This way out - no, that way.

Byline: Laura Porter

Tightly woven stalks of corn and sorghum line the hard dirt paths. The sapphire blue of a mid-September sky stretches overhead. There was a drenching rain last night, but there are few puddles to avoid.

"You have to give up your sense of control!" A disembodied voice floats from an adjacent path. The woman could be next to us or on the other side of the maze. Sound travels in funny ways when you are in the middle of an 8-acre cornfield with no apparent way out. At that moment, my companion, who has been happily leading us into a series of dead ends, stops short.

"I just remembered I have no sense of direction," she says. "You'd better go first for awhile."

With three miles of pathways to choose from, it is going to take both of us to find our way to the exit over Victory Bridge. We switch places. I loop around a corner, where the path ends in a three-way intersection. Hesitating, I turn left.

It's like Yogi Berra once said: "When you come to a fork in the road, take it."

For the Davis family, that fork came almost 20 years ago. The Davis farm in Sterling has been in the family since the mid-1800s, operating primarily as a dairy farm but with such offshoots as orchards, a roadside market, timberland and lumber mills.

In 1990, a fire destroyed the dairy operation run by John Davis and his sons, Doug and Larry, forcing the family in a new direction. Their decision to explore the preservation of endangered farm animals through genetic breeding has become the farm's principal purpose. To support that work, an initial petting zoo evolved into Davis' Farmland, a children's discovery farm that opened to the public in 1996 to allow access to ancestral breeds of today's pigs, cows and horses.

"There are so many articles about farmers turning to agritourism," says Larry Davis. "We preceded all of that." As its Web site notes, Davis' Farmland is now "the largest private sanctuary of endangered livestock in North America."

In the past 10 years, the farm has also become known for its Mega Maze, an intricate labyrinth carved into the corn that draws thousands of visitors every year.

The family's first attempt at maze making was, remembers Davis, "the biggest failure." A small maze created to patch a hole in the perimeter of the discovery farm was "trampled to the ground -instantaneously."

Soon after, however, a brief telephone conversation with Adrian Fisher, an internationally known maze designer from England, led Davis to recognize...