With Halloween just around the corner and other autumn festivities now in full swing, Minnesota farmer Ted Galaty has decided to replace the corn in his annual, four-acre corn maze with hemp plants, the Post Bulletin reports.
“Everybody’s seen a corn maze. I wanted to do something different,” said Galaty, who also runs the Fright Farm, a haunted attraction in Maplewood, Minnesota.
Galaty said he decided to swap this year from corn to hemp because corn was more expensive, getting costlier, and year after year of growing the crop was starting to deplete his field’s soil.
“Not rotating was depleting the soil. I’m just putting more and more fertilizer, more and more spray on my crop. …It’s amazing what can be done with hemp and what it does for your soil at the same time.” — Ted Galaty, Minnesota hemp farmer, via the Post Bulletin
The first annual hemp maze officially opened for business on September 22 — since then, some 300 visitors have come to the maze, which has already covered the cost of buying and planting the hemp seeds.
Galaty said this year’s hemp maze will ultimately stay in the ground, but by next fall he hopes to have equipment and buyers in place to process the crop after the maze attraction closes for the year.
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