Field corn vs. seed corn: Untangling the mysteries of detasseling

Detasseling is a right of passage for many youth in the Midwest.

Detasseling is oftentimes a first job for many area kids, a taste of responsibility – hard work with the reward of a paycheck.

If you didn’t detassel when you were a teen, it's likely that you know someone who did. But what is detasseling? What are they doing out there in the field and why does it matter?

Detasseling is specifically done to seed corn. Seed corn is just what it sounds like – corn grown to become the seeds for farmers to plant.

Farmers who grow seed corn work with a seed company that will be selling the seeds. Through research, that company has learned which genetics it thinks will make seeds that will grow into plants that produce a good-yielding corn crop for the farmer.

Corn is typically a self-pollinating plant, meaning that the pollen (in the tassel) will fall off the tassel and pollinate the ears, the process that creates the kernels.

That is where detasseling comes into play. Through detasseling, the tassels of selected plants are removed so that only the pollen (and therefore, the genetics) of the remaining plants are pollinating the ears in the corn field, which is how the companies can create their desired seeds.

The majority of the corn that you see when you are driving down the road does not need to be detasseled because it not seed corn, but rather field corn. In fact, 94% of all corn grown in the United States is field corn.

When farmers grow field corn, they use the seeds that were grown as seed corn.

Field corn is oftentimes confused with sweet corn, but the two actually are different types of corn.

Sweet corn is the corn with which we are most familiar. We eat it on the cob and buy it frozen or canned in the grocery store.

Field corn is a higher starch corn that is used to make more than 4,000 different products, including livestock feed, ethanol, cereal, wallpaper, plastic, and much more.

So back to the topic at hand, detasseling. For anyone who has earned the right to put that hot job on your resume, you are doing an important job and your task matters.

In your small way, you are helping the farmers with their future success by helping the kernels of today (the seed corn) become their corn crop of tomorrow.

Danelle Burrs is director of the Lee County Farm Bureau.