Detasseling A Tangled Situation

Lately, Virgil’s detasseling trips have grown… longer. He’s been gone from sun-up to moonset. He insists it’s all part of the hybrid process. Yet I recently found a postcard in his pocket—from a Corn Queen Festival in Kansas, with a suspicious lipstick smudge.

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Dear Maized and Confused,

First of all, bless your beautiful heart—and your seventeen offspring, each surely a kernel of chaos in their own right.

Now. Let’s talk tassels.

Here’s my advice:

1. Call a Field Meeting.
   Invite Virgil to sit down—perhaps with a glass of lemonade and a firm tone—and ask him to walk you through exactly what he’s been detasseling… and with whom.
2. Request a Tassel Accounting.
   Ask for a list of dates, fields, and varietals. If he stammers and brings up the Dust Bowl, he’s dodging.
3. Consider Counter-Intelligence.
   Send one of the older kids (maybe the one who can’t be trusted near power tools) out to follow him discreetly. Bonus if they carry a clipboard and mutter things like “Yield deviation noted.”
4. Remember Your Worth.
   You are not just the silent partner in this farm-based marriage. You are the glue, the grease, and probably the one who fixes the tractor. Don’t let yourself be reduced to background corn.

If it turns out Virgil has been faithful, just deeply passionate about pollen purity, then celebrate with sweet corn and forgiveness. But if he’s been wandering from your row, I suggest you replant your boundaries—and maybe consider a solo vacation to a place where the only tassels are on cocktail umbrellas.

Standing with you in silk and solidarity,
Tess Twinehart
Advice Columnist, WLBOTT
(Former Poultry Counselor, Current Guardian of Emotional Harvests)

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References

Detasseling: the Nuts and Bolts

Elder G Provides a Detasseling Overview:

Ah yes—welcome to the romantic and oddly surgical world of corn matchmaking.

It’s like a Jane Austen novel, but with plants:

“Dearest Row 7, your tassels have been most rudely plucked, but worry not—for gallant Row 8 shall provide the pollen that completes your destiny.”

The Great Tassel Cull: Hybrid Corn Edition

In the name of agricultural love and science, corn breeders perform a delicate ballet of reproduction:

1. The Setup:
   • Fields are planted in alternating blocks: one type is the male (the pollen donor), and the other is the female (the seed bearer).
   • The rows designated as female have their tassels removed by hand before they shed pollen, to ensure no self-pollination.
2. The Tassel Tug:
   • Workers, often high school students on summer break or underpaid WLBOTT interns, walk the rows daily and de-tassel the females.
   • This is done just before the tassels mature and release pollen, like catching a party crasher before he spikes the punch bowl.
3. Controlled Cross-Pollination:
   • Only the designated male plants are allowed to drop pollen into the wind, floating like tiny golden whispers of destiny onto the silks of the de-tasseled females.

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Corn detasseling is often a rural high school student’s first job, lasting a few weeks in the summer.

Sort of an Iowa combination field trip / detention hall.

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WLBOTT Wonders: Are corn tassels edible?
A: Yes…..

WLBOTT Wonders: Can just about anything be eaten “lightly steamed with butter”?
A: No. Notable exceptions include pine bark, certain metamorphic rocks, and Microsoft Windows Enterprise Server.

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The WLBOTT Detasseling Team

To capitalize on the two weeks of long hours, hot sun, and minimum wage, we sent our WLBOTT team to the fields.

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What Led to Our Interest in Corn Detasseling?

The WLBOTT Literary Society is currently reading Interface, by Neal Stephenson and Frederick George. One of the minor characters, Floyd Wayne Vishniak, an unemployed rural ne’er-do-well, imagines himself as a political operative and needs some income to keep abreast of current events.

Chapter Forty-three > Page 441
He had lived for quite some time now on a meager unemployment check, and had long since given up trying to find himself a job. But now, Floyd Wayne Vishniak[…] had become, in effect, a personal adviser to Governor Cozzano. It was a weighty responsibility. He was not going to sit around in his trailer drinking beer and acting like some kind of a buffoon. He was going to educate himself. He was going to start paying attention to the presidential campaign and learn about all of the candidates and the issues.

Chapter Forty-three > Page 442
Since then it had become a habit [reading five newspapers a day]. Two and a half bucks a day, six days a week, added up to fifteen bucks, plus an additional five bucks on Sunday made twenty bucks a week. Eighty dollars a month. On Floyd Wayne Vishniak’s budget it was a lot of money. He had cut back on his beer consumption, and, as the summer wore on and the tassels began to sprout from the corn, he had taken a job detasseling. Detasseling was a common practice in Iowa; it was the mass castration of corn plants by the forcible removal of their tassels. The actual yanking was done by hand, by individual detasselers walking up and down the rows, endlessly, beneath the hot August sun.

Chapter Forty-three > Page 446
After he returned from his night detasseling shift, he sat down at his kitchen table with a beer and a fresh white piece of paper and relayed the results of his research activities to the one man who could make the best use of the information.

Interface, by Neal Stephenson and Frederick George

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Out Takes

Some pretty cool images that didn’t quite fit….