In the cornfields I’ve been in, you’d really have to be trying to not walk in a straight line. When you’re between rows, you have a very clear path that’s a couple feet wide and straight as an arrow, and there’s a perfectly straight and fairly tight wall of corn on either side. If you walk down the row, nothing is in your way. If you want to cross over the rows, you’ve got to bend the corn to the side in order to get through. I can’t imagine getting lost in it. If you walked to the center, closed your eyes, and spun around a few times, you could still easily find your way out, but you’d have a 50% chance you’d end up on the opposite side from where you intended.
You just don’t run the center pivot irrigator all the way around the circle.
BTW, In some places out west, circular (center pivot irrigated) fields are arranged in a hexagonal pattern to minimize non-irrigated area.
Well, if you hit the dope patch in the middle, turn around and go the other way - fast.
At least, that was the rule when we went corn-picking when I was a kid.
Si
Listen, you Ohioan…
I went to Illinois. So don’t mess with me.
Ohio :smack:
A slight hijack, but my former co-worker wrote his senior thesis in Ag Engineering on the use of a Geographic Information System in production agriculture. The title was “Use of a Geographic Information System to Determine the Optimum Placement of a Center Point Irrigation System on an Irregularly Shaped Field.”
Just in case your land isn’t laid out in nice 1 mile x 1 mile squares.
Right…and that is probably simply considered “acceptable loss” the same way turning around in a field and trampling what you just planted is. Know what I mean?
I can call my dad AGAIN and ask. And his name IS Verne…so, he has even more farm cred…but I pretty much know, even just from riding with him, that there’s a certain amount of loss that’s assumed…
The towers are usually farther apart than 50 feet- more like 100-150.
Which brings to mind storage. In MY farm girl mind, it’s much more dangerous to fall into the storage bins than it is to get lost in the field. I mean, you can literally DROWN. And the bins are HUGE and scary.
Actually I originated in Wisconsin, grew up in Iowa and am now in California. Just the same, word is that Ohio State is a pretty good school and probably can be trusted on this matter.
See, my world is different. Let me 'splain.
Grandma ( still living) graduated from Illinois in 1944. Grandpa (also still living) graduated a year early…1943 …so that he could go to war. Which he did. Grandpa is a WWII Hero.
Dad graduated, I believe n 1967…
I graduated in 1992.
All from the same school, mind you.
So I don’t trust Ohio State on anything…lol…
(Hope you know I’m joking and just have a family “thing”…oh and please don’t bring up the indian…)
Oh sure and what better place to joke about that Ohio Stater? It’s de rigueur to hate the place.
As to the indian, I graduated from the University of Iowa and its early sports people were smart. The used “Hawkeyes” as the name. Nobody knows what a Hawkeye is, other than someone from Iowa, and so we don’t have such problems.
Yeah, what the heck is an “illini?” And didn’t we effectively delete them years ago anyway?
Thanks so much for not being a hater. 
That something might be a pissed off farmer, though. 
No! He’s a crop circle type!
You’d bleed out before you’d get too far.*
Corn leaves are sharp!
- I exaggerate. But you’d be cut up pretty bad.
After consulting my father, we’ve decided that only people from Purdue, Michigan, and maybe Wisconsin would be capable of getting lost in a corn field.
Us normal people have better ways to destroy ourselves…
Apologies for resurrecting this zombie, but apparently some corn mazes are so big that visitors have called 911 after getting lost.
pumps are placed at the edge or corner of a field.
water is piped to the pivot.
obstructions above ground are not good.
On adjacent fields of the same crop:
Are they all planted with row in the same direction? For mechanical efficiency, I have to think they are.
But could I find a corner where one field is planed N-S and the next E-W?
How about the theory:
When lost in maze: Place one hand (either, the only possible difference is time/distance to exit) on a wall and keep it there - you may (in a crude machine) run around an obvious box (but maybe the exit is hidden and only visible from within that tiny, obvious box?).
Would/does this work?
I have a magnetic compass in the car - when I’m rich I’ll upgrade to GPS.
And screw the rules: If I’m going into a corn maze, a machete is coming with me…
That is a really big maze at 63 acres. One of the best field mazes in the world, Davis X-Treme Mega Maze is in Massachusetts outside of Boston and it is only a few acres but that is plenty big enough. My daughters and I spent 3 hours walking quickly through that thing and only got to the half-way point where you have the option to take an early exit. Some people take 8 hours or more to solve the whole thing. Still, you are never truly trapped inside and there is no emergency unless you have serious medical issues. There are emergency exits that are roped off and you could just cut through the corn if you had to get to the edge quickly.
The people in that article are dumbasses. The whole point of a corn maze is to get lost just like the point of a haunted house is to have people scare you. If you aren’t the kind of people that enjoy those sorts of things, you should at least have enough sense to abstain from that activity.