Fruit crisis: Florida’s orange orchards are battered by hurricane and disease

Vernon Hollingsworth grew up in Florida among his family’s orange trees, recently devastated by a double whammy of disease and a hurricane that sent juice prices soaring and left growers blinking in disbelief.

One morning this past March, a fifth-generation farmer drove a pickup truck through the rows in his orchard, noting the damage from last fall’s Hurricane Ian like uprooted trees.

“I lost between 95 and 97 percent of my crops,” the 62-year-old told AFP. “We’re going to have to rebuild, and we need help to do that.”

But the tornado is only the final blow.

In Florida, the world’s second largest producer of orange juice after Brazil, orchards suffered from a citrus tree disease called Huanglongbing (HLB) 17 years ago.

A bacterium spread by an insect, called the Asian psyllid, causes the disease, causing the trees to produce green, bitter, unsalable fruit, before dying off within a few years.

The dual crises of Ian and HLB wreaked havoc on the industry, which is so integral to Florida’s identity that orange is even on the state’s license plate.

Orange production in Florida is down 60.7 percent from last season, one of the lowest numbers since the 1930s, according to estimates from the USDA.

The hurricane alone caused $247.1 million in losses in the state’s citrus sector, out of $1.03 billion for the general agricultural economy, according to estimates from the University of Florida.

‘very much needed’

The situation is particularly painful for Hollingsworth, because the season was looking promising before Ian hit his 4,200-acre (1,700 ha) estate.

And for the first time, he began injecting orange trees with two bactericidal treatments recently approved by US authorities to fight HLB, which is also known as citrus greening disease.

“With the new medicine I’ve seen (orange trees) can bloom and grow as big as they once did… This hurricane couldn’t come at a worse time for citrus in Florida,” Hollingsworth said.

Now his orchards, which employ about 50 full-time employees in addition to seasonal workers, are facing a terrible few months.

It’s the profits from one crop that make it possible to produce the next harvest, but this year Hollingsworth has almost no income: The insurance didn’t pay enough to cover the damage and each replanted tree will take four years to bear fruit, he explains.

“It’s really hard. I’m trying to do the best I can. But if we can get some help, that would be great,” he said, referring to the state of Florida or the federal government.

“We need it very badly now.”

Marisa Zansler of the Florida Department of Citrus, which regulates the industry, said state officials are scrambling to help farmers plant the trees.

Payment is key to supporting the citrus industry, which accounts for $6.9 billion of Florida’s economy and more than 32,500 jobs, said Zansler, the agency’s director of economic and market outreach.

Meanwhile, the price of orange juice in American supermarkets has risen, and Brazil is taking advantage of this situation. The South American giant exported 240,000 tons to the United States this season, up 82 percent from the previous season, according to official data.

In Arcadia, Hollingsworth says he’s not giving up hope. He is convinced that if he overcomes this stagnation, the future will be bright, especially given new treatments against HLB.

It is, he says, the only option.

“I will stick to this,” he told AFP. “I don’t know how to do anything else.”

© 2023 AFP