I’ve written a few times about corn field mazes which can be seen using Google Maps – enter the newest “skyvertisement” promoting Whole Foods at P Bar Farms:
The Whole Foods corn field maze advertisement
It’s not the first time “crop art” or corn field maze designs have been used to promote a company.
Whole Foods’ does have a coolness factor and logic to it, since the grocery store chain desires to associate itself with the concepts of organic farming and freshness. Farm operator Loren Liebscher is quoted as saying:
We feel people are too far removed from where their food comes from.
So, the farm and Whole Foods are said to have thought the maze promotion was the “perfect way to emphasize the farm-to-plate connection.”
What’s not mentioned is the commercial side of the deal — the money which almost certainly had to change hands for this to happen. These sponsorships are good business for the farms which offer them, helping to further augment the diversification of revenue streams. Good corn field mazes help bring in significant amounts of money for farms in terms of admission fees and concession sales.
It will be interesting to see if the maze becomes temporarily immortalized in satellite pics appearing in Google Maps, Bing Maps and other online mapping interfaces. Since the images for those services only get updated every year or every other year, it can be hard to predict if any sort of crop art will get photographed before the season ends and it all gets mowed-down again.
ShareThisTags: cornfield mazes, crop art, Earth Art, farming, mapvertising, skyvertising, Whole Foods
