Fleetmack.com - The Detasseling King

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"Women: You can't live with them, and you can't get them to dress up in a skimpy little Nazi costume and beat you with a warm squash or something." --Emo Philips

Phil Kohorst - The Detasseling King
by Bryan Mack
11-07-2005

Let's discuss corn detasseling. Hybrid corn is corn that is cross-pollinated. You plant 2 types of corn in the same field. In the case of hybrid corn, you plant 4 rows of type A corn (female) and 1 row of the type B corn (male). So it goes male, female female female female, male. The tassel is the part of the corn that contains the pollen, and in early to mid August (I think) is when that tassel will self-pollenate the corn. However, to produce the hybrid, you need the tassel from the type B corn (male) to pollenate the female corn. For this reason, in mid to late July (after the corn is fully grown but before pollenation) you go detasseling. Before the tassel can self-pollenate the corn, you walk through rows of corn, which range anywhere from 1/4 mile to 1 mile in length, and manually pull the tassel from each piece of female corn. This is a miserable job. Summers in Iowa have temperatures consistently in the 90's, and if you're in a corn field, you're in the middle of the sun, so it's likely to have a heat index of 100 degrees or higher. Iowa also has very high humidity, this doesn't help. For this reason, to beat some of the heat, you begin detasseling by 6a.m. at the very latest. Imagine walking through a soaking wet corn field, full of spiders and spiderwebs (which collapse in your face), walking through corn fields in which the corn can be as high as 8 or 9 feet in height (don't believe me? Here's Jess stanidng by it - she's just over 5 feet tall). Note: I am wearing biking gloves in those pictures as I took them while entering a corn field during RAGBRAI, you wear work gloves or go bare while detasseling.

Let's paint this picture further. It rained the night before, you're walking in mud and your feet sink with each step. You have allergies and get corn rash so you have to wear a full sweatshirt and bandana to cover your neck. You're soaking wet but boiling hot at the same time. Your feet are tired as you've walked a good 8 miles so far today, you're thirsty, it's 10am, you've been working for 4 hours, and you still have about 5 or 6 more hours (at the bare minimum) before you can call it a day. You're in the middle of a thistle field, you're hungover, your arms hurt, there's corn in your face, and the row you're walking in is unlevel as the planter's wheel rode where you walk, so it's rounded and you trip about every 5th step. Here's what I looked like after a typical detasseling day when I was 13 years old.

Sounds pretty miserable, doesn't it? Call me crazy, but these were some of the best days of my life. The job itself is horrible, but when you're 15 years old and you can pull in $14/hour, you'll do pretty much anything. When I was about 13 doing this, I was only getting $6/hour. Back then I wore my headphones to keep me company. Walking in a field, listening to AC/DC's Thunderstruck or Body Count or some hard metal music like that. But detasseling with headphones on is not the way to go. The real reason I loved detasseling is because of the conversations you have with the people around you. You're doing miserable work in miserable conditions with 3 other people between male rows with you. I've detasseled with Muhl, Klaver, Scott and Tim Schau, Staiert, and many others. I remember the first time I went, I was in a crew with Tyson and Eric Rust, Dale Reineke (who passed away almost 4 years ago), and Kurt Baumhover was our supervisor. That was the summer before my freshman year of high school and they were all 2-3 years older than me. Not to sound ridiculous here, but I bonded with those guys for a good 2-3 weeks, every day, for hours and hours, and when I got to high school - I knew them all very well. In fact, I still feel like I have some weird connection to those guys for some reason.

When I was a sophomore in high school, Mark Kohorst asked me to join him and a select few others for that season. I would continue to go with this crew for 3 or 4 years, until I was 19. I suppose 10 or 12 of us went that year, and these were by far and away the best detasseling seasons ever. This guy who I'd never met before was in our group. A big guy, huge guy, we're talking 6'3" 300lb guy. He wore a garbage bag to keep from getting wet. He had these enormous socks with holes cut out for fingers that went all the way up to his biceps to cover his arms from corn rash. He was boisterous, loud, and --along with Mitch Hedberg-- the funniest damn person who has made me laugh. Walking through miserable conditions in 100 degree heat, nothing was sore except my stomach from laughing so much. He had a rendition of Lesbian Seagull from the Beavis & Butthead movie that would bring me to tears. After detasseling, it was shower time then time to hit the town. The next morning it was back at 'em, 5am, wet corn, mud, corn rash, hunger, exhaustion -- but we'd all be armed with our stories of what we did the previous night. If for some reason I chose to watch paint dry the previous night, Phil would make a story about how this was the funniest thing in the world. The jokes, the stories, the immense laughter, the sudden "fox hole" tackle/attack from someone hiding in the corn to scare you, and most importanly, the friendship and comraderie. The days just flew by at mach speeds, and I'm proud to talk about them. I am also proud to call them some of the best days of my life, and I know those days will never be matched.

I was informed late last night that the man who made these days so fun for me, Phil Kohorst, died incredibly unexpectedly and suddenly this weekend immediately after leaving the Iowa State football game. As I've told several people, Phil isn't the guy I would ever call up, and I'm not sure I have an email address for him any more. But I can tell you that if I ran into him at the bar back in Carroll, the guy would come up, give me a hug, immediately hand me a beer, and we'd talk for a couple hours of the detasseling days. The next few hours would be filled with laughter, and I'd leave saying "Thank God for that guy." He had no enemies, only friends, all of whom would be laughing at all times around him. I feel I know him as good as anyone, but if he listed his top 100 friends I'd be lucky to make the list. It hurts me that I didn't get to spend more time with him than those wonderful days in the corn fields and the occasional meeting at the slow-pitch softball games, beer gardens in the summers, and bars in Carroll. It brings a tear (more like several hundred) to my eye to see him go. Please pray for all his family and friends, we'll miss you, Phil.

Note: This story originally ran on November 7, 2005's news page