A good first job for a kid

A century ago, when I was a young man, I worked several summers for some seed companies. I'm not too much into agribusiness any more (I'm more a local, sustainable type now), but I ran into a poem I wrote about it, and it reminded me of the job of detasseling. If you've ever detasseled, you know what I'm about to describe, and I invite you to comment.


Many seed companies sell hybrid seed corn. Hybrid means it's a cross between two or more varieties of corn, and it's quite a science. Corn pollinates by wind distribution. How do you get the corn to cooperate and not self-pollinate? What you do is plant four rows of one variety, called the female rows, and one row of another variety, called the bull row. Alternate like this across the whole field, (In the Midwest these fields can be a mile long, but more often half a mile). The bull row provides the pollen from its tassels. And you do not want any pollen from the female rows! 


Solution: hire a bunch of kids to show up at the crack of dawn, a couple days before the tassels on the female rows mature, and pull the tassels off. A kid can walk two rows at a time, one row for each hand, so you need two kids for each set of four female rows. It's entirely normal to have a crew or fifty kids start on one end of a field, and when they get to the end, line up for another set of rows and come back, and work like this until the field is done. It typically takes a couple of trips through a field over a couple days to get all the tassels. 

That early in the morning the dew is heavy, and the pure water immediately soaks into everything. Corn leaves have scratchy hairs along their edges. and some of the corn can be pretty tall. And it changes from cold and wet to sunny and blisteringly hot as the day progresses. And you have to pay attention to what you're doing; tassels are easy to miss. My job was to follow the kids and check for quality and problems. 
We had a lot of adventures. Center pivots watering the field were not a reason to get out of the field. You walk through puddles left by last night's thunderstorm, too. The occasional snake and gopher usually caused some excitement. I remember one girl, extremely citified and dainty, hairdo and nail polish and everything, actually caught a live grasshopper and held onto it until the end of the row because I had promised that if she did so, I would eat it alive. Which I did. I'm sure it was the first insect she had ever deliberately touched. Good experience for her. 


So it's a good first job; simple, but hard.


Now go read my poem.