The phrase "infertile soil" is perfectly acceptable in written English.
You can use it any time you want to refer to soil which is not capable of producing crops. For example, "The farmer was dismayed to discover that his land had been depleted of nutrients over the years, leaving it with infertile soil."
Dry, infertile soil limited agriculture, and timber was rare.
Because they grew in marshy, infertile soil, they had to devise other ways to find nutrients.
The sands and gravels that underlie the area yield an acidic infertile soil supporting rough heathland, scrub, and pine forest.
After the Paris peace agreements of 1991, the United Nations tried to plant a multiparty democracy in this infertile soil.
The peninsula sits at a low elevation and has infertile soil and insufficient fresh water; it is sparsely populated.
These — and lesser eruptions — formed the island, which, except for a minor area fit for farming and living, is lava with a thin layer of infertile soil.
The Pacific coast, including the department of Chocó, with its lush rainforest and infertile soils, is sparsely inhabited.
They couldn't handle the compacted, eroded, sunbaked and infertile soils that the farmers had left behind.
Mozambique's soils are diverse in quality and type, but the northern and central provinces have generally more fertile, water-retentive soils than does the south, where sandy, infertile soils prevail.
Laterites (soils dominated by iron oxides) and other infertile soils are especially prevalent in the Brazilian Highlands, where they can reach depths of as much as 90 feet (27 metres).
The discovery that the infertile soils of the cerrado can be made productive are due solely to the initiative of the private sector American IRI Research Institute funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fundd and Brazilian agro-industry.
