I'm not sure how we compare these numbers? The 70,000 is just for one county. So, scaled up across the country, it would be a lot more. Or was that your point?
But articles are trying to always show big numbers, and without context it is hard to know what these numbers mean. 70k hectares is not that much. A better way to play the area angle is, in my opinion, this: if we properly electrify the US, we can stop making bio-ethanol. The US is using 12 million hectares of arable land for that; that can be put to better use.
Yes, but they were only looking at biocrust potential from the three largest solar farms in that particular county.
Obviously if you wanted to help soil nationwide you'd also need to target solar farms nationwide. Plus, in the future we can expect more solar farms than we have currently, it's only quite recently that solar has started to become a non-trivial amount of energy generation in the US, as you can see in this chart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:USA_electricity_productio...
Subsidy to set food production at odds with energy is a colossal error
Besides, I'd imagine that the corn used for ethanol production could easily be turned in to food should that need ever arise.
I should hope they just keep it food. ;
I was commenting more on the uses of government subsidy. Unless things changed significantly in more recent years, ethanol was never all that affordable.
To wit:
"...53,956 BTUs per gallon to manufacture ethanol. The best existing plants use 37,883 BTUs per gallon" (1)
The manufacture of ethanol is both subsidized directly and subsidized indirectly through the use of fossil fuels to provide the energy of production. It is generally the case that ethanol cannot be made feasibly (cost) by burning ethanol.
1. http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2014/ph240/dikeou1/docs/et...
If agriculture as a whole were actually sustainable there would be a good shortage, or at least much less of an excess than we have now.