MSU College of Agriculture and Natural Resources’ diverse footprint benefits the world

<p>“I made kind of a circuitous route back to the university, Bill,” <a href="https://twitter.com/Ron_Hendrick">Hendrick</a> says. “I did my bachelor's and PhD degrees here and left in 1992. I did a post-doctoral fellowship in Alaska, and then I went to Georgia for 16 years. That's where I spent most of my active faculty career then migrated back a little bit north to The Ohio State University for about seven and a half years. I came back here in the summer of 2016 as dean. </p><p>“It's an interesting and exciting time for our college, and we do a lot of different things you would expect, of course, related to food and the environment. But I have everything from interior designers to soil microbiologists on my faculty and everything in between. And so my responsibility really is to empower my leaders at many levels in order to do the teaching, the research, and the outreach missions. We are a little different than other colleges because we're also the home for <a href="http://msue.msu.edu">MSU Extension</a> and our statewide presence there. And then also <a href="http://agbioresearch.msu.edu">AgBioResearch</a>, which is our agricultural experiment station as Michigan's land grant university. We have a very big international footprint as well and are literally on every continent and in many parts around the world and have remained that way here through the pandemic as well.”</p><p>Hendrick tells Beekman how the pandemic is impacting the college’s efforts.</p><p>“We do have a very big footprint. I think we are definitely the university's biggest tenant in terms of acres occupied. When the governor's executive order initially came out, there were exemptions for things related to food and fiber production, including research. So we had both the fortune and the big lift of getting our research adapted to this new operating environment. And one of the things that couldn't go interrupted at all was all the care for all the things that we have custodial responsibility for. All of us have been focused on the two