Inside the Unexpected Partnership Between a Nebraska Rancher and a National Geographic Photographer

When Jaclyn Wilson was a little girl growing up on the Wilson Flying Diamond Ranch in the Sandhills of northwest Nebraska, her grandparents gave her a subscription to National Geographic magazine every year for Christmas. 

Each issue transported young Jaclyn to exotic locations around the globe. “I’d unfold the maps and hang them all over my bedroom,” she said. The articles taught her about the importance of conservation, lessons echoed by her grandparents and parents, who restored wetlands and made other efforts to care for the environment on their ranch.

In 1998, National Geographic published a feature on the Nebraska Sandhills by photographer Joel Sartore. Wilson was a teenager when it was delivered to her mailbox. She was astonished to read that Sartore was from her home state. “You never really heard of famous people coming from Nebraska, so the fact he grew up here was so cool,” she recalled. 

Back on the Ranch

After attending the University of Nebraska, Wilson came home. She is the fifth generation in the family cattle business, which was established in 1888. Working roughly 700 head of Red Angus and Red Simmental alongside her father, Blaine, Wilson continued the environmentally conscious efforts her ancestors began.

“Everything always focused on conservation,” she said. “My grandparents built a house up on the hill, and the pasture that it overlooked was specifically for wildlife use. Grandma would yell bloody murder if she saw a cow in there.”

Her grandparents also restored a plot of hay ground to its natural state as wetlands. “Now, it’s a huge stop for migratory birds,” Wilson said.

In 2006, the Wilsons were named the inaugural Leopold Conservation Award winner for Nebraska. The award, given by the Sand County Foundation and sponsored by American Farmland Trust, honors those who go above and beyond managing soil health, water quality, and wildlife habitat on their land.

The Wilsons take part in the USDA’s Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP), which works with producers to create a conservation plan and pays them for those practices. 

One CSP project is planting trees to help prevent the erosion of sandy soil. “Trying to get a tree to grow out here is a struggle,” Wilson said, noting they have planted around 4,500 in the past few years.

Everyday Effort

Conservation also affects their daily decisions. “From a management perspective, we like simple things, like we only use ATVs or UTVs in the pastures, no full-sized vehicles at all,” she said. “We’re really conscientious of how we’re using pastures. There are some I will actually overgraze, because the compaction on that soil from the cows will actually improve the quality of that pasture. We don’t have a winter range and summer range here, because I’m a firm believer in pasture rotation.”

Wilson manages rotational grazing and year-round pasture management with the PastureMap program, which is accessible by phone. She said, “I can tell you at any time what group of cows are in a given pasture.”

Wilson is active in industry groups to help affect change and advocate for fellow producers. She has been international trade chair for the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA) and sits on the board of directors for the Nebraska Cattlemen’s Board and the state’s humanities council. 

While on an NCBA trade mission to Europe a few years ago, farmers there asked her about growth-promoting hormones. “They want to get rid of antibiotics, and fertilizers, and pesticides,” she said. “When I came home, I took everything I learned there and realized we can actually have more impact on the environment by increasing our efficiencies.”

That prompted Wilson to create EnviroSmart Beef in 2023. Although she had been shipping grass-fed, grain-finished beef from her ranch directly to consumers since 2019, this new trademark lets consumers know the product is raised as efficiently as possible with a focus on minimal environmental impact. 

EnviroSmart cattle originally had a small ear tissue sample sent to a lab for testing. Using a combination of data and genomics, Wilson received an ideal days-on-feed number for each animal. When it reached that number, it was sent for processing, reducing overfeeding and the animal’s carbon footprint.

For this and other cattle care and stewardship efforts, the Wilsons were named the 2023 National Beef Quality Assurance Cow-Calf Producer of the Year.

​Wilson is serving an 18-month term as a scholar for the nonprofit Nuffield International, which sends her around the world to find new ideas and best practices to bring back to the ranch and the industry. “I’ve learned almost as much from those experiences as I have here on the ranch,” she said. “I like to be home, but there’s a real advantage to getting out, seeing other countries, meeting other people, and really trying to be at the forefront of change.”

A Full-Circle Moment

As part of her mission to advocate for and educate about the beef industry, Wilson began writing columns for a regional publication in the 2010s. Unbeknownst to her, Joel Sartore was a regular reader. 

In 2020, the photographer was 14 years into his Photo Ark project with National Geographic, capturing images of at-risk species all around the world. “The goal is to show biodiversity in all its forms to try and lessen the impact of extinction and get people to care,” Sartore said. He has captured more than 16,000 species to date.

Because of COVID-19, Sartore shifted focus and sought out species he could photograph closer to home. He said he knew Wilson’s ranch was ecologically diverse, which made it a good candidate.

