Over the past few decades, ultracold atomic gases in optical lattices have proven to be an exciting playground for realizing and manipulating fermionic many body quantum states.  However, while nearest neighbor tunneling and on-site interactions can be freely tunable, most experiments are limited to interactions in the lowest band.  In this talk, I will discuss the opened avenues when this restriction is lifted in conjunction with utilization of the p-wave Feshbach resonance in Potassium-40.  In addition with the well known s-wave Feshbach resonance, these experimental knobs enable potential applications towards cluster state generation and many body spin models.  I will show our pioneering experiments measuring the two-body elastic interaction of atoms near the p-wave resonance and potential applications thereof.  Time permitting, I shall conclude with a discussion of pragmatic and effective improvements to cold atom experiments that can keep them competitive with modern quantum machines.