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

For decades, corn detasseling was a customary summer job for teenagers in Nebraska and the rest of the Corn Belt. In recent years, however, agriculture companies are relying more on migrant labor to do this work through a visa program meant to supplement the local workforce.
Over time, Lynn Leif found herself with less and less work to offer to teenagers.

For more than 40 years, Leif 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. Leif 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.