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CRETE, Neb. (AP) — Stand on some parts of Frank Andelt's farm and it's hard to tell the place has grown corn and other crops and raised cattle for generations.
Warm-season grasses, tinged in gold and red, rise up a hill, and a tractor pulling a fertilizer tank moves slowly across the ridge line.
Turn east and there's a small wetland, home to a handful of green-winged teal ducks and an occasional soaring hawk.
"It really worked out nice," Andelt said of the wetland he established on the family farm about 8 miles southwest of Crete. "It was an easy way to create some habitat and solve an erosion problem at the same time."
His parents, William and Amelia Andelt, farmed the original 80 acres in Saline County. Frank Andelt grew up there and went to a one-room school a few miles away until the seventh grade.
His folks are gone now, and although he and his family live on an acreage near Lincoln, he has strong ties to the land in Saline County, the Lincoln Journal Star (http://bit.ly/19MnhOt ) reports.
Over the years, he has struck a balance between farming and conservation of natural resources, planting more than 4,000 trees and shrubs as field borders and windbreaks and to stabilize eroding stream banks. He uses sensors to monitor soil moisture to conserve water and energy.
No-till farming, a practice that does not disturb cropland year to year, is a given.
Andelt is the 2015 recipient of the Howard L. Wiegers Nebraska Outstanding Wildlife Conservation Award, named for the former University of Nebraska-Lincoln professor who founded the school's fisheries and wildlife major in the late 1960s.
The award is co-sponsored by the UNL Wildlife Club and the Lincoln Journal Star and has been presented annually since 1966. Andelt will be honored April 11 at the Izaak Walton League north of Bennet.
Forty years ago, he was president of the Wildlife Club and received the outstanding student award at a similar banquet. And one of his professors was Wiegers.
"I was honored," Andelt said of the more recent award.
Wiegers, his former college adviser, will turn 100 this year and plans to attend the banquet honoring Andelt.
Andelt graduated from UNL in 1975 with a degree in agricultural honors with an emphasis in natural resources and wildlife management and a minor in zoology. He was a wildlife biologist for Nebraska Game and Parks for 24 years and retired in 1999. While there, he played a pivotal role in the reintroduction of river otters along Nebraska waterways.
Andelt, 61, spends most of his time these days working on the family farm and other parcels of land he owns with his brother, William, a wildlife studies professor who retired in 2012 from Colorado State University and moved back to the Crete area.
Andelt said he doesn't mind driving the 27 miles to the family farm to work the fields and maintain the 120 acres of mixed native, warm-season grasses and wildflowers enrolled in the federal Conservation Reserve Program.
The program pays farmers to forgo farming marginal land, providing habitat for wildlife and protecting sensitive land. Andelt has another 40 acres of grasses and woodland habitat not enrolled in any federal program.
"Every grass patch we own, we're on at least a five-year burn schedule," he said, referring to the practice of burning areas to release nutrients into the soil and improve growth.
Right now, he's trying to get rid of Maximillian sunflowers, an aggressive perennial that has crept into some of his CRP land.
A longtime member of Bluebirds Across Nebraska, Andelt has placed 50 nesting boxes at 32 sites on the farm and has tracked the number of fledglings to nearly 100 per year.
He's getting ready to plant about 150 shrubs, including plum and chokecherry, on another parcel to create thickets for quail.
And he's trying to restore a 10-acre woodland on a western section by adding more oak and walnut trees. In the past, he's planted food plots, up to an acre in size, to benefit wildlife.
"We tend to have conservation in mind with everything we do," Andelt said.
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Information from: Lincoln Journal Star, http://www.journalstar.com
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