Scott Wilcox wasn’t surprised when Bayer, one of the largest seed corn producers in the world, did not renew its contract with the detasseling company he owned and operated out of Seward, Neb., after the 2020 season.
In the nine years that Wilcox hired and supervised detasseling crews for Monsanto and Bayer, which bought Monsanto in 2018, he began to notice an increasing number of migrant workers in the seed corn fields near his crews of local teenagers. State and national data indicate that many of those migrant workers likely held H-2A visas.
“They don’t have to take care of them like they are required to take care of us, the kids from Nebraska,” said Wilcox, a teacher who made extra money detasseling in the summer. “It was just a way cheaper way for them to go.”
The number of farm labor contractors employing local teens in Nebraska dropped from 27 in 2019 to 15 in 2025, according to data from the Nebraska Department of Labor.
Cross-referencing that data with a national database of H-2A employers showed the number of detasseling contractors employing H-2A visa holders in Nebraska rose from three to five over the same time period.
The H-2A visa program was introduced in 1986 in response to farm labor shortages, mostly in fruit and vegetable harvesting, that require large amounts of manual labor for extended periods. It allows agricultural employers to bring in foreign workers on temporary visas if they can prove that domestic labor isn’t available.
But Wilcox and other current and former contractors said detasseling isn’t like other farm jobs in the country. There are only a few weeks in the summer when the tassels of seed corn plants can be manually removed to ensure proper pollination, and local teenagers on break from school have traditionally done that work.
“There are enough kids in Nebraska to get all the detasseling done,” Wilcox said. “We even had a meeting in the governor’s office with high representatives from Monsanto.”
That 2019 meeting in the office of then-Gov. Pete Ricketts marked the beginning of a political effort in Nebraska to keep the tradition of corn detasseling in the hands of teenagers and the sourcing of that labor under the control of local business owners.
To address the accusations that seed companies violate H-2A rules by hiring contractors that use H-2A crews instead of available local labor, the Nebraska Legislature passed a law in 2024 with the goal of increasing transparency in detasseling labor practices. One year after its passage, it’s not clear that the law is working as intended.
The Nebraska Department of Agriculture released its first annual report under the new law last month.
The report said that a majority of detasseling and roguing – the process of eliminating unwanted or defective plants – was being performed by local, mostly teenage crews. Still, local detasseling companies reported that their acres and contracts are getting cut needlessly, and that they can source enough labor among teens to keep up with the demand.
Contractors like Wilcox claim that seed companies prefer migrant labor. But other factors might make the trend toward H-2A labor irreversible, including more well-paid employment options for teens.
The minimum wage in Nebraska has risen to $13.50 from $9 in 2016, and it will rise again to $15 in 2026. Those wages approach the amount young people can earn detasseling, and they are available to Nebraskans as young as 14 who work service industry jobs that don’t involve long days of outdoor manual labor in July.
The approval for H-2A visas is done at the federal level by an administration that seems to be embracing the program. Despite President Donald Trump’s promises to toughen immigration laws and save U.S. jobs, his administration recently made it easier for H-2A workers to receive and renew visas, made it possible for employers to lower their salaries, and suspended protections created to prevent abusive practices by employers who use the H-2A program.
“Previously, a farmer might not have entertained H-2A workers because the labor costs were higher than they might otherwise be,” said Matt Mauntel-Medici, an immigration attorney in Iowa. “The administration has been responsive to business interests, and farmers are no exception to that.”
Antonio De Loera-Brust, the director of communications for United Farm Workers, said an expansion of the H-2A visa program aligns with Trump’s idea of the role of immigrants in the U.S. economy.
“Which is, we want your labor, but we don’t want you,” he said. “We want you to come here, pick our crops and then get the hell out.”
A diluted measure
In 2022, former Nebraska State Sen. Steve Erdman got wind of the complaints from detasseling companies about lost acres and contracts. His team began drafting a bill that aimed to discourage employers from hiring H-2A laborers when local labor is available. It included penalties for working detasselers more than 60 hours a week, before 6 a.m or after 10 p.m. The bill, Legislative Bill 393, never made it out of committee.
