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2025 Draft Corn Maze: People Make the Experience

By Jake Feltz

As another fall season wraps up here at our dairy store, it provides a great opportunity for us to reflect on what we were able to offer to visitors in Central Wisconsin, including a 2025 Draft corn maze. At the center of everything we do, one word is always key: “people.” It takes relationships with smart people to get things planned. It takes many people to help things run smoothly each weekend. Most importantly, it takes people stopping by each day and supporting our business to make everything we do a reality.

In late 2023 we were lucky enough to have a few people from the Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation stop out to our farm. As things were wrapping up that day, we got to talking about a contact they had in the Green Bay Packers organization and mentioned they were looking for farms with fall attractions to help showcase the 2025 Draft coming to Green Bay this upcoming spring. We were thrilled at the opportunity and started to prepare right away.

Setting up the 2025 Draft Corn Maze

The people from the Green Bay Packers, MazePlay, Biadasz Farms and Swiderski Equipment all played a large role in making our corn maze possible. This was the first year we worked with MazePlay and they made the process of combining four separate mazes into one cohesive design easy.

The Packers organization was there every step of the way whenever there was something to work through. Once the design was finalized, Swiderski Equipment and Biadasz farms got the files into their planter and got our maze planted. Although we are not that smart, we sure know a lot of smart people!

Over 100 people were relied upon to make all our fall offerings a success this season. From picking pumpkins, to scooping ice cream, to scaring people in our haunted corn maze, to making fresh cheese curds, to driving wagons of people out to the pumpkin patch and everything in between. We were lucky to be surrounded by hardworking individuals.

You hear a lot nowadays about how young people don’t like to work, but I’ve seen with my own eyes that is not the case. We had high school students wanting to work on days off from school, after school, before sporting events on weekends and nearly any free time they had. We had college students working for a few hours between classes, working between other jobs and working on weekends when they could have just as easily been enjoying off time. We had so-called “retired” people making cheese, preparing food in the kitchen and driving wagons on the weekends. It was a blessing to be surrounded by so many enthusiastic people.

The most important people in this whole equation were the members of our community that came out and enjoyed our corn maze, pumpkin patch and fun farm. Without them we would have nothing. This year was especially fun getting to see reactions when they saw our maze design or heard that we got to work with the Packers.

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Western Canadian Agriculture: Hard Times Made the World's Best Farmers

Video: Western Canadian Agriculture: Hard Times Made the World's Best Farmers

Western Canadian agriculture produced the most advanced farmers in the world not through abundance but through adversity. The crow rate fell. The wheat price went nowhere. The brown envelopes stopped.

When the subsidies disappeared, the bad farmers left and the good ones stayed. And the ones who stayed could not just grow wheat anymore. They started growing lentils and canola and peas and flax and faba beans. They built crop rotation. They got serious about agronomy because there was no government backstop. That process produced the Western Canadian agriculture Dennis Bulani describes in this clip: the most advanced, most educated farming culture in the world.

His contrast with Iowa corn and soybean farmers is sharp. At a DeKalb farmer meeting in Okoboji, Iowa, he asked what crop rotation they ran. Beans on corn stubble, corn on bean stubble. How do you fertilize? The co-op agronomist handles it. Have you considered other crops? No need. We make so much money on corn and soybeans. Western Canadian agriculture was never allowed that comfort. And now those Iowa farmers are watching soybean markets lock up with China and corn prices slide, and they do not have the agronomy knowledge or the research base to pivot. Western Canadian farmers adapted on a dime because they had done it before.

Dennis also makes the case that Western Canadian agriculture keeps adapting in real time. Low commodity prices over the past year have pushed growers to look seriously at precision spot-spray technology. He knows a neighbor who bought a sprayer with the seeing-eye system and sprayed only 80 out of 320 acres. As a chemical retailer Dennis acknowledges that will affect his sales. He supports it anyway, because if it advances Canadian agriculture and makes farmers money, that is a good outcome.

The lesson Dennis draws from the tale of two farms: continuous improvement is the only durable strategy. When canola was $22 a bushel some growers went to Arizona instead of the Crop Production Show. When the price came down those same growers came back to the research and the discipline. Products do not go on Rack Petroleum's shelves unless they pass a replicated trial first. That is what Western Canadian agriculture built through hard times: farmers who do the work whether the times demand it or not.

Dennis Bulani is CEO of Rack Petroleum and Ultimate Yield in Biggar, Saskatchewan. Dan Aberhart hosts GTF Productions, Western Canadian Agriculture's foremost live briefing platform and its foremost AI training platform for ag operators