Where 'field work' means stalking the corn

Despite the gear, few of Josh's colleagues have been able to endure the summer toil. A hardy core of only 13 detasselers remain from the original group of 25 that began walking the fields two weeks ago.

Crew chief Jeff Schoettlin, a senior at Seward's Concordia College and a Marine Corps reservist, says his remaining charges have a lot of spunk.

"There are two kinds of kids. The ones that walk through the mud, and the ones that walk around it," says Mr. Schoettlin. "The ones that walk around aren't here anymore."

Avoiding mud isn't easy. Even without rain, the dew off the corn soaks the soil. Detasselers' shoes are encased in a weave of grass and dirt after their first pass through the fields.

"You learn to walk Indian-style to keep your balance," says Schoettlin.

The group of 13 "rogue" through 15 to 20 rows of corn each - about eight miles of walking by the end of the day.

The corn is often taller than the pickers. It scratches at their necks and arms. Dense with vegetation, the fields dampen any fresh breeze.

At daybreak, however, the detasselers are surprisingly spirited. Most attack the fields, yanking the greenish tassel stems with a straight, upward jerk. Others bend it 90 degrees and break it with a horizontal pull.

A distinctive popping sound, veterans hint, reveals whether the tassel was cleanly taken.

The teens take their work seriously. They have to. Company representatives check the fields over after crews pass through. If the teens fail to detassel 99.5 percent of the field's corn, they are sent back in.

"There is crew pride," says Schoettlin. "They all want to do more than the other groups."

Nebraska lawmakers' efforts to raise the detasseling age requirement from 12 to 13 failed this year, largely due to objections that detasseling often provided the best-paying work for kids who need it the most.

Kerry Butzke, a 13-year-old detasseler from nearby Staplehurst, says she has skipped work days because she's had more exciting things to do, "Like going to the county parade," she says sarcastically.

Yet Kerry will probably return for her third year of detasseling, she says, because her pay grows each year. Most detasselers start off earning minimum wage - $5.15 an hour. Their salaries can more than double, based on their experience, and hefty bonuses often kick in at the end of the year.

The legal victory notwithstanding, detasseling may be a fading tradition. In the late 1960s, scientists breeded a genetic mutation of corn that automatically sterilized its own tassel.

Farmers stopped using it when the crop started growing a dangerous fungus. But new efforts to engineer sterilized corn have already yielded some positive results. Whether new technologies phase out the detasseling tradition will largely hinge on cost, experts say.

"It will come down to economics," says Richard Vierling, a professor of agronomy at Purdue University in South Bend, Ind.

"They'll have to ask: Is it cheaper to have a bunch of kids pulling tassels or is it cheaper to go through paying for the technology?"

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