn" is the term used for wheat -- will have a cool design modeled after Harry Potter, Napoleon Dynamite or the Statue of Liberty.

To city slickers, a corn maze can seem, well, corny; like an outdated form of entertainment from a bygone era when people spent their leisure time at taffy pulls and ice cream socials.

But, amazingly, corn mazes have been growing in popularity for the past 15 years and, according to family farmers like

Rick Lattin in Fallon, Nev., they can add a lot to the bottom line.

"If I planted three acres of corn, I could probably get 100 tons of corn that I could sell for around $10,000," Lattin told HuffPost Weird News. "But if I turn that three acres into a maze, I can earn around $50,000. Using the land that way allows small farmers like me to keep going."

Lattin -- who calls himself a "corn maze early adopter" -- doesn't make the mazes himself. He hires companies like The Maize, a Salt Lake City, Utah, business that, since 1996, has done a few thousand mazes, including more than 200 this year.

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