In America’s Corn Belt, detasseling is a rite of passage for teens, providing summer employment and extra money for clothes, music, cars and college. In the 1940’s, farmers discovered that hybrids could offer large corn yields, and consequently, needed machines to remove most of the tassels and teens to pick up where the machines left off. Detasseling has become such a strong tradition that a proposed ban to prevent anyone under 14 from working in Nebraska’s corn fields has been blocked on the grounds that the ban would have drastically decreased the labor pool and would have deprived young people of work.
See "Corn Work is Rite of Passage in Neb", The New York Times, July 22, 2001