some crops replenish nutrients, e.g. legumes directly fixing nitrogen from the air.
just because capitalist industrial agriculture is addicted to fossil fuel fertilizers doesn’t mean it’s the only way to farm.
Yes they do, still it’s not sufficient enough to replenish what is needed. Agriculture is an open loop system, it requires external inputs to continue to operate. Without external inputs, agriculture turns into minery.
Cover crops can help a bit in soil that’s not seem significant agricultural use yet… by biologically mining and aerating the soil (ie. plants with deep and hardy tap roots can break through some plow pan and clay to extract mineral nutrients beneath).
Like you say, external inputs and care are needed to amend the soil to grow useful food crops. If they weren’t, we’d still be foraging, without need to settle areas and dedicate energy to agriculture.
There has to be a balance, we need to understand that as long as we export harvests out of the field we need to import nutrients into the field. We can’t expect plants to naturally replenish the nutrients that we unnaturally extract.
Also we need to understand that when we introduce heavy machinery into a field, we need heavy machinery to break compaction. Plants and soil organisms simply cannot naturally break the compaction caused by our unnaturally heavy machinery that is heavily concentrated in the small contact area of a tire.
Some of these dogmatic beliefs lead to “regenerative” farmers being more extractivists than the industrial farmers they demonize.
