The seed corn business in Nebraska is already big business and it’s getting bigger.

Monsanto is hard at work on the construction phase of a $155 million investment that will be spent largely on a new processing plant between Utica and Waco. Pioneer is spending $13 million to upgrade a similar plant near York.

 Syngenta and Mycogen are two more prominent players in one of farmers’ most familiar and significant value-added opportunities and in a state where irrigation protects against drought.

Yet seed corn remains a strange research-production combination. It’s 11 months of high-tech dazzlement and a July full of grunt work.

On the research end, lab technicians can now splice together tidy biotech packages that give kernels genetic resistance to corn borers and rootworms. Along with that comes tolerance to the herbicides that can be counted upon to wipe out invading weeds.

On the production end, thousands of perspiring teen-agers do the grunt work seven days a week, rain or shine.

They typically arrive on buses from Lincoln and points surrounding not long after daybreak. They plunge into often muddy, half-mile-long corn rows, and pluck corn tassels missed by machines for minimum wage plus incentive pay.

Twenty years after the biotech craze swept through the seed-corn industry, hands-on work in the field is still the only way to adequately defeat corn’s self-pollinating ways and to ensure that plants in adjoining rows will cross with each other and deliver hybrid vigor.

Bill Sloup, Seward school teacher and veteran of the summertime detasseling wars, keeps hearing how companies are going to find the answer that allows seed corn to grow sterile, negating the need for teen armies, and yet produce fertile seed.

“We’ve done it for 30 years and that question has been asked for 30 years,” Sloup said, “and we’re still pulling tassels. I’m not so brazen or so bold as to say they’ll always need us, because the day may come when they don’t.”

But for now and for as far into the future as Pioneer’s Jeff Dilbeck can see, they do. And they will.

In responding to growing demand for corn, Pioneer has added 30 percent more acres this year across a seed-producing area that stretches as far east as Michigan and as far south as Texas. In Nebraska alone, just this one of the big four of seed corn will need 4,500 detasselers — “4,500 very, very important detasselers.” Dilbeck said.

“In the end,” said the Lincoln-based marketing manager, “having a skilled agronomist and having folks out there pulling tassels by hand — making sure of purity and making sure all the tassels are out of the field — is extremely important.”

The sterility-fertility trick has shown some signs of success and it will probably become standard operating procedure some day, he said. “At this point, it is not here. It’s still about hiring those kids and getting out and doing the detasseling.”

Remembering the past 

As a large population center perched on the edge of seed-corn country, Lincoln is home to lots of people who know something about detasseling — in some cases, more than they want to know.

It’s easy to conjure up images this week of barely awake parents delivering barely awake sons and daughters clutching lunch coolers to bus pick-up points at dawn.

Dale Flowerday and Earle Raun go back a lot farther and to a more obscure point in the corn time line.

“I can remember 60 years ago when farmers did their own selection,” said Raun, a Lincoln crop consultant.

In those days, next year’s seed came out of the current year’s harvest and from a regular cornfield, not a specialized seed plot. “They took an ear that looked awful good,” he said, “and put it with other ears and selected their own seed.”

  Flowerday, a former Pioneer employee and now also a Lincoln crop consultant, tells of similar events. “You had a little box on the side of the wagon. And if you got a nice ear and a stalk that was still standing, and all that sort of thing, you picked that stuff out.”

Seed successes are now closely guarded secrets, controlled by licensing agreements among companies. Lawsuits sometimes result when somebody strays over the line.

Especially since 1990, the giants of the seed industry have come a long way from the little boxes.

Darren Wallis, based in St. Louis as a spokesman for Monsanto, cited the “transformative technology” tied to a no-till style of agriculture, meaning tillage has become much less of a factor in eliminating weeds.

That same description takes in the discovery that plant genes could be manipulated to deal with weed and insect pests.

From there, Wallis said, “the stacking of those into the plant really changed the game again.” And along the way, “farmers were able to reduce the amount of other costs they have and really invest in seed technology.”

Triple stacking, for example, means that resistance to above ground insects, below ground insects and herbicide resistance can be put in the same seed and passed on in the seed sack sold to farmers for use the next year.

“You start with good germ plasm,” said Kent Martin, who heads Monsanto’s North American corn operations from St. Louis. “We have the most competitive germ plasm in the industry, we feel.”

Pioneer’s Dilbeck said the time was certainly right for some changes as the 1990s arrived.

