By STAN MADDUX

Indiana Correspondent

NEW CARISLE, Ind. — The late planting of corn after an extremely wet spring is creating a shortage of labor for detasseling throughout the Midwest.

Traditionally, much of the labor is provided by teenagers and young adults wanting to make some extra spending cash during the summer. This year, the young fieldhands are beginning school or heading off to college before seed corn, 2-3 weeks behind in growth, is ready for detasseling.

Jerry Collanese of New Carlisle said he hired 30 workers for detasseling this season on the farms he serves within a 30-mile radius of Plymouth. He once had as many as 90 people to send out into the fields during the 1980s, when interest among youth was higher in the six- to seven-hours-a-day, labor-intensive job.

The number he’s been able to hire ever since, though, has steadily dropped. Adding to the difficulty this year is detasseling running so late and school in Indiana starting in early to mid-August. College students also have to leave this year before the season is over for late-planted corn.

Normally, Collanese starts detasseling on July 10 but had to wait 10 days longer to begin this summer, and since the work normally takes about a month to complete, not all of his hired help will be able to get to all the fields. “We’re going to come up short this year.”

Collanese said he is contracted to provide detasseling by seed producer Pioneer, which has migrant workers to dispatch into acreage his crews won’t be able to get to.

The narrow window for detasseling caused by late planting doesn’t seem as great in Michigan, where the school year typically begins later than in Indiana. Schools in Michigan used to be under a mandate not to begin the school year until after Labor Day but recently were given the option to start earlier.

Laura Miller of Sturgis, Mich., said she and her husband did not experience any shortage of labor this year for the detasseling they perform on seed corn because of school in her area not starting until August 21.

The Millers, contracted by Bayer SeedGrowth to provide this service, hired their usual 200 or so workers on target to complete detasseling in all of their fields before heading off to school. “We’re going to have our acres in,” she said.

Miller said it helps her maintain their labor pool by being a retired teacher with connections in the schools to help with the recruiting.

Workers age 18 and older for Collanese are paid $11 an hour. His hourly wage is $9 for 17-year-olds, $8 for 16-year-olds, and $7.25 for kids 14-15. He said all of his workers also receive $10 an hour for their commute.

The Millers pay first-year workers $8.50 an hour and a $1 hourly raise every year they return. Some of them perform other work in the fields before and after detasseling for extra money.

“We have many kids who work on our cleanup crews and our de-rowing crews that make almost $2,000 in a summer, so that’s really good for a kid,” Miller said.

Detasseling is done to cross-pollinate two different types of corn to produce the best hybrid seeds for the following season. Tassels broken from the tops of male corn plants are dropped to the ground and pollen from the tassels, with help from the wind, falls onto the silk of the female plants.

Such hybridization is credited with helping to substantially increase yields nationwide over the past 60 years. Nowadays, machines are relied upon heavily for the task, but they can only reach about 80-90 percent of tassels; manual labor is used to detassel the rest of the corn.

Jim Anderson, co-owner of DTL Detasseling in Newman, Ill., also reported contractors of seed producers his area have struggled in finding enough student labor to finish detasseling on late-planted corn.

He said a shortage of local youth to perform other tasks throughout season is also becoming more difficult in other countries, like Argentina, where he served as a detasseling consultant more than a decade ago. At the time, detasseling was still done primarily by hand but he said at his recommendation producers there started bringing in machines to help ease its labor shortage.

“It’s a global issue. I don’t know if you want to call it the ‘Xbox era,’ but we don’t walk beans anymore. Chemicals do the job for us now,” Anderson said.