Laurent “Woody” Van Arkel likes to push the boundaries of conventional thinking and strives to understand more about soil and crop interactions.

University of Nebraska–Lincoln researchers are leading a study of how a targeted restoration of perennial grasses amid cropland could bring about a variety of benefits, ranging from reduction in water and fertilizer use to expansion of wildlife habitat to encouragement of new bioenergy industry. The four-year, $4 million project will be conducted on University of Nebraska research plots and 12 to 15 on-farm sites in the Republican River Basin in west central and western Nebraska, said Daren Redfearn, the Husker forage systems specialist leading the work. Read more in this article from the University of Nebraska.