If plants are continuously removed from an area of land would that land eventually become completely infertile?

Soy beans remove nitrogen from the air and return it to the soil. A good rotation crop. Eventually the soil will become depleted of the chemicals the plants use to grow and produce crops, leaves, stems and such. The plants are taking nutrients out of the soil, but not returning them. Air is a good diet food. However, no nutritional value.

If the rate of removal is too high, and cutting and removing everything above ground could be too high. Then the ground does loose productivty. This is a lot like what happens with desertification. One can't say absolutely because you aren't removing all plant material, most plants have as much underground as above and you don't say if you are keeping overal growth up with fertilizers and such. If you use fertilizers and keep growth levels high, it's possible you could remove everythng above ground for a long, long time without seeing the ground be seriously impacted. A lot of the answer depends on conditions and just how much you are producing. Even if no fertilizer is added, the use of legumes can extend the period but eventually you would deplete the land of nutrients like phosphorus and potassium and so on. Only nitrogen can be fixed by plants from the air. So remove everything on top, no fertilizer, then yes, you deplete the soil. Marv

It doesn't matter whether you're removing a hay crop, grain, vegetables, peanuts or whatever, those products all contain varying amounts of nitrogen, phosphrous, potassium and a host of others in much smaller amounts like zinc, boron, sulfur, magnesium and so on. The more crop you take off, the more nutrients are removed and it doesn't take hundreds of years either. Depending upon the crop, a decade or less can seriously depleat the soil of nutrients enough to drastically reduce the yields unless nutrients are replaced by commercial fertilizer or manure. Yes, legumes produce nitrogen, but they also use lots of potassium. As that element is depleated, the smaller the root system is going to me and the less nitrogen will be produced. Besides, nitrogen by itself won't grow a crop, you need the other elements as well. All the N in the world won't grow a crop if you don't have P or K. The least impact fertility wise is grazing animals. When you haul the cattle off of a pasture, very little nutrients are actually contained in their flesh because like humans, they're mostly water. Most of the nutrients they consume in the form of forage is returned in manure.

Nitrogen fixing plants...which have root nodules...mostly legumes such as clover, soy and beans would keep the soil from becoming infertile. The root nodules act as a host site for Rhizobia, soil bacteria which fix nitrogen. Other diazotrophs work symbiotically with angiosperms and some with lichens and liverworts. If any of the above mentioned were present then the soil wouldn't be completely infertile. There are also a few insects that might help things out. If you really wanted infertile land then the easiest way to achieve it would be chemical sterilisation.

With roundup ready crops plenty of fields look like a desert between the rows. This is part of the reason chemical fertilizers are so important these days. They do the trick just fine for now. At balled-and-burlap nurseries where they dig up trees and sell them, rootball intact, there is actually a problem with physical removal of the soil. not so easily solved with technology.

yeah