> Nobody is making solar panels "track the sun".

It's very common for utility-scale solar to use single-axis trackers (the panels move from pointing east to pointing west through the day), unlike small-scale solar which usually has fixed panels (normally pointing south or north depending on which hemisphere you're on). The gain from single-axis trackers is high enough and their cost is low enough (a single geared motor can move a whole row of panels) to make it cost-effective.

(I haven't, so far, seen any large photovoltaic solar power plant which uses two-axis trackers to really track the sun; but thermal solar power plants with a central tower need these two-axis trackers to aim each mirror at the correct angle.)

I think trackers are a thing of the past. The cost of solar panels has sunken so low, they come essentially for free in installations. A tracker would be way to expensive. Here in Germany, people even start covering north-facing roofs with solar, and of course even walls and fences, if they are roughly in the right direction.

Well, actually Florida (FPL) along I-10 is right now constructing new solar farms where there used to be forests. I'm not sure if what they did with the trees constitutes "clear cutting" but the solar panels are there now, and the trees are not. I've driven the route for many years. It was all forested.

Do you know if those forests were professionally managed for paper production? It might be private land, and it very likely legal.

True. There isn't any actual untouched forest land in north Florida. It's all been harvested and replanted many times. Almost certainly it was private sale or leased land. But those farm trees still produced more oxygen and stored more carbon than the solar panels will.

> But those farm trees still produced more oxygen and stored more carbon than the solar panels will.

If those solar panels replace a coal fired power plant, is that still true? I am unsure.

I'm not sure about the other things but sun tracking tech for solar panels has been around for a long time and it's trivially easy to find through a search, such as [1].

"But there are also other ways to boost the energy production of solar panels – such as by tilting them to follow the Sun's path in the sky, similar to the way young sunflowers follow the sun from east to west during the day. Tracking technology, which is already in use on some land based solar arrays, helps increase the overall electricity production, as the panels constantly adjust to face the Sun."

1) www.bbc.com/future/article/20221116-the-floating-solar-panels-that-track-the-sun

Trackers are necessary if someone is doing math based on panels perpendicular to the sun. Of course they are rare, but are needed when doing the conversion. Whether the tracked pannel cast shadow, or more panels recieve less-than-direct sunlight, the math is the same.

And it is all irrelevant. There is an absolute overabundance of pasture land, so spacing panels out so the grass can grow between and under causes no difficulty.