© Alan Pogue/Texas Center for Documentary Photography
Marcilia Estrada Castillo reaches to pull off a tassel from an ear of corn on a detasseling job in 1981. Detasseling facilitates the production of hybrid corn. The practice has remained little changed for decades.
With morning temperatures approaching 90 degrees one day in July 2015, a migrant laborer walking down rows of corn began to experience symptoms of heat exhaustion, including difficulty breathing and extreme nausea.
The laborer was working near Boone, Iowa, for an independent contractor with the St. Louis-based Monsanto Co., which hires such contractors annually to recruit and oversee teams of migrant farmworkers in the cornfields of the Midwest.
The farmworker was doing tasks related to detasseling - the practice of lopping off corn tassels, which enables growers to produce lucrative high-yield hybrid corn seed.
Each year, seed-corn companies like Monsanto bring in thousands of laborers to produce the hybrid seeds, most of which are genetically modified.
The companies sell the seeds to farmers worldwide,
in what has become an $11 billion GMO corn industry. The farmers grow the seeds into corn for sale as food, ethanol, livestock feed and components of a range of industrial products, from fireworks to ceiling tiles.
In a two-year investigation of GMO seed-corn production, the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting found repeated allegations of labor violations over the past decade against Monsanto, its counterpart DuPont Pioneer, other seed companies and the companies' contractors.
Comment: See also: The epidemic of junk science in tobacco smoking research