Calcium is leaving the soil in fruit. Apples also deplete the soil of calcium. Some plants like the callery pear can live a very long time in my soil and not die. Some plants need fertilized like corn. Corn requires nitrogen to grow. Every cow or buffalo etc all used nutrients as they grew. How many farmers put those nutrients back in their land all those cows took off? That is just talking about grass.
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You should do your research before making broad statements. Myself and I think any farmer who wants to make living off of raising cows will maintain and rotate pastures to provide the best forage. Soil sampling yearly. Generally speaking cows return 60 to 80 percent of P and K removed in the form of manure they drop around. As for spreading manure over a pasture with a spreader, cows donāt like to eat in a pasture that has manure freshly sown over it. Hence, rotating pastures and fertilizing, etc as the it rests between moving cows back in.
Farmers are the stewards of the soil for future generations. They also fence out streams and maintain buffers to keep our water supply clean.
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Not a lot of calcium- I believe more is removed by leeching as a general rule, which is why soils tend towards acidic in the humid regions. Calcium loss is generally dealt with by adding limestone to the soil.
If the blackberry harvest was removing a lot of calcium youād need to do this to grow most varieties of fruit after the calcium was removed, blackberries do not have a particularly high need for it compared to other fruit, do they? They thrive in slightly acid soil.
.āa typical agricultural soil in Pennsylvania (a CEC of 10 meq/100g and a base saturation of 65% calcium) already contains 2,600 lbs/ac of exchangeable calciumā
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Ditto.
In my part of the PNW blackberries are a pestilence that overrun any area that cannot be mowed. Blackberries, like cockroaches are near impossible to fully exterminate. There is nothing that grows in these parts that I hate more, (thereās just no killing it). 
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Thatās probably true of most of the SE as well.
Iāve been growing Arapahoe thornless for a few years now. I still hesitate to pick them from memories of picking wild blackberries amd having my hands eaten up by the thorns.
If I were to pick a single āinvasiveā edible, it would be blackberry.
Letās just say itās a very successful plant and so unbelievably spreadable by birds with itās small seed.
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On the topic of Blackberries etc.
By natures design i think they are nearly a perfect plant for sustaining local fauna. By their own design they use local fauna to propagate themselvesā¦as well as sustain themselves.
1)Soft succulent growth- highly desired to be eaten. - response by plant is to send more growth which will eventually propagate.
2)Roots- highly desired to be eaten by voles and other root eaters. Once a root is severed it propagates.
3)Berries- highly desired to be eatenā¦ and seeds dispersed far away from the mother plant to propagate.
4)Laterals or uneaten tips will touch the ground which will trigger rooting and further propagate.
- Leaves of blackberry are high in nutritionā¦edible by fauna as well as humansā¦even have medicinal properties. When spent canes are left alone those leaves will fall and provide high quality nutrition. Spiny canes easily catch blowing leaves from local trees during autumn storms and wind gustsā¦often creating a mulch. Dying spent canes provide nutrition all through the winter.
6)A fully mature crown will smother out most of the light underneath the canopy which starves out competitionā¦
7)The goal of a blackberry seed is to become a crown. The goal of the crown is to become a thicketā¦ Eventually self sustaining. Roots intertwined and communcating and thriving via the myco network.
Disease, pestsā¦ and humans stop this process mostly. Only in very desolate areas or ground unfit for humans is this allowed to take place.
Cultivation by humans changes most every aspect of the natural process. Canes are cut which took alot of energy to produce. Those canes cannot produce leaves which would have fallen to replace that energy. Less cane length leads to less leaves which leads to less absorption of light. Once the berries are done the human removes all of the cane and berries both which took massive amounts of energy to produce. A signal is sent to the roots to look further for nutrientsā¦but the walkways have very littleā¦ due to the mowing and often spraying of herbicides. So eventually the crown suffersā¦ which the human feels the need to apply fertilizer and the process repeatsā¦until the crown or canes are so weakened by their imprisonment and mistreatment that they succumb to an infection, disease or pest. Words like supression are used for cultivation.
Does a cultivated plant need fertilizer or amendmentsā¦ Yes. The humans instinct is to remove the plants natural fertilizers and discard it as waste. All weeds are removed, or chemicals applied or barriers. No hope for natural composting or feeding from the weeds roots. All leaves are often removed as waste. All canes that do not fruit are waste. Areas around the plants are mowed and supressed.
Does a wild plant need fertilizer. No. The thicket is genius. The thicket has access to all of its natural habitat and functions independent of humans.
While blackberries are invasive to our human spaceā¦ we are invasive to their space as well. They are food, forage and habitat for things other than ourselves.
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My sentiment as well. On old lots or abandoned homes or out buildings; they literally grow over them and pull them down. Thereās an old barn on my walk that you cannot even see anymore. Death by blackberries. They rival bamboo in the pnw for super fast invasive tendancies. I always cringe when I hear people plant blackberries. Not around here unless you have a death wish.
I was gifted a black raspberry. I keep my eyes on it because it looks so much like a blackberry. I am trained to fight the battle every time they get into my lot. Have to say that one is not a blackberry, donāt cut it out.
If humans disappeared all the cities and non forested areas of the pnw would became building high brambles of blackberries in just a couple years. Every cleared lot here has them in the soil as seeds or fragmentsā¦.
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Well itās better than multiflora rose, which donāt even have decent āhipsā.
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True. And besides soils, some of the problem is the ālook goodā factor vs the better nutrient content of heirlooms.
Not all apples, like not all tomatoes, have equal vitamins and minerals. Even from the same plot of ground.
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Hey, we still have a slight chance of outsmarting our stupidity.
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You donāt have a blackberry problem, you have a tragic lack of goats!
