The Spiral of Soil Regeneration: How Small Changes Boost Profit and Soil Health
- Buz Kloot, Ph.D.
- Aug 14
- 3 min read
We pulled into the parking lot at the USDA-ARS facility in Brookings, South Dakota, cameras in hand, wind tugging at our jackets. I remember thinking—this may be a quiet campus, but something important was about to be said inside.
Dr. Randy Anderson didn’t deliver a long lecture that day. In fact, the heart of what he shared lasted less than three minutes. But in those few minutes, he offered a bird’s-eye view of how soil health really improves—how one practice begets another, and how a small management decision can spiral into something much bigger.
Randy is not a man of fanfare. He’s soft-spoken, precise, and deeply thoughtful—shaped by years of working in the semi-arid Great Plains. And what he described that day was what he calls the Spiral of Soil Regeneration: a framework that ties together erosion control, water management, nutrient cycling, plant health, weed suppression, and profitability.
It all starts with no-till and surface residue. That residue conserves moisture. More moisture means more plant growth. More plant growth means more residue. That alone starts the cycle. But it keeps building.
That extra moisture opens the door to more diverse, more frequent rotations. Those rotations add organic matter. Microbial life flourishes. Aggregates form. Infiltration improves. Nutrient cycling takes off. “No-tillers were reducing nitrogen by 25 to 35%, and in some cases phosphorus by up to 50%,” Randy told me. “Some even eliminated phosphorus altogether—and yields still went up.”
Healthier soils brought more vigorous seedlings, earlier nutrient uptake, and fewer plant diseases—especially the belowground ones we often miss. One long-term study showed that growing corn just once every four years, instead of every two, led to a 15–20% yield bump under the same conditions, just by lowering root disease pressure.
Then came something even more surprising: crops in regenerated soils were more tolerant of weeds. In a Pennsylvania study, corn grown in biologically active, cover-cropped soil could tolerate five times more weed pressure than corn in conventionally tilled ground—with no yield penalty.
But Randy didn’t just stop at plant health. He pointed to a long-term economic assessment of Great Plains producers who embraced these regenerative principles. Their net returns were 3 to 5 times higher than those of conventional tillage operations. Fertilizer and herbicide use dropped. Soil organic matter more than doubled. “They were just simply getting more profit,” he said.
This spiral isn’t a metaphor. It’s a high-level systems view—one that makes sense to farmers who live in the day-to-day details, but need to see the big picture too. In revisiting this interview nearly a decade later, and seeing the kinds of questions showing up in our social media comment threads, we realized this message still hits home. It gives producers—especially those feeling stuck—a 30,000-foot path forward that’s both grounded and actionable.
That’s why we’ve worked hard to bring this back to life in video form. We’ll be releasing the full 3-minute version soon. In the meantime, we’ve created a <1-minute teaser to give folks a quick, accessible gateway into this story—and into the full article.
And we’re not done. In a follow-up piece, we’ll share more of Randy’s work on rotational diversity and weed suppression—an area that’s becoming even more critical as herbicide resistance rises and costs mount.
Further Reading:
For an early visual representation of this concept, see Randy Anderson’s Spiral of Regeneration diagram in Leading Edge, Winter 2005 (pp. 220–226): “Crop Residues & No-Till Stimulate a Spiral of Soil Regeneration.”
Visit these “Growing Resilience Through Our Soils” information pages:
1. Podcast page for drought planning fact sheets, Q&As, news, podcasts, and more.
2. Video page to watch videos of other ranchers’ journeys toward improved rangeland/pasture.
3. Follow Growing Resilience on social media:
4. Our homepage: www.growingresiliencesd.com
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