Challenging one last frontier: Understanding and improving deep rooting

While current agricultural cropping systems have a limited exploitation of water and nutrients from below 1m soil depth, some plant species can grow much deeper root systems. Crops with deeper roots can allow us to exploit unused nutrients and water from deep soil layers hereby increasing the sustainability of cropping systems. We want to develop such systems, and to study their resource use, biological effects and carbon sequestration in soil layers down to 5m depth.