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By Jordan Hansen
Everett Herald
MALTBY, Wash. -- Contrary to popular belief, corn mazes are a relatively new phenomenon.
Bob Ricci, a fifth-generation farmer co-owns Bob's Corn and Pumpkin Farm with his wife Sarah, remembers seeing a Pennsylvania corn maze for the first time in a 1995 edition of Successful Farming magazine. He was astounded. There was just something about 50,000 people paying $5 to walk through a cornfield that the lifelong farmer had trouble wrapping his head around.
It was an early taste of agricultural tourism, something the Ricci family has since fully bought into. Their farm is a major destination come fall -- now drawing over 100,000 visitors in October alone -- and they'd like to continue to provide those experiences for years to come.
Recently, they worked with Washington Farmland Trust to protect 207 acres of farmland near Maltby along the Snohomish River.
Through a farmland preservation easement, the land will permanently be used for agriculture. It now can't be sold for development, at a time when more and more local farmers are tempted to take advantage of a popping real estate market.
But long before their land needed preserving, Bob Ricci was out in a corn field trying to figure out how to make it into a maze. After reading the magazine story, he set out the next year to try to make a maize maze.
"I couldn't figure out how they did it," he said. "I didn't know how it was done, how did they do it?"
This was in the days before the YouTube instructional video. Bob Ricci gave up for a few years, until attending a seminar in Wisconsin where experts teach farmers how to build corn mazes. He's been building them ever since.
The Ricci family still use the analog method -- paper, a tape measure and a lawnmower -- over more recent advances in corn maze technology, like GPS. It's just about the only aspect of the farm that hasn't changed.
Bob's Corn and Pumpkin Farm was long a dairy farm before it became the tourist destination it is now, Bob Ricci said. His dad was a dairy guy and loved his cows. Bob Ricci didn't love the cows, or any livestock, quite as much.
That attitude goes back to when his dad would wake up the entire house with the sound of a tractor running if Bob Ricci didn't get up. Milking cows is for early birds.
"You have to love the cows," Bob Ricci said. "And that was not my love."
He is a corn guy, getting his start selling sweetcorn as a kid. Head over to the farm and you'll find a farm cat and a dog, but no livestock.
Farmers in the area are close and try to help each other out, Sarah Ricci said. For example, Bob's Corn does not do a haunted maze, but others do.
For that, they would suggest Stalker Farms or Thomas Family Farms.
"Each farm has their own (thing) and it actually makes it better," Sarah Ricci said. "We all do that for each other."