"GET lost" has almost become a term of endearment on a farm near York, as Tom Pearcy now makes his living out of people doing just that when they visit his crop of maize. Indeed, the term can also be attributed to his status as a farmer too, since he is now no longer actively farming in its truest sense.
The reason is the on-going success story of the York Maze, established five years ago and now a firm family favourite in the things-to-do-with-the-children category.
If you travel on the A64 near the A1079 junction, you cannot fail to see it in all its glory, and it opens this weekend for its 2005 season. Tellingly for farming, over its 23.5 acres, it will create a greater profit in its limited eight-week season than the rest of the 450 tenanted acres put together.
Tom, who is the third generation to farm at Heslington, next to the university, was aware of maize mazes on a visit to America, but only started considering the idea as a business when he saw one in Suffolk, where he lived for five years.
"It was in the middle of nowhere, not near a town or city, but the chap was doing all right out of it. He was attracting 5,000 people a year and it occurred to me that if I could set up a maze on the edge of a major town or city, and put a bit into it – because a lot of farmers concentrate more on their farming than expanding on the sideline – it could go well.
"The maze is now my core business and basically from this year onwards the farm is being contract farmed by neighbours."
Tom hasn't found that the idea of saying "get lost" to farming, as many others might, has been difficult.
His father, David, has always found secondary incomes from holiday houses, and Tom appears to have a similar frame of mind in looking for other areas to draw new income. "There's nothing I'd rather do than farming. If it was making a nice profit, it's not a bad way to earn a living, but when margins have gone, not making money is a struggle. It's then not a nice way to make a living, and for me, the farm was taking my time away from the maze, which had the potential to grow. I couldn't see any potential in farming without constantly expanding."
However, Tom is expanding the maze and to such an extent that this year's work of art is so big that he is confident it is now the world's largest maze and is waiting to hear from the Guinness Book of Records as to whether they will recognise it as such.
"The existing record stands at 17.5 acres, but ours is 23.5 acres. The debate is over whether we are classed as a real maze."
It certainly looks real from the A64 and it looks truly spectacular from overhead where you can see quite clearly this year's design. Tom designs each maze himself and incorporates a theme to each masterpiece.
"I'm really a repressed artist. Last year's maze theme was the Flying Scotsman but this year it's Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament – because of what a local man, Guy Fawkes, tried to do to it 400 years ago."
Tom is expecting about 25,000 visitors this year and explains that in order to attract that number you have to put a lot in to get a lot back.
"I spend a lot of money on advertising and realise that my skills aren't in every area, so if I'm out of my depth I bring in help – particularly in PR." Promotional material is one of his biggest expenses while, perhaps surprisingly, the growing of the maize is a minimal cost.
"There's a local dairy farmer who buys the seed for the maize. I grow it, and have the costs such as spraying and rent, and he feeds it to his Jersey cows."
Of course, as any business grows, you generally have to take on more staff, and Tom now has a team of 10 (mostly York University students who never get lost) working on the York Maze.
He has expanded the business too, not just by increasing the acreage of the maze. "It's like any business. If you stand still, you're liable to let it fizzle away. This year we've added giant talking sculptures to find in the maze, and we've also got our Crazy Mazy Golf (crazy golf played in a maze)."
Tom says he's learning all the time – and not least from his visitors, although sometimes in not quite the way he would have liked to.
"Whenever you think you've learned all there is to learn, they always surprise you with their next trick. The first time we opened we immediately learned how destructive people can be. We were obviously a bit naïve over the capacity that exists for mess and destruction. Generally, country folk don't chuck things on the floor or destroy things, so we weren't ready for all that."
Tom's maze, designed when the maize is no more than four inches high, is different to many others, particularly with its wide corridors.
"We very quickly came to the conclusion that we shouldn't have pathways nearer than 10 metres to each other creating a thick wall of maze. It isn't as simple and neither so tempting to get through a thick wall of it. And we also decided that we would have three-metre wide pathways so that families can pass by each other easily and wheelchairs and buggies can be used."
Picking up plants all day long is one of the drawbacks as Tom refers to it. "People are like lemmings. As soon as they see where someone has gone, even though that was wrong, they'll all follow, so we have to keep going around checking and clearing up."
Tom says that the York Maze has had a fair selection of cavorting couples and lots of dirty nappies left lying around. He believes that his location, close to the heart of York, is all-important but there is an impending York University campus new building being mooted – and it looks certain to be on the site of the York Maze. Because Tom is a tenant farmer, he will receive no compensation so he has already taken steps to ensure that York Maze is to be around for some time yet.
"I've bought a small farm on the road to Elvington. We are limited for buildings at the moment, because everything has to be temporary in Green Belt areas and we have to share the toilets with the Park and Ride system."
Dunnington Lodge (the recently acquired farm) has buildings and land, enough to create their own café, toilets and retail unit, although it will not be able to be seen from the A64, which could be a drawback.
Tom doesn't rule out a return to farming one day, but, equally, he's not falling over himself to rule it in either. "It needs to earn twice as much as it is doing now," he says.
York Maze is quite a change from the days of his grandfather Tom's dairy farm, with a milk round, and his father David's mixed arable and livestock enterprise. Nowadays, Tom designs mazes and, what's more, designs what happens within them as adult visitors only will find out during the last two Fridays of the season when Tom plans nights of terror.
The York Maze continues to grow from strength to strength.

The York Maze is open from Saturday July 16 to September 11 –opening daily at 10am and with last visitors allowed in at 5pm. It is situated to the left of the A1079 junction of the A64 as you travel from the Leeds direction towards Scarborough.