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Many teenagers will take summer jobs this year in retail or fast food, but one of the Nebraska’s hottest, dirtiest summer jobs will have less opportunity this year. This year’s corn detasseling season will be pushed back by a wet spring.
Every July, thousands of Nebraska kids as young as 13 load onto school buses at five o’clock in the morning to travel out to corn fields and put on work gloves and safety glasses. They are: The Corn Detasselers. Governor Pete Ricketts estimates there are around 7000 of them each year.
They spend the day going row by row through corn fields, pulling the tassels from the tops of corn plants, discarding them in the dirt of the field. The plants can grow far above the heads of these young workers.
Makylee Ailes will be working for her dad’s detasseling company for the fourth time this summer.
“It’s not terrible," Ailes said. "It’s not the worst thing I’ve ever done. But it definitely takes a toll on you by the end of the season. It’s a long season."
The season lasts about a month, and usually starts in early July. A particularly wet spring pushed the season back nearly two weeks.
Tyson Buresh co-owns Buresh Detasseling, and he’s concerned he won’t have workers for the end of the season.
“One contractor already asked me if I’m gonna have kids in the middle of August, which would be the lastest dates we’ve went in the last forty years,” Buresh said.
At the end of the season, as they start to lose their labor force to pesky academics, some detasseling companies will have to go to a weekend-only schedule, or count on kids from schools that start a little later in August.
The good news? Not all corn has to be detasseled. It’s reserved for seed corn, which becomes next year’s commercial crop. In Nebraska, that’s about 150,000 acres.
Darin Doerr is production leader for seed company Corteva Agriscience. He also worked as a detasseler growing up.
“The tassel is the male portion of the plant and that has the pollen in it, so when it drops the pollen it falls on the female portion of the plant, which is the silk," Doerr said. "So as one pollen hits every single one of those silks, and then it travels down the silk, and that’s what makes that kernel.”
Darin Doerr (left) and Joe Murman (right) of Corteva Agriscience in a corn field near Utica. (Photo by Allison Mollenkamp, NET News)
Seed corn fields are planted with two breeds of corn, separated by rows. Removing the tassels from one breed means it cannot self-pollinate, ensuring a hybrid seed.
Aaron Saeugling, another detasseling veteran, is an extension field agronomist for Iowa State University. He describes how machines are used to remove about 90% of corn tassels.
“There’s a product called a cutter," Saeugling said. "It’s an actual machine with a blade, and so it cuts the top portion of the plant off exposing the tassel, so it’s much easier to go in with a puller. They bring this machine in and it tries to grab the tassel and pull it from the plant.”
90% isn’t good enough for seed companies. Kids help them get to near 100%. And in return, detasselers make good money. One detasseling company owner estimated it would be about average for a detasseler to earn $1500 for 100 hours of work in a season. Beginner detasselers make less, usually minimum wage.
Makylee’s dad Brent Ailes is a high school principal and owner of Ailes Detasseling. His pitch to kids is they can make a couple thousand bucks in just a few weeks of work.
“And then the flip side is, I may work at Dairy Queen 20 hours here, ten hours this week, five hours this week all summer long, but I don’t even have total lump sum that I could earn in detasseling which is kind of a compact two to three week season,” Brent Ailes said.
He also says detasseling is part of Nebraska’s foundation in farming.
“Nebraska is an agricultural state, so that’s kind of our backbone," Brent Ailes said. "Which means we’ve got a lot of kids that are willing, and families that know it’s a good job, a good situation to teach work ethic, and so there’s thousands of kids, literally right here in Lincoln, that are hopping on crews and working this kind of business here in the summertime.”
It’s also a bit of a Nebraska tradition. Twenty or thirty years ago, there wasn’t machinery to do the first 90% of detasseling, so teens did all the work.
Now, for kids like Makylee Ailes, hard work is made a little easier by having friends out in the field too.
“It definitely makes it more enjoyable when you have friends out there, cause then you’re not just all by yourself walking down the corn field,” Makylee Ailes said.
Detasseling may be hotter than scooping ice cream and dirtier than checking groceries, but teens across Nebraska will load into school buses and drive out into the countryside to make some extra money this month, because wet spring or not, the corn keeps growing.