Detasseling
removing the immature pollen-producing bodies, the tassel, from the tops of corn plants and placing them on the ground.
Detasseling corn is removing the pollen-producing flowers, the tassel, from the tops of corn (maize) plants and placing them on the ground. It is a form of pollination control, employed to cross-breed, or hybridize, two varieties of corn.
Fields of corn that will be detasseled are planted with two varieties of corn. Removing the tassels from all the plants of one variety leaves the grain that is growing on those plants to be fertilized by the tassels of the other, resulting in a hybrid. In addition to being more physically uniform, hybrid corn produces dramatically higher yields than corn produced by open pollination. With modern seed corn, the varieties to hybridize are carefully selected so that the new variety will exhibit specific traits found in the parent plants. The detasseling process usually involves the use of both specialized machines and human labor.
Machine detasseling
Nearly all detasseling is done in two steps; the field is first detasseled by machine and then detasseled manually. Machine detasseling itself is typically a two step process. Initially a detasseling machine called a "cutter" goes through the rows of corn to be detasseled and cuts off the top portion of the plant.
The public source identifies “Detasseling” as removing the immature pollen-producing bodies, the tassel, from the tops of corn plants and placing them on the ground. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Detasseling, removing and immature.
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This entry incorporates text from “Detasseling” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.