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Oranges are synonymous with Florida. This delicious fruit can be found on everything from license plates to kitschy souvenirs. Ask any Floridian and they will tell you that crops are the hallmark of the Sunshine State.
Jay Clark would quickly agree. He is 80 years old and is a third-generation grower whose family has owned land in Wauchula since the 1950s. But he wasn’t sure how much longer he could hold out. Two years ago, Hurricane Ian devastated trees already weakened by a deadly and incurable disease called citrus bacterial wilt. The 150 mph winds “blown away nearly all the crops,” and it took more than a year to recover. “It’s been a struggle,” Clark said. “I guess we’re too stubborn to give up completely, but it’s not a profitable business right now.”
His family once owned nearly 500 acres in west-central Florida, growing oranges and raising beef. In recent years, they have sold off much of their land and scaled back their citrus groves. “We’re paying more attention to cattle,” he said. “Everyone is looking for alternative crops or solutions.”
The state grows about 17% of the nation’s oranges, grapefruits and other tangy fruits but produced just 18.1 million boxes during the 2022-2023 growing season, the lowest harvest in nearly a century. This was a 60% decrease compared to the previous season, with the decline primarily due to the compound impact of mysterious pathogens and hurricanes. The final forecast for this year’s season just released by the U.S. Department of Agriculture shows that this year’s production will increase by 11.4% compared with last year, but this is still less than half of the production from 2021 to 2022.
Consumers across the country are feeling the pinch from these declines, which have been compounded by flooding in Brazil, the world’s largest orange juice exporter. All of this has pushed the cost of beverages to record highs.
Florida’s nearly $7 billion citrus industry faces existential threats as climate change makes storms more likely, diseases kill more trees and water becomes harder to come by. The Sunshine State, once one of the world’s leading citrus producers, producing nearly three-quarters of the nation’s oranges until 2014, has faced challenges like this before. Its citrus growers are nothing if not resilient. Some believe that ongoing research will lead to a cure for citrus greening that will go a long way toward recovery. But others are less optimistic about the path ahead, as the dangers they face now are a harbinger of things to come.
“We’re still here, but it’s not good. We’re here, but that’s it,” Clark said. “This is not just our family as citrus growers. If solutions are not found, there will be no citrus industry.
Citrus greening is an incurable insect-borne disease that damages crops and eventually kills trees. citrus industry. It comes several years after an outbreak of citrus canker, which rendered crops unmarketable and caused the loss of millions of trees across the state. While greening has occurred in other citrus-producing regions, such as California and Texas, it has not had a widespread impact on commercial forests in those two states. Florida has by far been the most severely affected by the blight and has suffered the most losses – production in the state has been reduced by 75% since 2005. The Sunshine State’s year-round, subtropical climate allows pests to spread faster. But as global temperatures continue to rise, the disease is expected to spread northward.
“You see a lot of abandoned citrus orchards on the highways and all the roads,” said Amir Rezazadeh of the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences. “Most of the trees are dead now. ”
Rezazadeh is a liaison between university scientists working to solve the problem and citrus growers in St. Lucie County, one of the state’s largest producing areas. “We have a lot of meetings and visits with growers every month, and there are a lot of researchers working on developing resistant varieties,” he said. “It really makes these citrus growers nervous. [Everyone] New research results are awaited.
The best hope lies in antibiotics that can mitigate the effects of greening. Despite promising early results in reducing symptoms, treatments such as oxytetracycline are still in their preliminary stages and require growers to inject the treatment into each infected tree. What’s more, it’s not a cure, just a stopgap — a way to keep infected trees alive while researchers race to figure out how to defeat this mysterious disease.
“We need more time,” Rezazad said. Growers in St. Lucie County began using the antibiotic last year. “We want to keep them alive until a treatment is found.”
The state’s total citrus acreage took a huge hit in the 1990s, when eradication programs for the industry’s worst enemy, canker, led to the felling of hundreds of thousands of trees on private property. In the years since the onset of citrus greening, the cascade of blight and persistent hurricanes, floods and droughts have threatened growers.
Not only do hurricanes uproot trees and scatter their fruit, they also shake them so violently that they take years to recover. Heavy rains and floods can inundate woods and deplete oxygen in the soil. Diseased trees are at particular risk because the disease often affects their roots, weakening them. Ray Royce, executive director of the Highland County Citrus Growers Association, likened it to existing health conditions.
“I’m an old guy. I catch a cold, or I get sick, and it’s harder for me to recover at 66 than at 33. “Greening is a negative underlying health condition that makes anything else that happens to the tree Things that put pressure on the tree will be further amplified. “
It doesn’t help that climate change has brought poor rainfall, rising temperatures and record dry spells that have reduced soil moisture. The lack of precipitation also caused wells and canals to dry up in some of the state’s most productive areas. All of these can reduce yields and cause premature fruit drop.
Of course, healthy trees are more likely to withstand such threats. But the tenacity of sturdy woods is being tested, and small events like a brief freeze can be enough to end any grove that’s already dying.
“We suddenly had some bad luck. We had a hurricane. After the hurricane, we had a freeze,” Royce said. “Now we’ve just had a drought, which will undoubtedly have a negative impact on next year’s crop. So, to some extent, we need to grab some good breaks and have a few good years and get the right amount of of moisture, without hurricanes or freezes, which can negatively impact trees.
Human-induced climate change means the respite Royce so desperately wants is unlikely. In fact, forecasters predict this will be the most active hurricane season on record. Researchers have also found that climate warming will increase the pressure on global crop greening and other plant diseases.
Tim Widmer, a plant pathologist who specializes in crop diseases and plant diseases, said that while “almost every tree in Florida” is affected by the disease, warmer temperatures are making it easier for the pathogen to spread. The reality is increasingly worrying, but the days of citrus production in the state are far from over. “We don’t have a solution yet,” he said. “But something looks very, very promising.” An unexpected sum of money was used to find the answer to a puzzling question. The Florida Legislature earmarked $65 million in the 2023-2024 budget to support the industry, and the 2018 federal farm bill included $25 million annually during the bill to combat the disease.
Widmer is a contractor with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service, which is designing an automated system (called “Symbiosis Technology”) that will “pump” therapies such as antimicrobial peptides to eliminate parasites in host trees. pathogens, thereby eliminating the need for growers to manually inject. It’s “sort of like a biological factory, producing compounds of interest and delivering them directly into the tree,” Widmer said. But they just started testing it on 40 acres of woods this spring. Other solutions scientists are pursuing include breeding new citrus varieties that are more resistant to blight. “It takes eight to 10 to 12 years to develop a long-term solution. [greening]and some climate change factors that will affect citrus production,” Widmer said.
Time is beyond the reach of many family businesses. Over the past few years, an increasing number of Florida citrus groves, growers associations and related businesses have closed permanently. Ian was the turning point for Sun Groves, a family-owned business in Oldsmar that opened in 1933.
“We did have some freezes, hurricanes… we did our best to stay in business despite the challenges,” general manager Michelle Urbanski said. “When Hurricane Ian hit, it was It was really the final push and we knew we had to close the business.”
The financial damage was too great, ending nearly a century of the family’s contribution to Florida’s enduring, now-troubled citrus legacy. “The closing of Sungrove is heartbreaking for my family,” she said. Amid the torrent of severe infections and catastrophic storms, many others may soon know what it’s like.
This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/food-and-agriculture/can-floridas-orange-growers-survive-another-hurricane-season/. Grist is a nonprofit independent media organization dedicated to telling the stories of climate solutions and a just future. Please visit Grist.org to learn more