It was no fun, for example, to try to apply insecticide chemicals in April in a 50 mph wind. Farmers had to stand ready to deal with the possibilities of first-brood and second-brood corn borers.

Shattercane was an especially persistent weed problem in corn because it’s also from the grass family. That meant that any attempts to kill it with chemicals had to be carried out carefully to avoid killing the corn as well.

Making corn tolerant of the chemicals that could kill shattercane provided the way out of that box.

Overall, “It was very intensive to grow a crop of corn back in 1990 in Nebraska and other parts of the country,” Dilbeck said.

Now farmers who pay the technology fees that go with seed purchases can deal with all those headaches through the seed.

“You’re able to get all those things done that had to be done separately back in 1990,” Dilbeck said.

Wallis said there’s no secret to why things have moved so fast since then. “It’s customer recognition that these products work,” he said, “and that’s what makes them grow so fast.”

The gee-whiz technology behind seed progress also extends into seed processing.

Tom Schaffran, site manager for Monsanto at Waco, said equipment expected to be in use there for the 2009 harvest will include digital cameras that will help sort “every individual kernel going through processing equipment” into the keepers and the culls.

Brand loyalty gives way 

Change often has a down side.  Part of the picture for high-tech seed is enormous dollar expenditures that are beyond the reach of smaller seed companies.

Some have gone out of business. Others, such as Lincoln’s NC+, have been bought up by the big guys.

As consolidation has taken hold, the intense brand loyalty that farmers felt to those small companies has given way to a willingness to switch allegiances about as quickly as they see a price advantage or as a bigger seed player gains a new biotechnology edge.

What’s going on? Crop consultant Flowerday was quick to spell it out.

M-O-N-E-Y, he responded.

There may still be a bit of an element of trust between a farmer and his local seed-corn dealer. “You have a little bit of association,” he said, “but they also know the big decisions are made in Des Moines and St. Louis and all the big corporate board rooms.”

Who’s winning the war for market share? “Nobody gives you any figures,” Flowerday said, “but my guess is that Monsanto and all its subsidiaries have the greatest market share at the moment.”

Back into the fieldsWhat technology still can’t do is substitute for all the teen-agers and those able to attend to all the details that form them into an effective detasseling force.

 Again this summer they will be led by the likes of Bill Sloup of Seward and Dawn Buell of Lincoln.

Buell, a high school teacher by training, evolved into a routine that includes running her own business. She’s now in her 11th year as boss of NATS.

That stands for Not Afraid To Sweat. The 350 detasselers following her into the field this month know the name is aptly chosen.

Nonetheless, when sought out before D-Day, as in the first day of detasseling in 2008, Buell sounded as enthusiastic as ever about what was ahead.

“It’s pretty exciting,” she said. “It’s very exciting. I don’t know why.”

Buell can already feel the impact of expansion in seed acres that goes with spiking corn demand. She’s hired about 70 more workers than last year.

The added help is mostly there to deal with a new request from Syngenta to do fields in the Elkhorn area.

Next year, she expects an even bigger test of her hiring skills. “I think next year will be a really big year, because that’s when the Monsanto plant at Waco, from what I’m told, will be up and running.”

 Sloup has been part of the same ramping up. “We’ve had an opportunity to build more crews,” he said, “and particularly the last two years. Last year is when we saw our biggest growth ever, in all the years we’ve done it, and that’s been followed by more growth this year.”

It adds up to about 900 detasselers and adult supervisers overall for the two companies he helps manage. The work territory goes north beyond Norfolk and as far south as Hebron and Fairbury.

Despite the hiring onslaught, “I think it’s probably fair to say we had an easier time filling up crews that maybe we’ve ever had.”

Sloup cited an economic situation in which there may be fewer jobs available for teen workers in Lincoln. “I think, because of the economy, we’ve even got waiting lists on some of our buses this year.”

Those hired by his business partnerships can expect to earn between $700 and $3,000 working without a weekend break for several weeks.

One of the messages in that compacted schedule is that the tassels absolutely must go before they start to shed pollen and interfere with cross-pollination.

Buell has also heard the talk about the grunt work of the seed-corn industry being supplanted by some new form of technology genius.

“If I’m 65,” she said, “I’ll look forward to it.”

In 2008, despite the mosquitoes, the mud, and the other hazards of an outdoor work setting, she’s eager to get in the field.

In whatever year becomes her last year, “I’d get a little bit sad about that, a little bit nostalgic. I think it’s a great opportunity for teen-agers.”

Reach Art Hovey at 473-7223 or at ahovey@journalstar.com.