Thirty years ago, 225 million cases of oranges were harvested in Florida. This year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture forecasts a harvest of just 12 million cases—a 95% decline in a single generation.
Yet Florida experienced a golden age of oranges between the 1950s and the early 2000s.
Growers sold entire shipments to Tropicana, Minute Maid, and Florida’s Natural, as demand for Florida orange juice from American households was very strong. Since then, the nutritional quality of the juice has been called into question, and dietary habits have changed. This is one factor in the decline, but it is nature itself that has accelerated the decline of orange farming.
First, the climate: successive cold snaps early in the year damaged the smallest trees and those already weakened. The Florida Department of Agriculture estimates losses at nearly $700 million.
Next, pests and diseases: for the past thirty years or so, citrus greening disease has been caused by a bacterium carried by a small insect, the Asian citrus psyllid.
To combat bacterial infections, it is possible to make an incision in the tree trunk and inject oxytetracycline annually, an antibiotic that slows the bacteria. This reduces the percentage of green or undersized oranges to about 20% of total production, according to farmer Steve Crump of Vo-LaSalle Farms in Volusia County, interviewed by Tom Hudson for WLRN. This represents a significant improvement.
Another solution: to limit the movement of Asian psyllids from one tree to another, the trees can be separated by very fine netting with small holes barely visible to the naked eye, as the insect is tiny.
It is also possible to grow oranges in greenhouses covered with mosquito netting, which prevents psyllids from entering the trees, but of course building such a greenhouse is very expensive.
Furthermore, they cannot withstand severe weather: Hurricane Ian in 2022 and Hurricane Milton in 2024 tore through grower Crump’s mosquito netting, and it takes several weeks to repair them, allowing psyllids to enter the greenhouse.
The disease takes 14 months to develop in a tree: this long timeframe requires constant vigilance and the immediate removal of any tree showing the first signs of infection. And despite researchers’ intense efforts over the past 15 years, a new variety of psyllid-resistant orange trees has still not been developed.
The citrus industry generates seven billion dollars annually and supports 30,000 jobs in Florida. That is less than half the number of full-time jobs there were twenty years ago. Farmers like Crump are aging, and he fears that the decline of this sector will deter young people from entering it. Yet a new generation must be trained before this knowledge is lost.
Now, on Crump’s farm, in an effort to diversify, the vanished orange trees are giving way to new crops, such as snow peas, carrots, and spinach. Old school buses, once converted into harvest trucks to transport numerous 400-kilogram crates of oranges and grapefruits, have been left abandoned for five years, rusting reminders of the golden age of citrus farming in Florida.
