As teens wait for work, ag firms turn to guest workers to tend to Midwest cornfields

By Will Bauer

For more than 40 years, Lief and her family employed up to 500 middle and high schoolers to detassel corn in July and August. Based in York, Nebraska, she ran buses to pick up teens in neighboring Seward and all the way to Lincoln one hour away.

Her family contracted for Syngenta as well as Monsanto, the St. Louis-based agricultural behemoth that German-based Bayer bought in 2018 for $68 billion. Lief was in the business of finding workers to detassel more than 2,700 acres of corn controlled by the two large agriculture companies throughout her region of southeast Nebraska.

New advances in herbicides and plant breeding over the years meant Monsanto needed fewer people to detassel corn. And of those fewer people Monsanto used, more of them were migrant workers.

It became unsustainable for Lief to hire all these teens with so little work to do.

“It was hard for our kids because they used this for so long as an income and some of them had worked for us for years,” she said.

Lief first detasseled at 13 years old. More than 40 years later, she is out of the corn detasseling business altogether. For her, that was an adjustment.

“I never knew what you did in July other than detasseling,” she said.

Other corn detasseling operations have faced similar experiences as seed companies like Bayer, Syngenta and Remington Seeds, which control a growing amount of the Midwest’s cropland, increasingly use the H-2A visa program to hire temporary migrant workers. The H-2A program allows agriculture companies to hire migrant workers if they cannot find enough domestic workers.

For decades, corn detasseling has been more than just a job for Nebraska teenagers. Pulling the tassel off the top of corn stalks to prevent self-pollination paid well above minimum wage and offered pay raises to return following years. And, given the manual labor involved, detasseling was seen as a rite of passage for teenagers in Nebraska and the rest of the Corn Belt, a task that taught lessons in work ethic for young Midwesterners.

Nebraska Public Media News also learned that job postings for corn detasseling contained misleading or unrealistic job requirements that appeared to discourage local workers from applying.

Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts’ administration sought to direct seed companies toward using local workers, but the U.S. Department of Labor intervened and said temporary guest workers had already been approved and must be used.

One of the major companies involved with detasseling authored a presentation that detailed its decision to prioritize migrant workers because they required less company oversight and were more productive.

The result is what local detasseling contractors say is a vanishing opportunity for local teenagers and the use of migrant workers who are sometimes taken advantage of for the benefits of their employers.

‘710 employees wait-listed’

In 2019, Gov. Ricketts took note of a wait-list that contained hundreds of Nebraskans who were interested in detasseling corn that summer. So, it came as a surprise to learn that contractors for seed companies had been approved to hire migrant workers under the H-2A program.

The H-2A visa, created in 1986, allows agricultural companies to hire seasonal temporary foreign workers. But companies can only bring on H-2A workers after they’ve shown that they tried to hire local workers and found there’s not enough interest or capability.

Ricketts wrote to federal officials later that year to let them know local workers wanted to detassel corn.

“In 2019, Nebraska detasseling (harvest) companies had 710 employees wait-listed,” Ricketts wrote in a letter to the U.S. Department of Labor, “but certifications were still granted for H-2A workers to perform detasseling.”

Ricketts heard from local contractors who raised concerns about the trend of contractors for seed companies using H-2A workers. His letter urged the Department of Labor to reform the H-2A program by requiring seed companies to first petition the local contractors for the amount of available work before they can apply for migrant workers, which is not currently a requirement.

“This requirement would ensure that the hiring of American workers is prioritized and prevent seed companies from manipulating the system by indirectly employing H-2A workers through the utilization of third-party harvest companies when there are more than adequate numbers of American workers who are willing to perform the needed services,” Ricketts’ letter said.

Asked about Ricketts’ letter, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) said a wait list of available teenage laborers amounted to insufficient evidence to prompt federal officials to act.

“Such a waitlist may show individuals are interested generally in employment in a certain area, such as corn detasseling, but it is not evidence that U.S. workers actually applied for a specific job opportunity offered in conjunction with an H-2A application or U.S. workers applied and were unlawfully rejected,” a department spokesperson said in a statement.

In order for the U.S. DOL to reject an H-2A application, the department needed evidence that Nebraska workers both applied to those jobs and were unlawfully rejected, according to the spokesperson.

But Nebraska Department of Labor officials investigated job postings for detasseling jobs and found signs that job descriptions discouraged local applicants.

The Bayer presentation also said there’s less corn for workers to detassel because of new developments in crop herbicides and genetically modified corn that requires less manual labor.

“While we’ve seen some shifts in labor as a whole, across Nebraska, the vast majority of our workers continue to be local youth laborers,” a Bayer spokesperson wrote in a statement. “The entire industry continues to face challenges in recruiting youth workers, and in many cases, these positions go unfilled.”

In 2020, the chief operating officer of Bayer’s crop science division sent a letter to Ricketts after the two spoke.

“I appreciate your passion for agriculture and your interest in our operations in Nebraska,” Brett Begemann wrote to Ricketts from St. Louis. “At Bayer, we support the opportunity to provide employment in the communities where we have sites located. Nebraskans, both youth and adult, will always be a critical part of our summer labor force.”

The letter was obtained through a public records request to the governor’s office.

Begemann said in the letter (dated May 6, 2020) that Bayer would employ 2,050 to 2,670 youth and 187 to 207 adult H-2A workers for detasseling that summer.

Bayer also declined interview requests. In a statement for this story, the Bayer spokesperson stressed detasseling looks much different today than a generation ago.