“I felt like I knew her from those columns,” Sartore recalled. “I emailed her and asked if I could come out to do Photo Ark pictures.”

When Wilson received that email, she didn’t believe it was real. “I was out on the 4-wheeler and this email pops up from Joel Sartore, and of course I knew who he was,” she recalled. “I opened the email and it started off with, ‘You probably don’t know who I am, but I’m one of your biggest fans.’ I laughed and thought, ‘OK, that really is spam.’”

Once Wilson convinced herself the email was real, she invited Sartore to the ranch. He drove up the long, winding gravel road, past the Leopold Award sign and through wetlands teeming with all kinds of waterfowl. 

He set up a makeshift photo studio in the ranch shop, and he, a biologist, and other crew members began collecting insects to photograph. “Everybody was getting in on the bug collecting,” Wilson said.

In three days, Sartore and his team photographed around 140 insect species, 90 of which he hadn’t yet captured for Photo Ark.

One highlight was when Wilson and her friend Amy Sandeen each caught a barber pole grasshopper. “We got to the shop and gave them to Joel, and the grasshoppers decided they were going to procreate, so that’s the photo that he got,” Wilson said. “Later, he was in Abu Dhabi doing a presentation, and he sent me a screenshot of the first slide, and it was those grasshoppers, which I thought was hilarious.”

A Hidden World

Wilson said she had no idea there were so many species of insects on her ranch. “I never would’ve thought there was that much diversity out there. It was so cool seeing the detail on things like grasshoppers, and beetles, and dragonflies,” she said. 

She said the experience changed her viewpoint on insects and even led her and her father to make some adjustments to their operation. “I will avoid a bug on the sidewalk now, which is funny because before I never would’ve
even thought about something like that, but now these things have an identity,” she said. 

During Sartore’s visit, she said she learned that dung beetles, which are beneficial in cattle pastures, can be killed by certain cattle dewormers. “That led us to change some of the things we’re doing on the management side,” she said. “It made us more cognizant of how practices can have a negative effect.”

Wilson encourages other producers to embrace that kind of learning and willingness to change, and appreciates the way some cattle groups are working with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) such as the Nature Conservancy and the World Wildlife Foundation. 

“If a rancher can learn something from an NGO and say, ‘That’s actually a really valid point,’ and if an NGO takes information from a rancher, then you start to find some common ground,” she said. “Then, when big issues come up, you aren’t enemies; you’ve already built relationships. You might be the first call they make, asking how it affects you, rather than reaching out to someone with a perspective that might not be favorable to ag.”

Her father shares her sentiments. “I was having a discussion with Dad the other day, and he said, ‘You know, the problem is that people just get tunnel vision and they want to do the same thing their grandfather did.’ We’re willing to see the bigger picture,” she said. “That doesn’t mean that your operation has to make changes, but that’s what we’re doing, and it’s working for us.”

Sartore said he admires the Wilsons’ willingness to adapt. “They may hold a certain belief, but if they get evidence to the contrary, they go with it, and that’s really the key to survival,” he said. 

Continued Connections

When the Photo Ark project wrapped up at Wilson’s ranch, scientists and other researchers began to reach out to her about visiting. One group came to study bat sonar, and another, nematodes.

Wilson’s friendship with Sartore and his wife, Kathy, has also continued to grow. Sartore purchased multiple plots of land in the Sandhills, including one bordering Wilson’s land. Since his home is in Lincoln, 5½ hours away, he asked Wilson to manage that land, granting her a lease to run cattle on it.

“The timing couldn’t have been more perfect,” Wilson said. “It gave me the opportunity to bring cows I had at a lease ranch closer to home because we had added Joel’s land to the portfolio.” 

That, she said, led to a change in the ranch’s business model, allowing Wilson to become a full partner with her father.

Home-State Heroes

Work from the Photo Ark is now on permanent display at the University of Nebraska State Museum. It includes a “wall of heroes” that features a portrait of Jaclyn and Blaine Wilson. 

“We’ve never considered ourselves heroes,” she said. “We just do what we do, but the fact that there’s a permanent place where Dad and I are featured is so cool.”

​​“I kind of found a kindred spirit in her,” Sartore said. “In my job, I travel the world, and I see a lot of sad things in terms of what humans are doing to each other and to the planet. Just knowing we have good stewards out there, like the Wilsons, makes me smile.”

Wilson said she is proud that her family’s ranch brought a little bit of Nebraska to Sartore’s Photo Ark project. It’s also not lost on her that her travels on behalf of the beef industry have taken her to many of the locations she first read about in National Geographic as a child. 

Still, for Wilson, no place is more beautiful than the Sandhills. “If I had to describe Nebraska in one word, it would be ‘home,’ and I think that’s how Joel feels about it too,” she said. “No matter where you travel in the world, there’s always a place to call home, and for both of us, it’s this great state.”

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