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Oranges are synonymous with Florida. The refreshing fruit adorns everything from license plates to kitschy memorabilia. Ask any Floridian and they’ll tell you that oranges are an icon of the Sunshine State.
Jay Clark would be quick to agree. He’s 80 years old and a third-generation grower on land that’s been in his family’s Wauchula estate since the 1950s. But he’s not sure how much longer he can keep going. Two years ago, Hurricane Ian pummeled trees that were already weakened by a highly toxic and incurable disease called citrus greening. It took him more than a year to recover after 150-mile-per-hour winds “pretty much blew the whole crop away.” “It’s a struggle,” Clark says. “I think I’d be too stubborn to quit completely, but it’s not a profitable business right now.”
His family once owned about 500 acres in west-central Florida, where they grew oranges and raised cattle. In recent years they sold much of the land and scaled back their citrus groves. “We’re focusing more on cattle,” he says. “Everybody’s looking for alternative crops and solutions.”
The state, which produces about 17% of the nation’s oranges, grapefruit and other sour fruits, is expected to produce just 18.1 million boxes during the 2022-2023 growing season, its smallest harvest in nearly a century. That’s a 60% decrease from the previous season, a decline that’s mostly due to the combined effects of a mystery pathogen and hurricanes. This year, the USDA’s final forecast for the season just released reveals an 11.4% increase in production over last year, but it’s still less than half of what was produced in the 2021-2022 season.
The decline in orange juice is hitting consumers across the country, with flooding in Brazil, the world’s top orange juice exporter, reducing crop yields and pushing orange juice prices to record highs.
As climate change increases the probability of storms, kills trees with disease, and makes water less available, Florida’s nearly $7 billion citrus industry faces an existential threat. Once one of the world’s leading citrus producers, producing three-quarters of the oranges in the United States until 2014, Florida has weathered such challenges before. Citrus growers in the state are known for their tenacity. Some believe that ongoing research into a cure for citrus greening will go a long way in helping to bring about a recovery. But others are less optimistic about the future, as the dangers they face today are a harbinger of what’s to come.
“We’re still here, but things aren’t good. We’re the only ones here,” Clark said. “This isn’t just about our family, the citrus growers. If we don’t find a solution, there will be no citrus industry.”
Citrus greening, an incurable disease spread by insects that destroys crops and eventually kills trees, has endangered Florida’s citrus industry since it first appeared in Miami orchards nearly 20 years ago. The disease emerged several years after an outbreak of citrus canker, which made the crop unsalable, and led to the death of millions of trees across the state. Greening has also occurred in other major citrus producing areas, such as California and Texas, but has not had a widespread impact on commercial orchards in those states. Florida has by far been the most widespread and costliest state affected by the disease, with production declining by 75 percent since 2005. Florida’s year-round subtropical climate allows the disease to spread at a faster pace. However, as global temperatures continue to rise due to global warming, the disease is expected to spread northward.
“You see a lot of abandoned citrus groves along highways and roads,” says Amir Rezazadeh of the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, “and most of those trees are dead now.”
Rezazadeh serves as a liaison between university scientists working to solve the problem and citrus growers in St. Lucie County, the state’s top citrus-producing region. “We have a lot of meetings and visits with growers every month, and we have a lot of researchers working on developing resistant varieties,” Rezazadeh says. “It’s really worrying citrus growers.” [Everyone] We await the results of further research.”
Antibiotics developed to mitigate the effects of greening hold the most promise. While early results in reducing symptoms are promising, treatments like oxytetracycline are still in their early stages, and require growers to inject treatments into all infected trees. More importantly, this is not a cure, just a stopgap measure; it’s merely a way to keep infected trees alive while researchers work on how to defeat the mysterious disease.
“We need more time,” Rezazadeh said, noting that farmers in St. Lucie County began using antibiotics last year. “There’s hope that we can keep them alive until we find a cure.”
