In 2021, Ted Turner created exactly that kind of place. He transferred almost 80,000 acres of prairie land to the Turner Institute of Ecoagriculture, which became a laboratory for wetlands and bison. What if one of the best ways to protect nature is to treat the land like a classroom? One of the projects of this institute focuses on wet meadows located between the sand dunes of Nebraska.
These waterlogged areas are more important than they seem, according to the Turner Institute of Ecoagriculture .
McGinley Ranch sits in the northern Sandhills of Nebraska and straddles the border with South Dakota. The institute’s first research partner was the Center of Excellence for Bison Studies at South Dakota State University. Its goal was to raise bison and generate income from grazing while maintaining ecosystem health. The wet meadow soil held substantially more organic carbon than the dunes. Soil texture was the main driver of the gap, since sandy soil stored less carbon. Future research, the institute adds, should test whether restoring water flow would help wet meadows sequester more carbon. The bison are the other side of the equation. The comparison is between bison grazing and no grazing at all. However, a Kansas prairie is different from the Sandhills, so these statistics cannot be directly applied to Turner’s property. However, together they show how a working ranch can also be a learning lab for people studying wetlands and bison.
The ranch occupied roughly 79,000 acres of native range when Turner’s firm moved it to the nonprofit organization in July 2021. The page also shares results and cites a 2025 master’s thesis by Nathan Moore, a graduate student at Oklahoma State University. The study analyzed 620 soil samples from paired sites on two ranches in Cherry County, Nebraska. Organic carbon made up an average of 2.95% of wet meadow soil, compared with 0.45% in the dunes. A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2022 about the bison of a tallgrass prairie in Kansas was led by Zak Ratajczak of Kansas State University. The authors reported that, compared with ungrazed areas, reintroducing bison increased native plant species richness (the number of native plant species) by 103% at the local scale of 10 square meters. At the larger catchment scale, the increase was 86%. These results held for 29 years, and the bison-grazed plots proved resilient to the most extreme drought in four decades, recovering within two to four years. Turner passed away on May 6, 2026, at 87 years old. The land that Turner moved into the institute in 2021 became a testing ground for ideas about water, soil, and grazing.
The Nebraska soil test and the Kansas bison study come from separate locations and raise separate questions, and therefore, each only contributes a part of the picture.
The institute said it could qualify for a property tax exemption but had no intention of applying for it, easing neighbors’ worries that the land would leave the tax rolls.
