Solar panel in and of itself would have the land produce more than what would be going into it.
Solar, and wind, power is a low yield technology that requires years of operation to return the initial costs, and pretty high maintenance for the remainder of a pretty short functional life. We will always need carbon fuels, even though we should turn to a new safer generation of nuclear power generation plants. If cows don't graze off the excess growth even from desert areas like this, we would still need to remove it as a fire hazard and a threat to all kinds of wildlife, including turtles. It is the natural carbon cycle in our ecosystem. Cows will reduce wildfires, which I have seen in deserts areas just like this, in summers after wet winters and where grazing was curtailed by the BLM mismanagement. Cows will actually do a better job than the BLM has done in recent years in keeping the ecology pretty well managed, at some ideal number.
People interested in discussing grazing practices need a realistic notion of what an acre is, as well as a square mile. . . . Go take a cow out on this kind of land and see which of you gets hungry faster, you or the cow. Typically, one cow can be sustained through a whole year on one to four square miles of this kind of desert.
What BLM scientists do is study the plant populations by a sampling method, and calculate the food yield, and throw in a big fudge factor. I've seen overgrazed land, and I don't like it. I've spent my life believing it is beneficial to let organic stuff like grass die off and go into the soil, thinking it would help retain water in the soil. But scientists who have actually studied the processes involved have found that cattle grazing is beneficial.
Here's what they did. They took some substantial plots of equivalent land, and fence them off. One of each pair of plots they let cows graze at the customary practices, on the other paired plot they kept the cows off. Guess what. They found the grazed areas became more heavily populated with all kinds of plants than the ungrazed plots. Of course, if you just graze excess cattle to the extent that the plants are all eaten down to nothing, you can damage the land.
But 1000 cows on a hundred square miles of this desert is not overgrazing. I'm not sure what the exact area is, as fenced or allotted by the BLM. But the fact is, in this case, it was the issue of the tortoise that was the reason for reducing the allotment to 150 from 1000, and that reason was not actually a valid reason. The turtles are not impacted by the cows, but are in fact benefited. The reason these turtles were disappearing have to be looked for in some other issue. I know when I was a kid, a lot of people were bringing turtles into town and they'd get run over on the streets. . . .