http://thefraserdomain.typepad.com/energy/2006/11/sugar_cane_yiel.html#comment-25199444

Sugar cane production destroys the soil david. Making fossil fuel derived fertilizer and chemical pesticides and herbicides necessary also. That contaminates the groundwater with cancer causing pollution.

The areas that have stored carbon in the soil for eons are being burned down then converted to sterile growing media for chemical agriculture, which burns the remaining cellulose out of the soil in a few short years. This whole process of agribizz farming has released thousands of years of carbon sink in a few decades.

And left us with chemically contaminated, tasteless food and dead soil. Wherte 20 feet of prairie soil once stored carbon as organic matter, the soil is now sterile. Poisonous with agri-chemicals when blown on drought winds due to global climate disaster.

A chemical dustbowl.

Meanwhile algae grown in solar collectors can produce 150,000 gallons of biodiesel per acre per year. Those collectors can be mounted on roofs and over parking lots instead of wrecking 1000s of square miles of land. And even all our farm land and conservation land devoted to biofuel could not supply uS enough with our present gas guzzling addiction.

Forget fuel farming, sugar cane is a disaster. Algae for liquid fuel, and electric plugin hybrid vehicles that only need 10% of the fuel we now use in internal combustion transport.