Its successor, LB 844, passed in 2024 without any of the penalties included in the previous version. It required the Nebraska Department of Agriculture to publish an annual report showing the total number of acres detasseled by two categories of workers: Those hired by certified exempt contractors, whose workforce is at least 80% individuals 17 years of age or younger, and non-exempt contractors that do not meet the 80% threshold.
Certified exempt contractors are excluded from the Nebraska Farm Labor Contractors Act and are not held to the same standards of most employers, including minimum age requirements.
The first report under the new law was published Sept. 30. It said that just under 60% of the detasseling and roguing in 2025 was performed by certified exempt contractors with a primarily teenage workforce. Just over 40% of the work was performed by non-exempt contractors, whose workforce is less clearly defined. This second category included H-2A workers.
Sen. Rick Holdcroft co-sponsored LB 844. He said the bill and the resulting report fell short of the original expectations.
Erdman did not respond to The Midwest Newsroom’s request for reaction to the first report.
The goal of LB 844 was to find out how much detasseling is being done by migrant workers, according to Erdman’s former legislative aide Joel Hunt. But the 2025 report did not identify which three seed companies reported information to the Nebraska Department of Agriculture, and it doesn’t say how many of the nonexempt contractor employees were working under H-2A visas.
The three unnamed seed companies reported that 101,527.15 acres of seed corn were planted in Nebraska. Many acres are detasseled or rogued multiple times, according to the Nebraska Department of Agriculture. In all, according to the report, 135,236.67 acres of seed corn were detasseled or rogued by certified exempt contractors – which mostly employ local teens – and 91,458.29 acres of seed corn were detasseled or rogued by nonexempt contractors.
Hunt, the primary author of the bill, said it got diluted after agriculture lobbyists got involved.
“There are things that have to be reported to the Department of Agriculture that don’t go into the report,” Hunt said. “So the Department of Agriculture has all of the numbers. What they’re posting on the website is just what’s required in the statute.”
Nebraska Sen. Teresa Ibach introduced Amendment 2891, which allowed for the acres detasseled and rogued to be reported in aggregate, not in detail, to protect proprietary information of seed companies. The amendment also made the information provided by seed producers exempt from Nebraska’s public records statute.
In an email to The Midwest Newsroom, Ibach said the amendment was provided by David Bracht, an attorney who represented a handful of Nebraska-based seed corn companies.
“They were concerned about information becoming public that could affect their market share and inventory information by revealing the number of acres each company was responsible for,” Ibach said in the email.
Ibach also referred to a letter from Sherry Gangwish, part of which she read when she introduced the amendment on March 7, 2024. Gangwish, co-owner of Gangwish Seed Farms in Shelton, Neb., wrote that her company had to use H-2A labor because of dwindling interest and early practices for fall sports that have pulled teens away from the field. On a call with The Midwest Newsroom, Gangwish also said her town in central Nebraska doesn’t have the local labor pool of Lincoln or Omaha.
Sen. Mike Jacobson introduced Floor Amendment 252, which removed the Class 4 misdemeanor penalty for any seed corn producer that does not comply with the reporting obligations of the bill. When he introduced the floor amendment, Jacobson said it would eliminate the liability for a producer if a detasseling contractor did not file the proper paperwork. He did not respond to interview requests from The Midwest Newsroom.
One of the criticisms from some detasseling contractors that Erdman and Hunt tried to address in their proposed legislation was misleading advertising for detasseling jobs.
“Especially on the Department of Labor’s website,” Hunt said. “They were also advertising that the job extends through the month of October. Well, teenagers have to go to school.”
He said that some contractors would point to the lack of applications as proof that there was not enough local detasseling labor, which justified hiring H-2A workers.
“I think it means there’s probably a disconnect, not necessarily that the law isn’t being followed,” said Katie Thurber, the Nebraska Department of Labor Commissioner. “If those jobs, which I have every reason to believe, are being advertised, if qualified applicants aren’t applying for them, that’s what demonstrates the need.”
That advertising and employment information gets passed from the Nebraska Department of Labor to the U.S. Department of Labor to approve or deny the H-2A applications submitted by the advertising and hiring companies. Thurber said she did not know the details of any wait lists of potential workers kept by local contractors.
According to contractors who spoke to The Midwest Newsroom and Harvest Public Media, local detasseling labor is found by word of mouth through the networks created and maintained by contractors. They said young Nebraskans don’t typically go online to find detasseling jobs.
