Can Florida’s Orange Growers Survive Another Hurricane Season?

The Sunshine State, which was once among the world’s leading citrus producers and until 2014 produced almost three-quarters of the nation’s oranges, has weathered such challenges before. Its citrus growers are nothing if not resilient. Some have faith that ongoing research will find a cure for citrus greening, which would go a long way toward recovery. But others are less optimistic about the path ahead, as the dangers they face now are harbingers of the future.

“We’re still here, but it’s not a good situation. We’re here, but that’s about it,” said Clark. “It’s bigger than just our family as citrus growers. If a solution isn’t found, there will be no citrus industry.” 

Citrus greening, an incurable disease spread by insects that ruins crops before eventually killing trees, has imperiled Florida’s citrus industry since the ailment took hold in a grove in Miami nearly two decades ago. It appeared a few years after an outbreak of citrus canker disease, which renders crops unsellable, and led to the loss of millions of trees statewide. Although greening has appeared in other citrus powerhouses like California and Texas, it hasn’t widely affected commercial groves in either state. The scope of the blight in Florida is by far the largest, and most costly — since 2005, it has cut production by 75 percent. The Sunshine State’s year-round subtropical climate allows the infestation to spread at a higher clip. But as warming continues to increase global temperatures, the disease is expected to advance northward. 

“You see so many abandoned citrus groves on the highways, all of 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 liaison between university scientists scrambling 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 it’s just really making these citrus growers nervous. [Everyone] is waiting for the new research results.” 

The greatest promise lies in antibiotics created to lessen the effects of greening. Despite encouraging early results at reducing symptoms, therapies like oxytetracycline are still in preliminary stages and require growers to inject the treatment into every infected tree. More importantly, it is not a cure, merely a stopgap — a way to keep afflicted trees alive while researchers race to figure out how to beat this mysterious disease. 

“We need more time,” said Rezazadeh. Growers in St. Lucie County started using the antibiotic last year. “There are some hopes that we keep them alive until we find a cure.” 

The state’s total citrus acreage suffered a massive blow in the 1990s when an eradication program for canker disease, then the industry’s biggest foe, resulted in the culling of hundreds of thousands of trees on private properties. In the years since citrus greening took hold, 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 it can take them years to recover. Torrential rain and flooding can inundate groves and deplete the soil of oxygen. Diseased trees face particular risk because illness often impacts their roots, weakening them. Ray Royce, executive director of Highlands County Citrus Growers Association, likens it to a pre-existing medical condition.

“I’m an old guy. I get 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 makes anything else that happens to the tree, that stresses that tree, just further magnified.”

It doesn’t help that climate change is bringing insufficient rainfall, higher temperatures, and record-setting dry seasons, leaving soils with less water. A lack of precipitation has also dried up wells and canals in some of the state’s most productive regions. All of this can reduce yields and cause fruit to drop prematurely. 

Of course, healthy trees have a higher chance of withstanding such threats. But the tenacity of strong groves is being tested, and once-minor events like a short freeze can be enough to end any already on the verge of demise. 

“We all of a sudden had a little bit of a run of bad luck. We had a hurricane. Then after the hurricane, we had a freeze,” said Royce. “Now we’ve just gone through a drought which will no doubt negatively impact the crop for next year. And so we, in a way, need to catch a couple of good breaks and have a few good years where we’re getting the right amount of moisture, where we don’t have hurricanes, or freezes, that are negatively impacting trees.”

Ayurella Horn-Muller is a staff writer at Grist. This story was originally published by Grist. You can subscribe to its weekly newsletter here.