Oranges are synonymous with Florida. The spicy fruit can be seen adorning everything from license plates to kitschy souvenirs. Ask any Floridian and they’ll tell you that the harvest is a hallmark of the Sunshine State.
Jay Clark would be quick to agree. He is 80 and a third-generation farmer who works land his family has owned in Wauchula since the 1950s. But he is not sure how much longer he can keep it up. Two years ago, Hurricane Ian pounded trees already weakened by a virulent and incurable disease called citrus greening. It took more than a year to recover after the “entire crop was basically blown off” by 150 mph winds. “It’s a struggle,” Clark said. “I think we’re too stubborn to just stop completely, but it’s not a profitable business right now.”
His family once owned nearly 500 acres in west central Florida, where they grew oranges and raised beef. In recent years, they have sold much of that land and scaled back their citrus groves. “We concentrate more on the cattle,” he said. “Everyone is looking for an alternative crop or solution.”
The state, which roughly grows 17 percent of the country’s oranges, grapefruits and other tangy fruits, just produced 18.1 million boxes during the 2022 to 2023 growing season, the smallest crop in nearly a century. It is a 60 percent decrease from the previous season, a decline driven primarily by the compounding impact of mysterious pathogens and hurricanes. This year the USDA has just been released final predictions for the season reveal a 11.4 percent increase in production over last year, but it is still not even half of what was produced during the 2021 to 2022 season.
Consumers across the country have felt the brunt of these declines, which have been compounded by floods suffocates crops in Brazil, the world’s largest exporter of orange juice. All this pushed up the cost of the drink record highs.
As climate change makes storms more likely, disease kills more trees, and water becomes harder to come by, Florida’s nearly $7 billion citrus industry facing an existential threat. The Sunshine State, which once was among the world’s leading citrus producers and produced until 2014 almost three quarters of the country’s oranges, has weathered such challenges before. His citrus growers are nothing if not resilient. Some believe that continued research will find a cure for citrus greening, which will go a long way toward recovery. But others are less optimistic about the way forward, as the dangers they face now are harbingers of the future.
“We are still here, but it is not a good situation. We’re here, but that’s about it,” Clark said. “It’s bigger than just our family as citrus growers. If a solution is not found, there will be no citrus industry.”
Citrus greening, an incurable disease spread by insects that ruining crops before trees are finally killedhas put Florida’s citrus industry at risk since the disease took hold in a forest in miami almost two decades ago. It has a few years after an outbreak of citrus canker diseasewhich makes crops unsaleable, and has led to the loss of millions of trees nationwide. Although greening appeared in other citrus powerhouses such as California and Texas, it did not widely affected commercial orchards in any state. The scale of the rust in Florida is by far the largest and most expensive – since 2005 it has produced with 75 percent. The sunshine state’s subtropical climate throughout the year allows the infection to spread at a higher rate. But as warming continues to raise global temperatures, the disease is expected to progress northwards.
“You see so many abandoned citrus groves on the highways, all the roads,” said Amir Rezazadeh, of the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences. “Most of those trees are just dead now.”
Rezazadeh acts as a link between university scientists struggling to solve the problem and citrus growers in St. Lucie County, one of the state’s top producing areas. “We have so many meetings, visits with growers every month, and there are so many researchers working to develop resistant varieties,” he said. “And that makes these citrus growers really nervous. [Everyone] waiting for the new research results.”
The greatest promise lies in antibiotics created to reduce the effects of greening. In spite of encouraging early results to reduce symptomstherapies such as oxytetracycline is still in preliminary stages and requires growers to inject the treatment into each infected tree. More importantly, it’s not a cure, merely a stopgap — a way to keep afflicted trees alive while researchers race to figure out how to overcome this mysterious disease.
“We need more time,” Rezazadeh said. Producers in St. Lucie County began using the antibiotic last year. “There is some hope that we keep them alive until we find a cure.”
The state’s total citrus acreage took a major hit in the 1990s when an eradication program for canker disease, the industry’s biggest enemy at the time, led to the eradication of hundreds of thousands of trees on private properties. In the years since citrus greening took off, the ripple effects of the blight have compounded with an ever-present barrage of hurricanes, floods and drought threatening growers.
Hurricanes do more than uproot trees, scatter fruit, and shake trees so violently that they can take years to recover. Torrential rains and floods can flood forests and deplete the soil of oxygen. Diseased trees face particular risk because disease often affects their roots and weakens them. Ray Royce, executive director of Highlands County Citrus Growers Association, compares it to a pre-existing medical condition.
“I’m an old guy. I catch a cold, or I get sick, it’s harder for me to recover at 66 than it was at 33. If I had some underlying health issues, it’s even harder,” he said. “Greening is kind of this negative underlying health condition that just magnifies anything else that happens to the tree that stresses that tree.”
It does not help bring about climate change insufficient rainfall, higher temperatures and record-setting dry seasonswhich leaves soils with less water. A lack of precipitation also dried up wells and canals in some of the state’s most productive regions. All of these can reduce yields and drop fruit prematurely.
Healthy trees naturally have a better chance of resisting such threats. But the persistence of strong woods is tested, and once small events like a short freezer could be enough to end any already on the brink of collapse.
“We suddenly had a bit of bad luck. We had a hurricane. Then after the hurricane we froze,” Royce said. “Now we have just gone through a drought which will undoubtedly negatively affect the harvest for next year. And so we kind of have to get some good breaks and have some good years where we get the right amount of moisture, where we don’t have hurricanes or freezes that negatively affect trees. ”
Human-induced climate change means that the break Royce desperately hopes for is unlikely. In fact, forecasters expect it to be the most active hurricane season in recorded history. Researchers have found that too warming will increase the pressure of plant diseasesas greeningin crops worldwide.
Although “almost every tree in Florida” is affected by the disease, and the reality of warm temperatures spreading pathogens is a growing concern, the state’s citrus-producing days are far from over, said Tim Widmer, a plant pathologist who specializes in in crop diseases and plant health. “We don’t have the solution yet,” he said. “But there are things that look very, very promising.” a windfall of funding has been devoted to the search for answers to a perplexing problem. Florida’s legislature earmarked $65 million in the 2023-2024 budget to support the industry, while the 2018 federal farm bill included $25 million annuallyfor the length of the beak, na combating the disease.
Widmer is a contractor with the US Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service, which develops an automated system (known as “symbiosis technology”) that “pump” therapies like would. antimicrobial peptides that destroy pathogens in a host tree, which allows growers to no longer apply injections manually. Think of it “kind of like a biofactory that produces the compounds of interest and delivers them directly into the tree,” Widmer said. But they only started testing it in a 40-acre forest this spring. Other solutions scientists are pursuing include to breed new varieties of citrus which may be more rust-tolerant. “It takes anywhere from 8 to 10 to 12 years to develop a long-term solution for [greening]and also for some of the climate change factors that will affect citrus production,” said Widmer.
Time is something that many family-owned operations cannot afford. In recent years, an increasing number of Florida citrus groves, producer associationsand related businesses closed for good. Ian was the breaking point for Sun Groves, a family business in Oldsmar that opened in 1933.
“We certainly suffered from freezing temperatures, hurricanes … and tried to stay in business as long as possible despite all the challenges,” said Michelle Urbanski, who was the general manager. “When Hurricane Ian hit, that was really the last blow where we knew we had to close the business.”
The financial loss was too much, ending the family’s nearly century-long contribution to Florida’s enduring, now controversial, citrus legacy. “It was heartbreaking for my family to see Sun Groves close,” she said. In the midst of a deluge of crippling infections and calamitous storms, it’s a feeling many others will soon come to know.