John S
PDX OR
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Ya, but theyād even eat my barn. 
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The thornless blackberries Iāve planted in an enclosure are getting overrun by wild blackberries. The thornless berries donāt seem to have nearly the propensity to take over, unless perhaps some of the thorny problem is seedlings from them.
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On a certain level, this makes sense, weeds will colonize the bare earth, grow, cycle nutrients, provide shelter for later succession plants, and eventually get replaced but I have to stretch out the meaning of the words like taffy to make this fit.
If we mean that whatever plants nature plants will work towards correcting nutrient imbalances, either excess or deficits, then this is only rarely true.
Once sense in which it is true, legumes can enrich the soil with nitrogen, and tend to have an advantage in nitrogen poor soil. So, legumes grow in nitrogen poor soil and fix the nitrogen imbalance, but even this is only rarely true.
Where do legumes most often grow in the wild? In temperate NA, they grow in meadows and along forest edges. Hardly the places that lack nitrogen. In fact, the places with the least available nitrogen, peat bogs, have no legumes. Something doesnāt add up. Looking to subtropical NA, we see lots of mimosa trees dominating poor upland sites. And yet, these sites, while somewhat N-poor, are mostly just dry. Once again, the places with the lowest available nitrogen, bogs, have no legumes. And the other N-fixing natives, like wax myrtle, are also conspicuously absent from the bogs, growing mostly along field marginsāonce again, not the place where theyād actually need to fix that much N. Strange.
Ok, letās look to the southwest. A-ha! Many of the predominant canopy trees are legumes. Mesquite, palo verde, and many others. And the further south you go, into Mexico, the more legumes show up. But, once again, N availability isnāt actually that bad in these soils. The main thing is, theyāre just very dry.
Itās interesting. Suggests that nature might not actually care that much about correcting N imbalances.
Indeed, when studying natural history, one wonders if nature really cares about anything.
Early life evolves, slowly spreads around, begins proliferating, and then the Oxygen Catastrophe wipes out 80% of the entire biosphere.
Some time later, nature rearraigned the continents and screwed up the flow of heat around the planet, as well as pushed the balance of CO2 in the atmosphere way off, plunging the planet into millions of years of āsnowball earthā from which it was entirely possible that it would never recover (say if the ocean surface froze sufficiently). Glaciers crept as far as the equator at times, global biodiversity was annihilated once again, and the planet very nearly put an untimely end to the experiment called life.
This kind of BS would happen over, and over, and over. Nature would tediously create some complex beautiful thing, and then just toss it away like a petulant child. Sometimes through physical catastrophe, sometimes through cruel evolutionary pressures (ciao, prototaxites, nature thinks youāre boring now).
The continents themselves are in an ugly state of imbalance in inhospitality today. A dearth of geological turnover has left Australia absolutely starving for phosphorus, and even crueler tectonic movement has dried the continent, driving hundreds of relict Gondwanan genera that had built up their last refuge in Australiaās dwindling rainforests extinct. The Andes, together with the tilt of South Americaās southeastern coast robs all but the tiniest fragments of temperate South America of rain, leaving the Patagonian steppe mostly empty and desolate. The bizarre lack of any land bridges to Antarctica means that the entire continent is wrapped by a contiguous belt of ocean and atmospheric currents, robbing it of warmth and precipitation, leaving the entire thing iced over and almost completely lifeless, while similar latitudes in the north are full of animal life.
We feel a terrible guilt over bringing a pestilence into the New World and wiping out the American chestnut, but how many times in the fossil record does a widespread species just suddenly vanish? Be the causes natural climate change, some new disease or pest, it matters little, because nature has done so over, and over, and over. And unlike us, nature feels no remorse.
Itās almost like evolution is just a big, ugly, stochastic quasi-equilibrium, slouching towards Bethlehem to be reborn. Methinks Nature is an uncaring force more than a concerned mother. Balance isnāt among her concerns.
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I thought that the job of the weed was to correct a particular mineral deficiency, and once the deficiency is corrected the soil is no longer suitable for that particular weed.
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Like clover growing in N poor soil?
Donāt think Iāve ever seen clover enrich the soil so much it couldnāt grow there anymore. I have seen where it and other plants provided enough cover for pioneer trees to get started, though.
Perhaps your have some examples?
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Blackberries?
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Not that Iāve seen. I know the OP mentioned seeing that, but from the other comments in this post, looks like itās probably disease built up.
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That is exactly what iām saying. Weeds do exactly as you said. All plants are weeds technically we just consider some weeds to be plants because they are useful to us. Blueberries grow in acidic soil only. Lambsquarter grows in rich ground, mullein grows in poor ground etc. Montana is typically not good at growing apples due to calcium translocation not defficiency in calcium. Many people think if something is there it is usable but its not true and never has been Orchard Nutrition - Western Agricultural Research Center | Montana State University. Calcium is a bigger deal than people realize not just for growing fruit but also storage etc. CALCIUM - a vital element for fruit quality !! .Clearly i cannot grow apples well in my soil https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0304423822001881 .im not the first person to bring this up Dirt Poor: Have Fruits and Vegetables Become Less Nutritious? - Scientific American .facts are facts and it takes 38 apples to nutritionally equal one apple in the wild https://betterbiohealth.com/2020/10/07/38-apples-a-day-depletion-of-minerals-in-soil/ .Fruits do deplete soils Guide to Calcium Deficiency in Berry Crops | PowerAG .Many people claim soil is not depleted but that is simply not true Nutrient-Depleted Soil: What It Means for Our Food - Chris Kresser .It is difficult to mulch and fertilize acres of berries but it is needed Thoughts on regenerative agriculture - Fruit Growers News. Many people dont listen but it is still true Depleted Soils
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