STERLING – Max Gaumer takes his position around 5:30 each morning – sitting on the curb next to the softball fields at Sterling High School.

With a list in hand, he checks in the youths ready to go out to the cornfields for detasseling.

Under farm labor rules, they can be as young as 12, and plenty of them are. On Friday, the oldest was 23.

Two buses were waiting – Gaumer driving one and his daughter, Tori Ladner, 28, the other. They work for Pioneer Hi-Bred International.

At 6 a.m., Gaumer, 57, a crew leader, shouted, “Load onto the luxury liner if you’re signed in.”

One straggler showed up a minute later.

“You’re lucky you got here,” he told her.

Every summer, hundreds of area youths join detasseling crews. Detasselers remove the pollen-producing tassel from corn crops and place it on the ground. It is a form of pollination control, used to hybridize two varieties of corn.

It’s not an easy job even in comfortable weather. But when working during a heat wave, it’s even tougher.

It can be dangerous. This week, another local Pioneer detasseling crew working southeast of Rock Falls had six of its members go to the hospital briefly for heat-related illness.

Gaumer said he hasn’t had such problems on his crew. Pioneer is safety-conscious and makes every effort to protect its employees, he said.

With the heat wave, the company was requiring all of its employees to wear hats in the fields. And it asked that everyone bring water. As a backup, each bus had a 10-gallon bottle of water.

Usually, the Pioneer crews work until noon or 1 p.m. But in this week’s heat, they called it a day around 10:30 a.m.

Gaumer has been detasseling for 4 decades and leading Pioneer crews for 31 years, all the while teaching at Sterling High School. His children also have detasseled.

The employees start out at the hourly minimum wage of $7.75, but they get paid more for years of experience and performance.

Students do most of the detasseling in the area, Gaumer said. Very few migrant workers are involved – most of whom come from Texas, he said.

‘You’ll get corn rash’

After the buses load up, they head across the river to Rock Falls. They stop in the parking lot of the Save-A-Lot grocery. There, another bus joins the convoy.

They go to a farm near Star and Yorktown roads several miles southwest of Rock Falls.

The youths – 102 in all on Friday – disembark. Gaumer then gets them into a circle. He tells them about the details of their weekly paychecks.

Then he and his daughter divide the youths into groups – some of whom will walk in the fields to detassel. Others will be taken by mechanical carriers because they’re too short to reach the top of the cornstalks.

Some are disappointed they didn’t get chosen for the carriers. “I hate you,” one girl jokes to those who got the coveted spots.

The youths have to walk a distance in the mud.

“You’ll go down if you do this long enough,” Gaumer said. “It’ll be dry by the end of the day.”

In the field, Caitlin Liston, 16, and Katie Guthrie, 17, are walking through the field detasseling.

“You should have worn a long-sleeved shirt,” Guthrie tells a visitor. “You’ll get corn rash.”

Guthrie graduated this year from Sterling High School and is headed to Ashford University in Clinton, Iowa, in the fall.

“This is my fourth year detasseling. I’ll still come back every summer. I love it,” she says.

An approaching storm

Just off the field, Gaumer is starting to get worried. He sees an approaching lightning storm. At first, he decides to wait until the employees work their way back to his side of the field. Then he’ll have them go into the buses for shelter.

“Our kids are well-equipped for rain. Lightning is the dangerous part,” he says.

The storm is fast-moving, so Gaumer changes his strategy. He gets out his air horn and blows it – the signal that employees are supposed to return immediately.

“This is getting too close,” he says.

Gaumer expects that his crew will work about another week – with weekends often a part of the package. The detasseling window is short.

“The corn doesn’t know it’s Saturday,” Gaumer says.