“We need more time,” Rezazadeh said. Growers in St. Lucie County began using antibiotics last year. “There’s hope we can keep the trees 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 so hard that they take years 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, which Ray Royce, executive director of the Highlands County Citrus Growers Association, likens 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.”
It’s useless Climate change is causing lack of 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 can lead to reduced crop yields and premature 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.