Detasseling

It is a form of pollination control,[1] employed to cross-breed, or hybridize, two varieties of corn.

Detasseling machines typically remove 60 to 90 percent of the tassels in a seed corn field.

The main problems for the machines are that they are unable to adapt quickly to height differences in plants and they throw tassels into the air where they can become lodged in other corn plants and inadvertently allow pollination.

Detasseling work is usually performed by teens; as such, it serves as a typical rite of passage in rural areas of the Corn Belt of the Midwestern United States.

Exact starting dates depend on the specific area of the country and the growing conditions of any given year.

Detasseling was used in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the "ear-row" method of corn breeding.

Heterosis describes the tendency of the progeny of a specific cross to outperform both parents.

Hybrid corn was detasseled manually until the mid-1950s, when a cytoplasm was discovered that would cause one of the inbred lines to be male sterile while the hybridized seed corn it produced would regain male fertility.

[7] This situation changed in 1971 with an outbreak of the fungus southern corn leaf blight.

At the time, approximately 90% of hybrid corn used in the United States contained this gene.

[10] Today, corn hybridization is accomplished by a combination of machine and manual detasseling as well as male-sterile genes.

Seed corn fields are planted in a repetitive pattern known as a "panel", "block" or "set", depending on the area of the country.