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Besides we can still use that same land for crops with agrivoltaics
There are so many places we could install solar before we even have to touch agriculture.
Rooftop solar is expensive for a lot of people unfortunately because it's paid by the household installing them (government subsidies help, but even if gvt is paying 50% of your 20k solar install, 10k is still a lot of money). But there's ways for businesses and municipalities to install solar.
Without getting into reducing car dependency (which is also important), I maintain that every car park of any significant size should have solar. We're going electric anyway, this makes the EV chargers slightly cheaper to operate (and when nobody is charging, should make some money back) and there'd be shade in the summer, as well as slight protection from snow in the winter. Everyone wins. The owner of the solar, the people parking, etc.
Mandating rooftop solar on all non-historic government buildings at any level of government would also be helpful. I'm sure there could be countries already doing it - I'm advocating for more countries to start doing it.
Also for businesses and communities to install solar, there's crowdfinancing apps to get loans. Goparity has a bunch of solar projects. I've contributed negligible sums to a few, figuring that it might be a riskier investment than say index funds, but at the very least I'm contributing to something good happening to the planet I live on. There are other alternatives too, that's just the one I'm using.
We're not going battery electric. We're going bus grid electric and bicycle.
Or you could just do ground mount arrays somewhere because it's way cheaper to install and who cares about a 1% or whatever change in land usage.
Depends on the location. Around me, they're sometimes close to towns where the land could otherwise be used for homes or businesses in the medium-term future.
Also land is still a limited resource in much of the world. Why not use one piece of land for multiple purposes?
For sparsely populated areas I'll agree with you. Here in Europe, there's not a lot of completely unused land and in my country in particular most "unused" land is forests and bogs which have value of their own (sadly only 5% is wetlands nowadays - used to be over 20% before the soviets drained most of it). I'd much prefer those to remain untouched by both agriculture AND solar energy. Doing agriculture in a city is kinda hard, but solar is not. As a bonus, if solar panels in cities displace some of the demand for biofuels, that's biofuel-related land that could be used for something else.
You don't need unused land you just need to displace agriculture. If you have any land used for cattle grazing for example you can have enough grass to feed 1 cow or you can have enough solar to power 20-40 homes. Pretty obvious to me which is the more productive land usage there.
Or keep the cow and put solar on rooftops, car parks, etc. The cow shits out natural fertilizer which helps the land recover quicker so it can be used to produce more productive (in terms of people fed) crops again while the cow goes and grazes somewhere else where the soil's no longer very productive.
It's not a lot of land, sure, but there's literally zero downside to putting solar in places where shade is desirable anyway. Just mandating solar in car parks alone could provide a ridiculous amount of electricity in more car-dependent cities.
What they're saying is this is only tangentially agriculture. We grow crops, process them, and make additives for fuel or just fuel. If we stopped doing all that, we could provide enough electricity to make all the cars electric.
This, of course, doesn't take into consideration things such as battery requirements, etc. but it does give perspective on just how much land is being used for some small fraction of car fuel, and how absurd biofuel is, given how little we actually use relative to our overall fuel use.
Edit: everything else you said is true, but even turning biofuel land into grazing land and having it covered by solar panels would be more useful. And we need more batteries.
Legislation for car parks is a great start. Korea just did some