After a season of head-to-head decisions and real-world tradeoffs, Nebraska producers gathered Jan. 31, 2026, to celebrate the ninth year of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s Testing Ag Performance Solutions (TAPS) program at the program’s annual awards banquet.
A night of interaction and celebration, the banquet recognized top achievers from the 2025 TAPS season, which included six farm management competitions held at three research locations across Nebraska:
- Irrigated Sprinkler Corn and Continuous Corn competitions at the West Central Research, Extension and Education Center in North Platte, Nebraska.
- Food Grade Corn competition sponsored by Bayer Crop Science at the Water Utilization Learning Center in Gothenburg, Nebraska.
- Irrigated Soybean and N-Source Corn and Irrigated Corn competitions at the Eastern Nebraska Research, Extension and Education Center near Mead, Nebraska.
Participants made several input and management decisions during the growing season, which were implemented alongside those of their competitors in the same field. These decisions differed for each competition, but included factors such as crop insurance, hybrid/variety and seeding rate, nitrogen timing and amount, bioactive nutrition products, irrigation timing and amount, insecticide, fungicide, cover crop termination, micronutrient applications and, lastly, marketing of their crop.
Source : unl.edu