GALESBURG While many teenagers sleep in during the summer, 14-year-old Will Bennett wakes up at 5 a.m. to make it to his summer job -- corn detasseling. While it's hard work in the hot sun, it does ...

In order to make enough money to buy a new car, Alesander Rodriguez has spent nearly every day of the past week in a cornfield. He’s not a farmer, though. Rodriguez, 16, of Beardstown, is one of many ...

An employee of Ailes Detasseling walks through a seed corn field near Utica, Neb., in 2024. Detasseling is seen as a rite of passage for Midwest teenagers, but in recent years, more of the detasseling ...

As technologically advanced as agriculture has become, some things still must be done by hand. Helping the U.S. corn crop reproduce is one of them. Every summer, workers — many of them teens — pour ...

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... OMAHA, Neb.—Abi Swanson is a self-described girly girl who’s doing hard labor. The 13-year-old from Lincoln is saving money for ballet lessons, so she’s been ...

The first domestic intelligent robot developed to detassel corn recently began operating at a demonstration base in Changji city, Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region. Detasseling is the act of removing ...

As the dawn pales the night sky Wednesday morning, a school bus on a dirt road south of town stops to deposit a group of youths into a cornfield for another day of detasseling. They are joined by NBS ...

The corn is tasseling, the silk on the ear is growing, pollination is near, and my thoughts turn back to the worst job I ever had: detasseling. In the summer of 1959, at the tender age of 12, I along ...

Every summer, thousands of Midwestern kids as young as 13 load onto school buses early in the morning to do one of the hottest, dirtiest temporary jobs out there. They are the corn detasselers. But ...