Wiktionary
vb. (present participle of detassel English)
Wikipedia
upright=0.80|right|thumb|The tassel of a corn plantDetasseling 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. Every corn plant has both male and female parts, so if both varieties of corn were left intact, some of the resulting seeds would have non-hybrid parents. 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.
Usage examples of "detasseling".
After he returned from his night detasseling shift, he sat down at his kitchen table with a beer and a fresh white piece of paper and relayed the results of his research activities to the one man who could make the best use of the information.
This kind of thing did not happen to Floyd Wayne Vishniak very often, because usually he went places where no one else wanted to go: cornfields that needed detasseling, riverfront bars, and defunct factories.