Hunt, Erdman’s former legislative aide who now works for Nebraska State Sen. Glen Meyer, said the issue of H-2A laborers being employed to detassel despite the availability of local crews is “absolutely” ongoing. He said the only way to fight that practice, legislatively, was to shine a light on it with LB 844 and the report, whatever their shortcomings.
‘Forced out’
Thurber, Nebraska’s labor commissioner, confirmed that the use of H-2A labor for detasseling has risen in the past decade, as it has in other states.
“I think it’s broadly popular because it’s a known commodity as to what you’re going to get,” she said.
But the tradition of using local labor was often cited in support of LB 844. In one day of floor debate on Feb. 6, 2024, eight members of the public spoke in favor of the bill – most of them people who detasseled and want their children to detassel. No neutral parties or opponents spoke that day. Holdcroft went to high school in Florida, but his son detasseled in Nebraska.
“I don’t think we should let the big seed corn companies roll over local communities,” Holdcroft said. “It’s important that we keep the Nebraska work ethic in our young; that we’re not, just, because it’s expedient and maybe cheaper, that we look outside the state for a labor force.”
In a 2019 presentation obtained by The Midwest Newsroom and Nebraska Public Media in 2022, Bayer outlined a policy to move away from traditional labor to an "independent" workforce composed largely of H-2A laborers. But the company said in a statement that there has been “little to no change” in the detasseling workforce in Nebraska over the past several years.
When asked about canceled or reduced contracts, Bayer’s director of external communications, Brian Leake, said the company does not comment on such matters.
“Detasseling is one of the most important aspects of our business and we take great care to meet the time-sensitive demands while also ensuring the safety of all workers,” said a statement sent by Leake to The Midwest Newsroom. “To do this requires a diversified workforce that can be flexible and agile to deliver on those needs, including local labor. The detasseling workforce in Nebraska represents the most youth detasseling of any of our U.S. production sites.”
In 2019, there were three non-exempt farm labor contractors operating in Nebraska. According to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services H-2A database, those contractors were granted 371 H-2A visas for Nebraska worksites.
That number rose to 713 visas approved among the five nonexempt contractors operating in Nebraska in 2025.
Because USCIS does not break down H-2A data by job – only by broad category – it is unclear if the H-2A workers hired by these companies were detasseling or performing other agricultural jobs.
United Farm Workers advocates for those working agricultural jobs in the U.S., most of whom are Hispanic, according to the union. That includes H-2A workers. But UFW is critical of the H-2A program, saying that those workers have little to no bargaining power and recourse to justice when labor law violations occur, especially in the current political moment. Also, it sends jobs and wages out of the U.S., according to De Loera-Brust, the UFW director of communications.
“We want to protect the existing workforce made up of both undocumented immigrants as well as U.S. citizens,” De Loera-Brust said. “We want to protect them from having their jobs displaced or their wages lowered by unfair competition with the H-2A program.”
At Ailes Detasseling in Lincoln, where Brent Ailes has worked as an employee and then co-owner for more than 30 years, the work remains steady but the profit margins are shrinking. Ailes said his company contracted with two seed companies this year: Corteva Agriscience, and a second company that he preferred not to name.
“You wonder if there’s a push towards putting tighter restrictions and limitations on local contractors in an effort to potentially force local contractors out of the industry,” Ailes said.
Ailes said he had a wait list of about 30 teenagers he couldn’t hire with the number of acres designated in his contract this year. That’s far less than the 100-plus teenagers left off the roster in the past, but he said any wait list is evidence that local labor is being ignored by some seed companies.
One company that hasn’t taken that approach in Nebraska, Ailes said, is Corteva. Caroline Ahn, a spokesperson for Corteva, said most of the company’s detasseling workforce in Nebraska is local labor.
“We’ve been part of the Nebraska agriculture community for nearly a century, and our relationships with local detasseling families go back generations,” Ahn said in an email. “Detasseling is an important step in corn production, and we’re proud to partner with our friends and neighbors who play a critical role in the state’s ag industry.”
She also said that Corteva’s workforce varies from state to state.
