Are you under the impression farmland is not a massive source of dust? It's tilled and aerated soil populated by short-lived crops genetically engineered to spend as much of their energy on the edible part as possible.

If you want a concern to hold, it's that this will probably increase pioneer grass spreading during the rainy season and then then the panels will all get melted in a wildfire. You don't need to plant anything to pollinator-friendly stuff on your land in California. It shows up with a vengeance.

If you don’t water California soil, it cracks and then turns to dust. eg: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=cracked+california+soil&iax=images...

Also, if not controlled, Avena grass (the invasive species that turns the hills yellow during the summer) takes over, killing off anything that would support pollinators during the summer and fall.

The cracked soil is a feature of being a desert, and since the entire point of this is that it's unsustainable to irrigate a desert that far from a major waterway, there isn't much to be done in the long term about what species thrive. That's the wages of climate change.

This area didn’t start out as desert. It is some of the most fertile (remaining) land on earth. (Like the Sahara used to be.)

It also currently, but unsustainably, produces a large fraction of all food on earth.

Here’s an article from 2012 with some anecdotes if numbers aren’t your thing: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/14/magazine/californias-cent...

Here is a table of crops: https://republicans-naturalresources.house.gov/newsroom/docu...

(it doesn’t seem to include exports, so the numbers are low-balled)

It is clearly being over-farmed, but the solution to that is crop rotation and letting the fields periodically go fallow.

Blanketing it with solar panels is likely irreversible.

I'm quite aware of how much food California produces. I'm also quite comfortable with California not overfarming and just, you know, letting the rest of the country stop producing subsidized corn.

I can't help but feel like it's a subtle contradiction to propose that without constant watering the soil in California will crack up and vanish and that's not going to happen with crop rotation but will happen with crop rotation (as if many farms in California aren't already forced to do this because of the nature of our groundwater).

Are you also opposed to orchards? They're full of solar panels that make fruit rather than electricity.

An answer, then, is to plant some longer-term grass (or something that can hold the topsoil), and give the panels a short spray of water every morning to remove dust.

Increases efficiency, prevents undesired pollinators taking control of neighboring paddocks, uses an order of magnitude less water than actual crop irrigation.

I'm fairly sure the pollinators are a benefit, even if we're going to have to accept much more aggressive and dangerous varieties populating the state as the average temperature rises and ongoing insect migrations continue.

>getting the dust it produces off those panels during the summer is going to be expensive.

We're talking like a couple minimum wage employees with leaf blowers and ladders. Sure it doesn't cost nothing but in the context of a commercial operation it's not thaaaat expensive.