“We need more time,” Rezazadeh said. St. Lucie County growers began using the antibiotic last year. “There is some hope that we can keep the trees 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 bringing 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 annuallyby the length of the beak, towards Fight against the disease.