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You Gotta Have Pull to Work Here

The Source

They’re one of the unsung treasures of our community and they go largely unnoticed unless you’re fourteen years old and need some spending money. 81 years ago two brothers launched a business on the coattails of the Great Depression and planted what was then a unique idea in our community: hybrid seed corn. Roy and Wilbur Burrus had a dream and the results can not only be seen spread across the Midwest Corn Belt, but in the pockets of youngsters on the streets of Jacksonville and surrounding communities. Those yellow buses we see loading in Jacksonville, Arenzville, Virginia, Mt. Sterling and Pike County are summer-filled with boys and girls headed out for in many cases their first real work experience. Detasseling corn has also provided some good summer income for young teachers, something I was once. Fellow I.C. classmate Tom Burrus gave me a call one spring morning and asked if I’d be interested in a job as a supervisor for their tassel-pulling crews. I needed the money but had no idea why you’d want to pull the tops out of corn plants. Thus began a two-decade education in the seed corn business. For the uninitiated here’s a simple explanation: When you combine the best traits of two varieties you get a third and better product. Since corn plants don’t exactly reproduce with wine and soft music, the farmer must plant one variety next to the other. Don’t worry, I’m not talking dirty here. The tassel corresponds to the male part of the plant and the silks to the female end of things. If you pull a cornstalk’s tassel (they don’t feel a thing) then “she” receives her pollen from the plant next door. It’s sort of the Amish version of sex. I’ll admit to smiling at the irony of a crew of twelve girls marching through a cornfield emasculating male corn plants. Mechanical pullers remove around 95% of the tassels but it’s that last five percent that separates one seed company from the next, and for eight decades Burrus has been known for producing some of the purest hybrids in agribusiness. Thus the need for hundreds of youngsters to walk the fields or ride personnel carriers in search of the remaining tassels. In the early days of hybrid corn everyone walked the fields and without the aid of mechanical pullers. When the corn got too high the kids would strap stilts to their feet to reach the towering plants. Over the years corn has been bred to be a bit shorter and the people machines have eased the workload a bit, although it’s still a job in the hot sun, the mud, the rain, and without a timeout. As the years went by I was promoted to area supervisor in charge of up to ten or twelve crews in a day. It was my job to call roll in the morning, keep track of our progress, move machinery and workers from one field to another, gas up the vehicles, and keep the crews well watered. I knew every bump in the road of the Meredosia bottomland, and had developed a personal relationship with the fence posts. Back then we worked a double shift with one group of kids coming in at six a.m. then being relieved by a one p.m. crew and working until eight that night. That required me to be on the job by five and return home around ten. It was a long, long day and although I could no more do that now that win the high dive at the Summer Olympics, it provided great exercise, a good summer stipend, and a great tan. Several generations of young people now have the Burrus brand on their resume and any employer in our area knows what that means: this boy or girl knows what it means to work, to get up early, to do what you say you’ll do. While many seed companies rely almost solely on migrant laborers, the Burrus folks have insisted on keeping things local as much as possible, providing a welcome income for our area youth. I’m no financial expert, but I suspect that it costs them a bit more to do it this way since the typical migrant worker probably works at a more efficient rate. However, that’s never been the Burrus philosophy. And of course any time you find yourself in a hot, wearisome job with several hundred others, you make memories. . . .the teen girl from Beardstown who swore she was dying of the heat and asked her supervisor to pour the end-of-the-day water can on her. He did and her top gave way, leaving the girl shivering and the poor boy red-faced. . . The boy who misunderstood me when I told him to “Walk down the row.” He thought I’d said, “Walk down the road,” so he walked back to Dosh thinking he’d been fired. . . The angry father who blocked my truck on a dirt road, demanding to know why I had fired his daughter. I said, “Because she was lazy.” The man said, “Okay,” then got in his truck and left. I guess he needed something to tell his wife . . . The first-day workers who show up on the job with enough food in their lunchbox to feed a third-world nation for two days . . . The van load of Japanese tourists who followed my crew through the field snapping pictures. . . The girl who re-did her makeup at the end of every lap in the cornfield. . . good stuff. But here’s a hats-off to some of the finest people I’ve ever worked for, and to an organization who still teach that hard work pays. I often tell prospective young tassel pullers that they’ll never work for finer people and every job for the rest of their lives will be easier than this one.