By Nick Loomis and Molly Ashford
Scott Wilcox wasn’t surprised when Bayer, one of the largest seed corn producers in the world, did not renew its contract with the detasseling company he owned and operated out of Seward, Neb., after the 2020 season.
In the nine years that Wilcox hired and supervised detasseling crews for Monsanto and Bayer, which bought Monsanto in 2018, he began to notice an increasing number of migrant workers in the seed corn fields near his crews of local teenagers. State and national data indicate that many of those migrant workers likely held H-2A visas.
“They don’t have to take care of them like they are required to take care of us, the kids from Nebraska,” said Wilcox, a teacher who made extra money detasseling in the summer. “It was just a way cheaper way for them to go.”
The number of farm labor contractors employing local teens in Nebraska dropped from 27 in 2019 to 15 in 2025, according to data from the Nebraska Department of Labor.
Cross-referencing that data with a national database of H-2A employers showed the number of detasseling contractors employing H-2A visa holders in Nebraska rose from three to five over the same time period.
The H-2A visa program was introduced in 1986 in response to farm labor shortages, mostly in fruit and vegetable harvesting, that require large amounts of manual labor for extended periods. It allows agricultural employers to bring in foreign workers on temporary visas if they can prove that domestic labor isn’t available.
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