Milburn Lincoln Wilson was born in Atlantic, Iowa on 23 October 1885, the son of John Wesley and Mary E. (Magee) Wilson. He received a B.S.A. from Iowa State College, Ames, in 1907 and his M.S. in agricultural economics and rural sociology from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1920. He began his career as a farmer in 1907. He served as Assistant State Agronomist at Montana State College, Bozeman, 1910-12; County Agent in Custer County, Montana, 1912-14; Montana State Extension Agent Leader, 1914-22; and an extension agricultural economist at Montana State College, 1922-24. Between 1924 and 1926 he took charge of the U.S.D.A. division of farm management and cost accounting. During his stint as professor and head of the Department of Agricultural Economics at Montana State College, 1926-33, he provided consultation on large-scale wheat farming in the U.S.S.R., 1929. From May 16 to September 1, 1933, Wilson served as the Chief Wheat Production Secretary in the Agricultural Adjustment Administration and then moved on to the directorship of the Division of Subsistence Homesteads in the Department of the Interior until June 30, 1934. In 1934, Wilson was appointed the Assistant Secretary of Agriculture and in 1937 the Undersecretary of Agriculture until 1 February 1940 when he became the Director of Extension Work at U.S.D.A. While Director, he also filled in as the Chief of Nutrition Programs and in the Production and Marketing Administration between 1943 and 1949. He was a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Farm Economic Association (president, 1925), Epsilon Sigma Phi, Phi Kappa Phi, and Alpha Zeta. He was also a Unitarian and belonged to the Cosmos club. His writings include Farm Relief and the Domestic Allotment Plan (1933) and Democracy Has Roots (1939). Married on December 17, 1913 to Ida Morse from Cromwell, Minnesota, Wilson made his home in Washington, D.C. where he died in October 1969 and is buried in Rock Creek Cemetery.

During the agricultural depression that followed WWI, Wilson and many other members of his department studied why some farmers prospered while so many others failed. During the course of their investigations they took thousands of photographs to illustrate their findings. Most of these photographs recorded efficient or innovated practices that helped some farmers survive, and the farming methods frrom more humid regions, inappropriate for conditions in Montana, that caused others to fail. Other photographs simply recorded what life was like on the northern Great Plains during the 1920s.