Learning from producer management via friendly competition

Integrating new systems, technologies, tools, or strategies to manage crop inputs and outcomes involves risk and challenges for growers. Besides added costs and lack of information regarding the potential return on investment, training opportunities and troubleshooting support are lacking or limited.

Included among the Irrigation Innovation Consortium’s (IIC) research projects selected for funding in 2022 is an exciting project centered on synthesizing data generated by the Testing Agriculture Performance Solutions (TAPS) program.

TAPS’s innovative approaches engages crop producers in farm management competitions that reward input use efficiency and profitability. While the TAPS program has broadly shared competition outcomes, the program has generated a massive amount of research quality data that hold the key to insights on which management decisions and sets of management decisions in different weather years, led to the most productive, profitable, and input-use efficient outcomes, and why.

With IIC-funding support, a multistate team of researchers has been mobilized to organize and analyze biophysical, social and economic datasets generated from Nebraska and Oklahoma TAPS participants from the past five growing seasons.