Walking the long corn rows

When the corn starts to tassel, and the smell of corn pollen fills the air, my memory returns to my days as a detasseler.

A fellow blogger calls detasseling “the worst job I ever had.”

I completely concur. I hated every second of the two summers I pulled tassels. Pulling tassels was a gigantic hassle! Detasseling is a hot, miserable experience, but it’s a rite of passage for teenagers growing up in corn country. Even though it’s a nasty job, teenagers line up each summer to do it. Why? For the money. Detasseling is the best money available to teens under 16.

What is detasseling?

Seed companies need to force corn to cross-pollinate in order to produce hybrid seed corn. Corn generally self-pollinates. Pollen falls off the tassel onto the ear’s silk. Therefore, the tassel must be removed to prevent self-pollination. When I walked the rows, farmers planted 10(?) rows of female corn to two rows of male corn. The female corn was deeper green, bigger and stronger than the male corn. We pulled tassels out of the female corn and left the male corn alone. Standards were exacting. Only two female corn tassels per mile-square field could be left in the field. If more were left, the crew would have to go back into the field and redo it. Or, worse humiliation, the seed corn company would have another crew redo the job.

What was the experience like?

I got up at 4:30 each morning. Mother fixed me a good breakfast, then took me to the biology teacher’s house to meet the bus. He ran a detasseling crew as his summer job. We all wore the oldest clothes we possessed. Dawn usually broke just before we arrived at the field. Corn was wet with dew that early in the morning.

We each brought a black garbage bag and ripped holes for our heads and arms. We wore them to keep somewhat dry. Note the “somewhat”. Keeping completely dry was impossible. Once wearing the bags became intolerable, we ripped them off and discarded them in the field.

The damp or downright wet leaves cut anyone who did not wear gloves. I could never wear gloves since I lost the touch necessary to pull the tassels. By season’s end, I generally had a enough band-aids on my hands to make a glove.

Under the black garbage bag, we wore pants, long-sleeved shirt, T-shirt and a cap or hat. The long-sleeved shirt was discarded early because of the heat, but it did protect against cuts and rashes. I once wore a tank top for a couple days. I was so badly sunburned on top of my shoulders that I had scars for years. I’ve not been fond of tank tops ever since. Those who didn’t wear head coverings were more likely to get sunstroke.

We wore sturdy shoes, but we didn’t want to pay too much for them. They would be ruined by — or even before — season’s end.

Corn sheds pollen from about 9-11 a.m. and we’d be covered with it. Most of us got a rash from the pollen and from corn scratches.

We were one of the last seasons before the advent of detasseling machines, so we walked every bit of every row, pulling every tassel.

Steam starts to rise from the fields around 10 and the temperature is downright hot by 11. Heat worsened throughout the afternoon. We generally knocked off around 2 or 3 and were completely exhausted by then.

Corn was often over our heads. Yes, that canopy provided shade, but it also prevented any cooling breezes, making the air stuffy and detasseler drowsy. However, some corn would be below our knees. A detasseler had to look both overhead at the canopy and down to take care of each corn plant. And each row contains a lot of corn plants, 3,000 to 4,000 in a half-mile row. Some of those fields are a mile long.

Fields were often muddy, sometimes so muddy that we lost our shoes in the muck. Mud slowed you down and that was a bad thing. At least on our crew, everyone would be assigned a row at the same time. Those who finished early got to rest more than those who finished later. After finishing the row, we got to sit on the ground or whatever place we could find, get a drink and maybe eat a snack.

Mud generally came from irrigation. My first year, we drank from the irrigation gates, wonderful, refreshing cold water. Drinking from the gates was some compensation for the exhausting task of trudging through that mud. Water bottles are far away in the middle of a field. But in my second year, chemigation started. The farmer would add fertilizer, herbicide and/or insecticide to the water, making it unsafe to drink.

Listening to water that we couldn’t drink was aggravating.

The worst field I remember was a mile long. Its terrain was V-shaped. The further we got into the V, the hotter and stuffier it became. By the time we were at V’s bottom, the heat and humidity in the cornfield was stifling. Every time I descended deep into the V, I felt as if I could not breathe.

When I got home, I had to go to the back door where Mother would spray me down before entering the house. After I showered, I’d take a nap. She’d wake me for supper, then I’d go straight back to bed.

Season lasted for about 20 days. Twenty days of hell.

Detasseling supposedly built character. I suppose that’s true. Knowing the misery I’d face yet still going to work daily was good life training. But I don’t want to do it again!