Different rules in Iowa
Mark Arends of Cedar Falls, Iowa, had a different experience with Corteva. He hired and supervised detasseling crews for 24 years for the company and its predecessors before Corteva Agriscience emerged from DowDuPont in 2019. Arends said Corteva did not renew his contract after the 2024 season.
“That’s probably the only money I would’ve made this year,” Arends said from his combine as he harvested soybeans in late September.
With the exception of 2021, Arends said, he never had trouble finding enough workers. In a state where the minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, few jobs available to Iowa teens pay as much as detasseling. He paid his workers an average of $19 to $21 an hour – and if someone worked harder, they got more. Arends said he paid one teenager $50 an hour “just because he was a machine.”
“We felt like when Corteva took over, things really changed,” he said about the 2019 split from DowDuPont. “I planned on doing it until I retired.”
Arends said he believes Iowa youth could supply all the required detasseling labor in Iowa. He estimated that they now comprise about 20% of the detasseling workforce in the state. He said he was not aware of any political effort like the one in Nebraska to regain territory, and there is no evidence of one in the Iowa Legislature.
Ailes in Lincoln, Neb., recognized the possibility that the political action on detasseling in Nebraska could be part of the reason he still has a contract, unlike Arends. He reviewed the Nebraska Department of Agriculture detasseling report in his office at Lincoln Christian School, where he is the secondary school principal, and noted the first takeaway: That a majority of the work in 2025 had been done by crews like his. Still, he wanted to know more.
“It’s a very, very, what I might call a 30,000-foot view of not much detail,” Ailes said. “How much did each particular contractor do roguing-slash-detasseling? So that would be one thing I would look to ask for in the future.”
Ailes said he is counting on a future in detasseling, for him as a local business owner, and for young Nebraskans – who, for generations, have learned the value of hard work by detasseling seed corn in the hot summer months. But if seed companies decide to go in a different direction, he questioned if there is anything he or the government can do to change that.
“Unfortunately, we’re at their mercy and those decisions that they make,” Ailes said. “It’s a year-by-year business.”
This story was produced in partnership with Harvest Public Media, a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest and Great Plains. It reports on food systems, agriculture and rural issues.
The Midwest Newsroom is an investigative and enterprise journalism collaboration that includes Iowa Public Radio, KCUR, Nebraska Public Media, St. Louis Public Radio and NPR.
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METHODOLOGY
Starting with a tip that seed companies operating in Nebraska continued the labor practices detailed in a 2022 investigation by The Midwest Newsroom, reporters Nick Loomis and Molly Ashford began by requesting detasseling contractor information from the Nebraska Department of Labor. They learned about an upcoming report from the Nebraska Department of Agriculture to be published in accordance with a 2024 law passed to bring transparency to the industry’s hiring practices. As they awaited the report, they continued speaking with politicians, agricultural labor experts, and detasseling contractors. Whether they employed local or H-2A labor, and whether they had active or canceled contracts with seed companies, most contractors denied interview requests. Loomis and Ashford also looked into the state of detasseling labor in Iowa, requesting contractor information and speaking with stakeholders there. To fill in the gaps left by the Nebraska and Iowa documents, they cross-referenced them with the national H-2A labor database kept by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
REFERENCES
H-2A Employer Data Hub (U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services website)
Nebraska Legislative Bill 844 (Nebraska Legislature | March 18, 2024)
Report on Acres Rogued or Detasseled in Nebraska (Nebraska Department of Agriculture | Sept. 30, 2025)
Nebraska Revised Statute 48-1715 (Nebraska Legislature | 2024)
As teens wait for work, ag firms turn to guest workers to tend to Midwest cornfields (Nebraska Public Media & The Midwest Newsroom | Aug. 31, 2022)
In new blow to corn contractors, Bayer requires they provide their own safety equipment (Investigate Midwest | Oct. 9, 2024)
Farmers Face Whiplash as Trump Immigration Shifts Keep Ag in Limbo (Successful Farming | Aug. 18, 2025)
Trump Admin Hands Immigrant Farm Workers Major Win (Newsweek | Sept. 18, 2025)
Adverse Effect Wage Rate Methodology for the Temporary Employment of H-2A Nonimmigrants in Non-Range Occupations in the United States (Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration | Oct. 2, 2025)
TYPE OF STORY
News – Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.
