The influence of different systems of soil cultivation is considered - traditional (recommended) technology and direct sowing, which is increasingly used under dry conditions of the region. The rehabilitation of the degraded southern chernozems and dark chestnut soils structure during 13 and 7 years of direct sowing, respectively, has not been established. It takes much longer to rehabilitation the aggregate state of soils, which is currently in a critical condition of the content of aggregates> 10 mm in size and the sum of agronomically valuable aggregates. The soils under 60-year treeline, as a control, showed a satisfactory range of aggregates, which indicates a high degree of soil degradation in the past and a long period of their recovery time. The effectiveness of direct sowing usage in the cultivation of a wider range of grain and row crops (winter wheat, sunflower, peas, chickpeas, rapeseed, buckwheat, corn) is due to the peculiarities of agricultural technologies. Abandoning of naked fallows and soil treatments with the simultaneous use of plant residues and cover crops on the soil surface between the harvest and sowing of winter crops provides an anti-erosion effect and, as a consequence, a decrease in physical evaporation, an increase in moisture and biota reserves, an increase in microbiological processes, which are noted in the form trends in improving the agrochemical and agrophysical properties of soils.
R–R–T (resistance–resilience–transformation) typology reveals differential conservation approaches across ecosystems and time