Both nitrogen rich strips and ramped nitrogen strips have been used to estimate topdress nitrogen needs for winter wheat based on in-season optical reflectance data. The ramped strip system places a series of small plots in each field with increasing levels of nitrogen to determine the application rate at which predicted yield response to nitrogen reaches a plateau. The nitrogen-rich strip system uses a nitrogen fertilizer optimization algorithm based on optical reflectance measures from the nitrogen-rich strip and an untreated strip in the same field. This paper uses Wilcoxon Signed-Rank Tests to determine which of these two systems is expected to be more profitable. Our results indicate that the ramped strip method produces significantly greater profits than the nitrogen-rich strip system. This result is robust to varying assumptions used by the nitrogen- rich strip method. On average, the ramped strip system is more profitable by $55.69 ha-1.