No Tassels, No Ears. A Sterile Summer In Northern Ohio
by AuntieB
Across the road from my house is my neighbor’s cornfield. He lives about a half-mile up the road. The corn is tall, lush and green. It is easily seven or eight feet but something’s wrong with it. On hot July afternoons, the air stays still and scentless. There’s no sweet smell of tasseling corn, no perfume of silks curling from the husks. In the evenings, the fireflies don’t rise from the fields like they have in years past. Instead, they lift in waves from my yard and pastures, blinking above the sheep and chickens, avoiding the corn as if they know it’s no longer home.
I’ve been watching the field every day.
Spring was an odd one. May started out cold, like spring might never come. There was rain, and more rain. Then a dry spell of just a few days, and every farmer in the area rushed to plant before the weather turned again. It was early June by the time the corn went in.
Then came the heat.
June hit like an oven. One day of rain, then nearly a week in the high 90s, with three days in the triple digits. After that, the temperatures plunged into the 60s again, followed by even more rain. For weeks, the corn in the surrounding fields just sat there, two little leaves high, looking like it might never make “knee-high by the Fourth of July.”
But it did. Just barely. Then, almost overnight, summer finally settled in, and the corn sprang upward, from knee-high to towering. By mid-July, it looked like a perfect crop.
Then I started to notice the silence. Usually corn fields hum with life. Birds, crickets, all sorts of insects create a quiet hum all day and all night. I couldn’t hear it.
Some of the fields also looked different. They were planted just before that wild swing of rain followed by heat. That brutal one-two punch hit right as the seeds were waking up. Now the corn has grown tall, but it’s sterile. No tassels. No ears. No harvest.
Farmers here are calling it “tight tassel.”
They say it might affect a third to half of the local crop.
Up until then, the farmers who grew row crops, commodity crops like corn, soybeans, and wheat, were considered the lucky ones.
The fruit and vegetable farmers were already in trouble. Without the migrant workers who normally come for each harvest, their crops are rotting in the fields. The blueberries are finishing up now. When you walk past the rows, you see birds feasting and smell the vinegary scent of overripe fruit. There are too many berries, and too few hands to pick them.
Last month, a local orchard, a century-old family farm, sold off its apple, pear, and peach trees. They plowed under their asparagus field. The orchard building and its coolers were rented out to vegetable farmers hoping to sell directly to locals.
I spoke to the granddaughter of the orchard owners. A few years ago, the family refinanced to install solar panels and new walk-in refrigeration. This year, their year-round workers were gone. Some were deported by ICE. Others just left to avoid deportation. Many of the trees went untrimmed in spring. The family managed to spray most of the orchard themselves, but when they learned the migrant harvesters wouldn’t be arriving, they called the bank, hoping to defer the loans.
The bank said no.
The orchard was auctioned off in two-acre lots in June.
At the local diner, the row crop farmers shook their heads over the loss. Everyone agreed it was a tragedy, but at least the grain farmers were still safe. They didn’t rely on migrant labor because their machines did most of the work.
Then came the hundred-degree days at the beginning of June.
The other morning, my neighbor pulled into the ditch across the road. I stepped out with a glass of lemonade. It was already 80 degrees at 10 a.m. He held the cold glass but didn’t drink it.
We talked about the corn. It looks so lovely, but with no ears.
He’s thinking about cutting it for silage, just to salvage something. But the other farmers have warned him that if the insurance companies decide the silage counts as a crop, he won’t get paid. No harvest, no insurance. No insurance, no next season.
Some of the other farmers will soon start running over their corn with equipment to shred it, and are planning to plow it under this fall or next spring. They will start as soon as the insurance is sure.
He’s hoping to get enough insurance money to cover the loans and try again next year. But he’s got payments on the combine, on the house, and on the new truck. He looks like he’s doing well, and in other years, he would be. But I know he’s thinking about that orchard. A family who farmed this land for a hundred years, and now selling it acre by acre.
I told him I missed the smell of sweet corn on days like this. His field is green and lush, but barren. Even the lightning bugs avoid it. It doesn’t smell like corn at all.