Sugar cane crops are burned every year, it returns micronutrients to the soil and allows for mycchorizae to re-establish before the next season. Tilling and decomposing not only take longer, but it reduces yield and the tillings can add other fungi that outcompete the natural mycchorizae, making your next crop a season late and less able to intake nutrients efficiently, which increases the cost of fertilizer.

Fertilizer runoff is what causes the yellow/green algae blooms in runoff ditches and holding ponds. That high of a concentration of nitrates, nitrites, phosphates, etc are bad for the environment in that concentration, on a similar level to the waste holding areas of a pig farm. It's a net negative for plant and animal life, including humans in the vicinity.

> Sugar cane crops are burned every year, it returns micronutrients to the soil and allows for mycchorizae to re-establish before the next season

Holy cow, have you hit a nerve in me! I lived years in two Mexican cities adjacent to Texas, and I swear they burn the sugar cane when the winds are southbound, so all the contamination ends up in Mexico. Early winter you can see greyed skies and small amounts of ash and soot everywhere. Burning the cane makes it easier to harvest, but there are machines now that do that job, and as a bonus, you don't dehydrate or sterilize the upper soil.

To be fair, some farmers also burn their crops in this side too, seeing how little environmental regulation there is. December and January are hard for your lungs there.

What chopping the trees down for fuel then? Burn them in a powerplant? Or turn into biogas or something?

I suspect the energy density is low enough that the activity of moving them to a location for processing would be net-energy negative.

Also the idea of getting California to approve a wood-burning powerplant is amusing.