Fuel ethanol is stupid too. It is made from corn, which could be used to feed people or at least animals. Anyway the point is, there is plenty of land that could have solar panels on it besides farm land. Farm land is too important to waste. We will starve if we don't have enough of it. You should always grow more food than you technically need. Crops can fail, and you can't eat solar panels or credit cards.
Fuel ethanol mostly exists because the US grows way too much corn to actually eat and we needed something to do with it. Industrial farming overshot what we needed to sustain the population and threatened to put a lot of farmers out of business.
This is one of the hidden benefits of corn ethanol, if there is some nutrition crunch it is trivial to convert back to farming food corn unlike switchgrass ethanol. There is no equipment to change out, no supply chains to rework, you just change which type of corn you plant and send the harvest to the market instead of the refiner.
