You detassel corn to remove the tassel. From the corn......so it doesn't have a tassel anymore.
That and because they paid you.

1). Mucking stalls at a local horse yard.
2) To ensure that the corn cross-pollinated and created hybrids.

First job on the books was at McDonalds. First work experience was also on the family farm though. Probably hoing potato fields, picking corn, or planting tobacco. And detassling corn is to hybridize plants for higher crop yield mostly I gather, though I admit I looked it up. If anyone did that for our cornfields it wasnt this honkey. Sounds like city slickin to me.

my first job was working in a bacterial laboratory, testing egg produce

Have done that as well!

My very first job - when I was 15, I babysat every weekend for four little kids, aged 1, 3, 5 and 7. All four of them were extremely precocious, and quite the handful

I rouged milo. We walked thru a field of milo and cut every thing that was too tall, too short, the wrong color and all the weeds. With a shovel. Ladybugs bite at 5am.

Picking potatoes after they had been dug up by the tractor thing.
It was a long time ago after leaving school.
My first proper full time job was repairing infra-red intruder detectors,
those burglar detector things you see in the corners of rooms with an LED on
that flashes when you move.

I grew up in a little, central Illinois farm town and I detasseled corn too. What a miserable job. When I was young, we walked, but, I think they ride on a platform now. I was hot, humid, dirty, dusty or muddy, buggy, sweaty, sunburned, and generally miserable, but it aid money, so every year, all us kids did it. I also worked in the evening in the local movie theater, 3 nights a week.

The answer to the first bit is a paper round, the second answer is.......what does detasseling mean?

To put through a machine?

My oldest son used to go house to house asking them if they needed garbage taken out, yards raked, snow shoveled, etc. He was only about 7yr old at the time. At 38, he still gets up at the crack of dawn and works his ass off.

My first job was working as a clerk in a bakery. Wouldn't have been that bad if the manager wasn't a perv. He kept stroking my neck and telling me how pretty it was. Being a naive 16yr old, I had no idea what he was trying to do though I did know it was pretty creepy. I should have told my mother who was manager of the grocery store the bakery was in. She would have kicked his ass.

Mowing lawns

Is it the same reason we used to peel potatoes

It was probably helping my brother install carpet. My second job was working for a moving company at 18 or 19. I used to have boxes come off a truck and put on dollys and I would take them to different offices. Easy job. I was making $24 an hour before I even took my first college class. I should have stayed with that job lol. I would have been a supervisor and making like $60 an hour by now.

Worked as a laborer on our farm, but that wasn't a job. They called it, "Doing your chores." First real job was as a Technical Illustrator/Writer when I turned 16.

Topped the corn so we'd have seed corn for the next year's planting. Because of our climate in the northwest, corn crops were limited, so our seed corn represented nearly half the crop.

besides baby sitting before I could be employed at a regular job.. Waffle House Waitress

At first I thought you meant shucking, just using a different term, which is something I did as a kid sometimes. But I looked it up, and now understand. I knew about corn hybridization, but I hadn't realized that people literally physically remove the pollen producing portion. I suppose it's all done by machinery now, huh?

My first job was in a steel fabrication plant. And I'm not sure about the detasseling corn.

My first job was walking around with a rack selling drinks, cokes, and those big annoying plastic trumpets at a baseball stadium.

I'd guess you detasseled corn to increase cross pollination?

I was a blueberry raker and I have no idea why you detassle corn

McDonald's cashier. To this day, I don't eat their fries. That was 25 years ago...

I would not call it a job, because it was not steady employment, but the first paid work I ever did was harvesting tobacco in 90 degree plus heat, glaring sun, and sweltering humidity. On top of that, the work required you to bend over constantly to pick off leaves near the ground. With an hour or so, your arms and much of your shift would be coated with black tar from the leaves and sand.

A/ killing, plucking and gutting either a duck or chicken, every Sunday, if my Father had failed to shoot something to eat, or a friendly local farmer hadn't butchered some livestock.
b/ I'm sure SkotlandSkye is right ... can't imagine her being wrong about much!