In the 1990s, an eradication program for canker disease, then the industry’s biggest enemy, led to the removal of hundreds of thousands of trees on private land, devastating the state’s citrus acreage. In the years since the citrus greening epidemic, the disease’s ripple effects have only intensified as growers have been hit by a succession of hurricanes, floods and droughts.
Hurricanes don’t just uproot trees, scatter fruit and shake them violently; they can take years for trees to recover. Heavy rains and flooding drown orchards and deplete the oxygen in the soil. Diseased trees are especially at risk because the disease often affects and weakens the roots. Ray Royce, executive director of the Highlands County Citrus Growers Association, likens it to a pre-existing condition.
“I’m an older person. If I catch a cold or get sick, it’s harder for me to recover at 66 than it was at 33. If you have underlying conditions, it’s even harder to recover,” he says. “Greening is like a negative underlying condition that magnifies everything else that’s happening to the tree, everything that’s stressing the tree.”
To make matters worse, climate change has led to poor rainfall, rising temperatures, record dry spells and reduced soil moisture. Lack of rain has caused wells and canals to dry up in some of the state’s most productive regions. All of this has led to lower crop yields and early fruit drop.
Healthy trees are more likely to survive such a threat, of course, but the tenacity of the stronger trees is being tested, and what were once minor events, brief freezes, may be enough to finish off trees already on the brink of death.
“All of a sudden we’ve had a string of bad luck. We had a hurricane, and then a freeze after the hurricane,” Reuss said. “Now we have a drought that’s definitely going to hurt next year’s crop. So in some ways we’ve got to get lucky a few times and have a couple of good years where we get the right amount of moisture and we don’t have the hurricanes or freezes that are going to hurt the trees.”
Human-caused climate change is unlikely to provide the respite that Reuss craves. In fact, forecasters expect this year to be the most active hurricane season in recorded history. Researchers have also found that warming will increase the pressure of plant diseases, such as greening, on crops around the world.
Though “almost every tree in Florida” is sick and the reality of pathogens spreading as temperatures rise raises concerns, the state’s days of citrus production are far from over, said Tim Widmer, a plant pathologist who specializes in crop diseases and plant health. “We don’t have the solutions yet,” he said. “But there are some that look very promising.” A surprising amount of money is being poured into searching for answers to this puzzling problem. The Florida Legislature allocated $65 million to support the industry in the 2023-2024 budget, and the 2018 federal farm bill includes $25 million per year for disease control for the life of the bill.
Widmer, a contract employee for the USDA Agricultural Research Service, is devising an automated system (called a “symbiotic technology”) to “inject” therapeutics, such as antimicrobial peptides, that destroy pathogens in host trees, so growers don’t have to inject them manually. “It’s like a biofactory that produces the compound of interest and injects it directly into the tree,” Widmer says. But they only just started testing it this spring on a 40-acre orchard. Other solutions scientists are pursuing include breeding new varieties of citrus that are more resistant to late blight. “It takes eight to 10 to 12 years to develop a long-term solution to late blight,” he says. [greening]We will also address some of the climate change factors that will impact citrus production,” Widmer said.
Time is not a luxury for many family-owned businesses. Recent years have seen a wave of closures of Florida citrus groves, grower associations and related businesses. Ian was the catalyst for the collapse of Sun Groves, a family-owned business that opened in Oldsmar in 1933.
“We had freezes and hurricanes, but we tried to stay open as long as we could despite all the challenges,” General Manager Michelle Urbanski said. “When Hurricane Ian hit, that was really the final straw and we knew we had to close.”
The economic loss was so great that it put an end to her family’s nearly century-long contributions to Florida’s enduring but now struggling citrus tradition. “Closing Sun Groves was heartbreaking for our family,” she said, amid a devastating pest infestation and disastrous storms, a feeling that would soon be experienced by many others.
This article originally appeared on Grist: https://grist.org/food-and-agriculture/can-floridas-orange-growers-survive-another-hurricane-season/. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories about climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org.
