Will Florida’s Oranges Survive Another Hurricane Season?

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Oranges are synonymous with Florida. This tart fruit can be seen adorning everything from license plates to kitschy memorabilia. Ask any Floridian and they’ll tell you that this crop is a hallmark of the Sunshine State.

Jay Clark would agree. He’s 80 years old and a third-generation farmer who has worked land his family has owned in Wauchula since the 1950s. But he’s not sure how much longer he can keep it up. Two years ago, Hurricane Ian struck trees already weakened by a virulent and incurable disease called citrus greening. It took more than a year for them to recover after “the whole crop was basically blown away” by 150-mph winds. “It’s a struggle,” Clark said. “I guess we’re too stubborn to just give up completely, but it’s not a profitable business right now.”

His family owned nearly 500 acres in west-central Florida, where they grew oranges and raised cattle. They have sold much of that land in recent years and scaled back their citrus groves. “We’re focusing more on cattle,” he said. “Everyone is looking for an alternative crop or a solution.”

The state, which is growing approximately 17 percent of the country’s oranges, grapefruits and other spicy fruits, produced only 18.1 million boxes during the 2022-2023 growing season, The smallest harvest in almost a century. That’s a 60 percent decrease from the previous season, a decline largely driven by the combined impacts of mysterious pathogens and hurricanes. This year, the USDA just released Final forecasts for the season reveal a 11.4 percent increase in production compared to last year, but that is still Not even half of what was produced during the 2021 to 2022 season.

Consumers across the country have felt the pinch from these declines, which have been exacerbated by flooding. Strangling of harvests in Brazilthe world’s largest exporter of orange juice. All this has raised the cost of the drink to historical highs.

As climate change makes storms more likely, disease kills more trees and water becomes harder to come by, Florida… $7 Billion Citrus Industry faces an existential threat. The Sunshine State, once a Among the world’s leading citrus producers. and until 2014 produced Almost three quarters of the country’s orangeshas overcome similar challenges in the past. Its citrus growers are resilient. Some have faith that ongoing research will find a cure for citrus greening, which would be a big step toward recovery. But others are less optimistic about the road ahead, as the dangers they face now are harbingers of the future.

“We are still here, but the situation is not good. We are here, but that is all,” Clark said. “This is bigger than our family as citrus growers. If a solution is not found, there will be no citrus industry.”

Citrus greening, a Incurable disease transmitted by insects that ruins crops before ultimately killing the treeshas jeopardized Florida’s citrus industry since the disease took hold. In a forest in Miami Almost two decades ago. It appeared a few years after an outbreak of citrus canker diseasewhich makes crops unsaleable and leads to loss of millions of trees statewide. Although greening has appeared in other citrus powerhouses like California and Texas, it has not Commercial groves widely affected in Any stateThe scope of the pest in Florida is by far the largest and most costly: since 2005, it has reduced production by 10%. 75 percentThe Sunshine State’s year-round subtropical climate allows the infestation to spread at a faster rate. But as warming continues to increase global temperatures, The disease is expected to spread northwards..

“You see a lot of abandoned citrus groves on the highways and all over the streets,” said Amir Rezazadeh of the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences. “Most of those trees are dead.”

Rezazadeh acts as a liaison between university scientists struggling to solve the problem and St. Lucie County citrus growers. One of the highest production areas in the state.“We have so many meetings, visits with growers every month, and there are so many researchers working to develop resistant varieties,” he said. “And this is really making these citrus growers nervous. [Everyone] “We are awaiting further investigation results.”

The greatest promise lies in antibiotics designed to reduce the effects of greening. Initial encouraging results in symptom reductiontherapies such as oxytetracycline Treatments are still in the preliminary stages and require growers to inject the treatment into each infected tree. More importantly, it is not a cure, but only a stopgap measure — a way to keep affected trees alive while researchers race to figure out how to beat this mysterious disease.

“We need more time,” Rezazadeh said. St. Lucie County growers began using the antibiotic last year. “There is some hope that we can keep them alive until we find a cure.”

