Top Farm Management Strategies Recognized at Ninth Annual TAPS Awards

Feb 03, 2026

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

Video: Democratizing Gene Editing - Pairwise’s Vision for the Future of Agriculture

Pairwise has built its business around an idea that runs counter to how many companies approach innovation: make transformative technology easier to access.

In this Seed World interview, CEO Tom Adams discusses why broader access to gene editing could speed crop improvement, expand innovation opportunities and help agriculture address emerging challenges. He explains why Pairwise believes no single company can solve all of agriculture's problems alone—and why making advanced breeding technologies available to more organizations could accelerate progress across the industry.

The conversation explores how consumer trust influences technology adoption, why innovations like pitless cherries and seedless blackberries matter beyond convenience, and how future crop improvements could help address labor shortages, automation, harvest efficiency and other production challenges. Adams also shares his perspective on what the industry may be underestimating about the next wave of gene editing innovation.

Watch the full interview to hear why Pairwise believes agriculture is approaching an important inflection point for gene editing, and why the pace of innovation over the next decade could surprise the industry.

Topics Covered:

o Democratizing agricultural innovation

o Consumer trust and technology adoption

o The business case for sharing innovation

o Expanding innovation beyond major crops

o Next-generation breeding technologies