Producers on CSU-TAPS Benefits
By Christine Hamilton
The CSU-TAPS farm management competition format offers hands-on, real-world benefits to all stakeholders, including producers. (Photo by Omer Izrael)
The TAPS format keeps bringing producers back, year-after-year, with the program expanding across the High Plains and beyond since 2017. Why? The IIC sat down with two winners from the 2024 CSU-TAPS competition and asked them.
Brian Lengel of Idalia, Colorado, won the CSU-TAPS highest yield award in the competition’s limited irrigation track in 2024, as well as the most profitable and most input use efficient awards in 2023. He has also competed in a TAPS competition hosted by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Zach Thode of Livermore, Colorado, who won the CSU-TAPS most profitable award in the limited irrigation track in 2024, also competed in 2023.
For agricultural industry partners, TAPS is supporting successful use of technologies and co-learning by farmers, researchers, and industry alike about successful precision farming strategies that can reduce water and nitrogen use while maintaining or even increasing production and overall profitability.
For producers like Brian and Zach, that translates to a risk-free opportunity to test drive management approaches that they anticipate could benefit their own operations. Here’s what they had to say.
[Note: In 2024, CSU-TAPS added a limited irrigation track to challenge competitors’ water management skills, and conducted soil testing to give competitors an idea of legacy nitrogen in their plots that could impact fertigation decisions. 2024 was a very dry year with May-August rainfall of 3.31 inches reaching just over half the 30-year precipitation average for those months. For a complete overview of 2024 program results, see the 2024 CSU-TAPS Farm Management Competition Report.]
IIC: What made you participate in the CSU-TAPS competition again?
Brian Lengel: Being able to try a different soil moisture probe that I’ve never tried in the past and compare and contrast. This year [I tried] CropX, where I’d used AquaSpy and GroGuru in the past. I’m always wanting to see different technology. And I wanted to see if a different corn variety would perform better or worse than I expected.
And challenging myself with water efficiency [through the limited irrigation track], which is one of the improvements that I wanted to try to make: yield and water efficiency.
Zach Thode: I always like free education! And to try different things. [As a rancher], I don’t make a living growing corn like Brian and many others in the [CSU-TAPS] program, so I come at it from more of a strictly scientific perspective: What are the outcomes and what are the inputs, and how can I navigate inputs to meet outcomes? It’s a super good opportunity for me to learn.
In general, on a private operation, you don’t want to push the limits to find out how hard you can stress a crop before you diminish your yield. You don’t want to do that at home, you’re trying to make money.
This is a great opportunity to build datasets and correlations that show that something can be done that you wouldn’t normally choose to do.
IIC: How has competing in the CSU-TAPS format impacted what you do at home, as a producer?
Brian: The learning part, for me, is more the [crop] marketing, breaking down discomfort in using marketing strategies on my farm. That comes to mind first.
When it comes to trusting technology, TAPS is huge to help drive more comfort and reliability when you use those tools. When you’re going to make investments in technology, you certainly are more comfortable making the investment if you’ve tried it out in a simulated environment.
Zach: There are a lot of technology options that TAPS allows us to evaluate and utilize in decision-making criteria that not all of us implement at home.
Just being able to see that data with those sensors, and the response [in the field] to certain activities—It has changed the way I make decisions at home. It’s changing my decision-making metrics from an anecdotal, responsive decision-making metric to a very prescriptive, data-driven decision-making metric.
[As producers] we use correlation in our minds for nearly 100 percent of the decisions we make. We’ve observed a response in the past, and we make a decision based on that observed response, and we adjust our own thinking model to that response, routinely.
If we can build our own decision-making correlations based on data, whether it’s on our own farm or on the TAPS farm, all that is fine-tuning our own models.
IIC: Can you expand on what you’re gaining from the marketing aspect of the competition?
Brian: For me, it’s been the basis amounts and understanding those differences, and seeing the nature of how it shifts so drastically, regionally, and shifts over time pretty quickly – that’s pretty interesting to me. In the spring, I think there was a whole dollar difference between [my local Burlington elevators] and the Front Range [where the CSU-TAPS field was located]. Seeing that regional difference and understanding what drives that change can be important on when to strike [to sell].
Zach: For my perspective, because I don’t sit on a farm that has to actively market grain myself, that part of the TAPS effort probably falls off my radar. Even though I think learning that is never a bad thing, that education doesn’t affect my operation because I don’t sell into a commodity market. I’m just looking at the agronomic side of it. My agronomy is super strong, and my marketing is terrible!
Brian: [To Zach] You might consider a [TAPS team] partnership with someone who wants to take on the marketing, and pair the agronomy with the marketing. [Both aspects] are quite different and not everybody will have an interest in both.
IIC: What was your experience with the limited irrigation track offered for the first time in 2024, especially with it being such a dry season?
Brian: It was a fun challenge. I was worried about the depth of water available to the corn, and then really proving out my concept of late growth not being as critical to have water available [to the plants]. I used a lot of my [allocated] water by the middle of the year, or middle-to-late. It’s challenging when there’s not as much rainfall, but that’s part of the deal. I had a pretty good yield compared to water use.
Zach: I used AquaSpy [soil moisture sensor] which goes 48 inches down. Even without applying irrigation water and without any rainwater – from planting until almost V5 or V6 [stages of corn development] – I was gaining water at 44, 48 inches deep. Water was coming into my soil profile at that depth, and I was not putting it in.
So, I knew there was more water deeper if I could get a crop to go deeper. I could see that there was a gaining water table down there at 40, 44, and 48 inches. And [the CSU-TAPS] soil testing showed more nitrogen deeper than shallower.
I did early water, a good shot at tasseling, and that was it. I was at 4.5 inches of applied irrigation water [at the end of the season] and that is near nothing, especially with the limited rain that field got.
IIC: How has the TAPS format helped you think about data and its usefulness?
Brian: I think more about my soil moisture monitor and the number of sensors it has. You can build a chart with 10 different lines that show some of them moving one way, some the other, and I like that.
But in a busy season, I would rather see the trend line and have more of a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ as far as turning the sprinkler on, applying water; and maybe a depth range, like 4/10 in. is too little and 9/10 in. is too high. Just those simple recommendations, where it doesn’t have to be exact, just a little bit more of a guide for a grower.
Zach: We all operate on our own models in our own heads about what response happens when we do certain inputs. And TAPS presents us an opportunity to tune those models. It’s an opportunity to see, OK, the adjustment of this input has a bigger impact than the adjustment of that input.
Whether it be a scientific model that has a bunch of mathematical equations built into it, or it’s just our own anecdotal, physical brain operating on what we’ve seen in the past and how we want to make decisions today, it’s all a matter of tuning those models.
Whether the data is precise or not isn’t always the most important part, it’s a matter of building those correlations and understanding which correlations are the strongest.
IIC: Any other observations from the competition experience?
Brian: I’d love to get more guys in the limited irrigation [track], trying to compete for yield and proving out that we can do better with the natural resources that we have.
Zach: I think this research is so relevant. Here [on one field] you have 29 different farmers with 29 different research intents and hypotheses and outcomes, and they’re strictly based on full operational profitability.
Now you can go back through that dataset and make correlations based on whatever was measured—not an academic hypothesis, but an actual, on-the-ground farmer hypothesis. Which is much more tangible to real-world outcomes.
I think it’s a good opportunity for anybody to try it and learn.