Research HighlightsIrrigation Competition Allows Farmers to Explore Risk-Free Management Decisions
Highlights:
- An annual farm management competition, UNL-TAPS, allows Nebraska farmers to see results of management decisions before they apply on their own farms.
- Supported by the Nebraska Soybean Board, winning teams earn cash prizes for the most profitable, highest efficiency of inputs, and best yield categories.
- Seeding rate research conducted with the competition plots showed that high seeding rates don’t necessarily result in high yields.
By Carol Brown
When farmers turn on the taps for irrigation, an entire crop field gets a drink of water. In Nebraska, “TAPS” also refers to an annual irrigation-focused competition.
The University of Nebraska’s Testing Ag Performance Solutions, or UNL-TAPS, is led by several of their extension educators and specialists. Teams compete on replicated plots growing corn, sorghum, or soybeans at three Nebraska locations. The competition is popular and a great way for farmers to explore management decisions without taking risks on their own land. At the end of the season, winners are awarded cash prizes in three categories: Most Profitable, Highest Input Use Efficiency, and Greatest Grain Yield.
The 2024 season was the first year of the soybean competition, supported by checkoff funding from the Nebraska Soybean Board. Extension educator Aaron Nygren heads up the TAPS soybean portion, which has expanded from last year’s event. In 2024, 18 teams participated in the soybean competition. This crop season, 30 teams with 65 participants are competing in just the soybean component.
“Last year, we added the TAPS competition as part of our Soybean Management Field Days, a long-standing program that highlights soybean production and economics at sites across the state,” he says. “The soybean TAPS field plots are at the Eastern Nebraska Research, Extension and Education Center (ENREEC) in Mead. Our goal is to take information generated by the competition and share it across the state to help Nebraska’s soybean producers.”
The teams are varied, Nygren says, with some teams consisting of four or five people, others are individuals, and nearly two-thirds of the competitors are farmers. Several teams are comprised of newer ag educators who use the competition to become more familiar with the decisions that farmers have to regularly make.
At the ENREEC site, each team has four, 8-row, replicated plots all under irrigation. There are also check plots with no management; one is under irrigation and the other is dryland. The check plots serve as a baseline to compare how the teams’ plots fared under their management choices.
During the growing season, the teams decide how to manage their plots in seven categories: soybean variety and seed treatment, seeding rate, nutrient management, irrigation management, pest management, crop insurance and marketing. All of these decisions impact each team’s productivity and profitability. The extension staff then plants and scouts the plots.
“We have our entomology and plant pathology specialists scout the fields for the teams and provide them updates. We send weekly photos of their plots as well as other pertinent information,” explains Nygren. “The teams will decide if they want to apply a fungicide, insecticide or a micronutrient based on their plot information. They continue to adjust their management as the season progresses.”
At the end of the season, the winners are figured using a combination of yield and costs of inputs, crop insurance, and grain marketing figures. This equation determines who was the most profitable. The winners in the three categories receive a cash prize and are recognized at a winter banquet. For details about the competition including how to become involved as well as the 2024 competition results, visit the UNL-TAPS website. The Competitions Report on the website contains information on the corn, sorghum and soybean competitions.
Research Within the Contest
During last year’s competition, extension researchers conducted a seeding rate test with some interesting outcomes from the teams’ plots.
“Seeding rates are still a big variable among farmers, and teams chose rates ranging from 105,000 up to 190,000 per acre,” Nygren says. “This big range has an impact on costs across the plots, which will affect the teams’ final numbers.”
The researchers counted the number of mature plants per meter in a randomly chosen plot row and factored that across the plots for a total of mature plants per acre. The plant counts ranged between approximately 90,000 and 108,000, despite the high seeding rates (Figure 1). The soybean plots did “self-thinning,” according to Jim Specht, University of Nebraska emeritus professor.
“Self-thinning occurs when the growing seedlings are competing for resources above and below ground, and it becomes severe enough to result in the mortality of the less robust plants,” Specht says. “The results were notable. For instance, the difference in seeding rate of 10,000 seeds, such as from 100,000 to 110,000, translated to an increase of just 2,075 plants per acre at harvest.”
When only the seeding rates were compared across the teams, the choices of low or high rates didn’t have a large impact on their yields, indicating that other management choices had greater impact on the final numbers. But Specht says the extra expense associated with higher seeding rates combined with offsetting costs for high yields, suggests that lower seeding rates may be a more profitable choice.
Popular Competition is Spreading
“TAPS was started in 2017 in North Platte by irrigation specialist Daran Rudnick,” Nygren comments. “He moved to Kansas State two years ago and began the competition there as well. We have a lot of cooperation between the states to manage the competitions similarly.”
The UNL-TAPS competition isn’t even a decade old, and similar competitions are being held in Oklahoma, Colorado and Kansas; all are supported by the USDA-NRCS. Nebraska is the only state with a soybean competition as a result of funding from the Nebraska Soybean Board.
The UNL-TAPS team includes Extension Educators Aaron Nygren, Chuck Burr, and Chris Proctor, who leads the overall competition; as well as agricultural economics professor Matt Stockton.
Additional Resources
UNL-TAPS website: www.taps.unl.edu
Published: Aug 25, 2025
The materials on SRIN were funded with checkoff dollars from United Soybean Board and the North Central Soybean Research Program. To find checkoff funded research related to this research highlight or to see other checkoff research projects, please visit the National Soybean Checkoff Research Database.
