Crack detasseling crew stands tall; ‘Not a lot slips through their fingers,’ company owner says
LINCOLN — They’re the Navy SEALS of corn detasselers.
At least Dawn Buell says so. She’s the owner of Not Afraid to Sweat Inc., a corn detasseling company, and she employs a group of detasselers that calls itself The Force.
“They’re very good at what they do,” Buell said. “Not a lot slips through their fingers.”
Every year, small armies of mostly teenagers descend on fields for the brief detasseling season. The task is essential to creating hybrid corn seed, and the labor-intensive work only lasts a few weeks.
These days, most of the work is done by machine. A grower will lop off the tops of some plants to allow another breed planted nearby to cross-pollinate them, creating a hybrid.
But the machine can’t get all the tassels, and growers say leaving behind more than one-quarter of a percent will contaminate the field. The detasseling teams walk through the fields and manually pull any remaining tassels. Usually, it takes more than one sweep.
That’s where The Force comes in.
They do the second pass through the field, and usually they avoid third, fourth and fifth sweeps often needed to meet the growers’ standards.
Buell said the 45 members of The Force are the best of the best, the most experienced of more than 400 detasselers she employs. Most have been around for several seasons, and each has been picked as one of the top five workers on a previous season’s crew.
“Many of them have grown up with me, so to speak,” Buell said.
While most teams need lots of supervision and double-checking, The Force has its system down cold. The detasselers put their water jugs at the end of the row, walk to the other end of the field detasseling two rows, then walk back to detassel the next row. Then they move on to the next set.
The job is tough. The day starts about 5:30 a.m., when buses pick up the detasselers from two Lincoln church parking lots. The buses — decked out with Christmas lights and emblazoned with “The Force” in duct tape — take the detasselers out to the day’s first field.
Walking row-by-row, they snatch at the tassels as if by reflex. The tassels aren’t easy to spot. During detasseling season, the normally gold tassels are still enveloped in leaves.
Taller stalks, still wet with the morning dew, are the worst. These experienced detasselers know to wear rain gear or trash bags to stay dry, and they wear long sleeves to prevent scratches from the leaves.
And they know what to look for. Less experienced workers might miss “suckers,” the low-lying tassels that you’d miss if you were looking up, or “hangers,” tassels that have been removed but are still hanging where they might pollinate the plants.
“My very first day, I remember going from corn plant to corn plant just looking in them,” said 16-year-old Drew Hoefler, a fourth-year detasseler from Firth, Neb., now pulling tassel after tassel without a second glance. “I guess it just comes with experience.”
On The Force, most detasselers will earn more than $2,000 over the three-week season.
Even though the season is short, the crew has grown close.
“When you’re in the field with people, you just talk about everything,” said 16-year-old Sarah Koehler of Lincoln. “Anything and everything.”
The team has developed its own traditions. Every day on the way home, they listen to the song “Sneaky Snake,” a children’s song about a root-beer-swilling snake.
On occasion, their work earns them a treat from their supervisors — a stop at McDonald’s for ice cream or a cookout at the field, courtesy of Buell or their team supervisor.
The days can be long, but the season is over before they know it.
“It goes really fast,” Koehler said. “You basically sleep, eat and detassel during the detasseling season.”