To really understand what’s going on in the Nebraska Sandhills, Shelly Kelly told me, it’s helpful to see it from the air. From the window of her father’s Bonanza A36, we looked out over the heart of one of the most rural landscapes in the United States. The Sandhills are a 19,500 square-mile swath of grassy dunes embellished with grazing cattle, serpentine rivers, and sunflowers.
Kelly has spent her life on the prairies of the High Plains. As a child, she made bouquets of flowering grasses and hunted for mudpuppies in the interdunal buffalo wallows on her parents’ ranch. Now a rancher herself, she’s trying to preserve the landscape she loves against the usual suspects — overgrazing and overharvesting — and one surprising new threat: trees.
She pointed out my window to the prairie below. “You can see it there,” she said, pointing to a neat grove of Juniperus virginiana, eastern red cedar, deliberately planted by ranchers to protect calving heifers from the wind. These windbreaks are ... Read more
