Soil Regeneration Spiral. Source: Anderson 2005 We pulled into the parking lot at the USDA-ARS facility in Brookings, South Dakota,...

On our spring tour of South Dakota farmers integrating livestock, my partner in crime, Joe Dickie, and I left Huron, and a couple of hours later crested the rise where Ryan Urban lives. Ryan identifies himself as a fourth-generation Pukwana crop-and-cattle producer—he jokes that they’re “cattle people who farm on the side.” With a name like Urban, I half expected him to grab a guitar and sing us a country tune. Instead, he grabbed the keys to his pickup, and we rode out into

Dr. Ray Weil Professor of Soils in the Department of Environmental Science & Technology at the University of Maryland, in a Soils Pit (no tilled for 30+ years) on the Steve Groff Farm in Pennsylvania. When I first started learning about soil, I wasn’t a trained agronomist—I just knew we were supposed to take soil samples down to 6" or 6¼". I didn’t question it at the time. Later, I learned that this 6" layer represents the old plow layer—the zone where most agronomic roots li