The state’s total citrus acreage took a severe hit in the 1990s, when an eradication program for canker disease, then the industry’s greatest enemy, resulted in the culling of Hundreds of thousands of trees on private propertyIn the years since the citrus greening phenomenon took hold, the pest’s domino effects have worsened with a constant barrage of hurricanes, floods and droughts threatening growers.

Hurricanes do more than uproot trees, scatter fruit and shake them so violently that they can take years to recover. Torrential rains and flooding can inundate orchards and deplete soil of oxygen. Diseased trees face a particular risk because the disease often affects their roots, weakening them. Ray Royce, executive director of the Highlands County Citrus Growers Association, likens it to a preexisting medical condition.

“I’m an older man. If I get a cold or sick, it’s harder for me to recover at 66 than it was at 33. If I had any underlying health issues, it’s even harder,” he said. “Greening is kind of a negative underlying health condition that makes anything else that happens to the tree that stresses it even more severe.”

It doesn’t help that climate change is causing… Insufficient rainfall, higher temperatures and unprecedented dry seasonsleaving the soil with less water. Lack of rainfall It has also dried up wells and canals In some of the The most productive regions of the stateAll of these can reduce yield and cause fruit to drop prematurely.

Of course, healthy trees are more likely to withstand such threats, but the tenacity of strong trees is being put to the test and events that were previously minor, such as A brief freeze It may be enough to end any situation that is already on the brink of death.

“All of a sudden, we had a run of bad luck. We had a hurricane and then after the hurricane, we had a freeze,” Royce said. “Now we just went through a drought that will definitely negatively impact next year’s crop. So, in a way, we need to have a couple of good times and a few good years where we get the right amount of moisture, where we don’t have hurricanes and freezes that negatively impact the trees.”

Human-induced climate change means that the respite Royce is desperately hoping for is unlikely. In fact, forecasters wait This is the The most active hurricane season in recorded historyResearchers have also discovered that Warming will increase plant disease pressureas greeningin crops around the world.

Although “almost every tree in Florida” is affected by the disease, and the reality that rising temperatures spread pathogens is a growing concern, the state’s citrus production days are far from over, said Tim Widmer, a plant pathologist who specializes 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 lot of funding has been devoted to finding answers to a vexing problem. The Florida legislature allocated $65 million in the 2023-2024 budget to support the industry, while 2018 Federal Farm Bill including 25 million dollars annuallyby the length of the beak, towards Fight against the disease.

Widmer is a contractor for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service, which is designing an automated system (known as “symbiote technology”) that would “pump” therapies such as Antimicrobial peptides that destroy pathogens into a host tree, allowing growers to no longer have to manually administer injections. Think of it “as a sort of biofactory that produces the compounds of interest and delivers them directly to the tree,” Widmer said. But they just started testing it in a 40-acre forest this spring. Other solutions scientists are looking into include Breeding new varieties of citrus fruits that could be more tolerant to the pest. “It takes 8, 10, 12 years to develop a long-term solution for [greening]and also for some of the climate change factors that will impact citrus production,” Widmer said.

Time is something that many family businesses cannot afford. In recent years, an increasing number of Florida businesses citrus orchards, growers associationsand related businesses They’re closed forever. Ian was the turning point for Sun Groves, a family-owned business in Oldsmar that opened in 1933.

“We definitely experienced freezes, hurricanes… and we tried everything we could to stay in business despite all the challenges,” said Michelle Urbanski, who was the general manager. “When Hurricane Ian hit, that was really the final blow, when we knew we had to close the business.”

The financial loss was too great, ending the family’s nearly century-long contribution to Florida’s enduring — and now beleaguered — citrus legacy. “It was heartbreaking for my family to close Sun Groves,” he said. Amid a torrent of crippling pests and calamitous storms, it’s a feeling many others may soon come to know.

This article originally appeared in Grinding in https://grist.org/food-and-agriculture/can-floridas-orange-growers-survive-another-hurricane-season/Grist is an independent, nonprofit media organization dedicated to telling stories about climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org