The way forward in citrus

Michael Rogers is the director and professor at the Citrus Research & Education Center of the University of Florida’s Institute of Food & Agricultural Sciences in Lake Alfred, Fla. COURTESY PHOTO

“Dark” or “dark days” are terms rarely applied to anything in the Sunshine State, but more than one multi-generation citrus grower has added them like mulch lately to conversations about yields.

Those yields are oranges, grapefruits, tangerines, mandarins, lemons, limes and other bounties produced in the humid subtropics of north and central Florida or the tropical regions of southern Florida.

In 2003 and 2004, citrus yields were the highest in Florida history, at almost 300 million boxes, more than any other state, including California.

“There was so much fruit they couldn’t sell it all — it was too much,” said Michael Rogers, director and professor at the Citrus Research & Education Center of the University of Florida’s Institute of Food & Agricultural Sciences in Lake Alfred, who arrived as a young field researcher with a Ph.D. the same year.

That was also when the Asian citrus psyllid arrived in the United States, an insect first detected in Asian citrus trees a century earlier. Nobody knew much about it in 2004 and 2005, recalls Rogers, who was 26 years old then, or about the bacteria it spreads that results in Huanglongbing or so-called citrus greening. Greening has devastated the Florida industry in the last two decades.

Wayne Simmons in his Hendry County orange grove observing the effects of greening. VANDY MAJOR / FLORIDA WEEKLY

Now they know a lot more about it, and Rogers is 46. Research is no longer “a shotgun approach trying anything somebody thinks could help,” explains Rogers, “but almost laser-focused on things that show promise.”

And some growers, people who see parts of the last two decades as difficult and even dark, say they feel some steady optimism for the first time.

You wouldn’t see reason for optimism just looking at the numbers, however.

When yield forecasts for the year now underway came out earlier this month from the United States Department of Agriculture, once again, they were nothing to write home about—which is why Florida Weekly decided to examine the challenges growers and researchers continue to face.

Unfortunately, in 2022-’23 Florida produced only about 18 million boxes of citrus, the lowest in 93 years.

“We’ve had some dark days,” acknowledged Wayne Simmons of the two-decade decline in the industry that led him to become a real estate broker for Southern Heritage to help support his farming lifestyle.

A longtime grower and grove owner born into farming near Plant City, he’s refused to give up, using science (he holds a degree in Fruit Crops from the University of Florida), ingenuity and tenacity to maintain about 200 acres of citrus trees in Hendry, Collier and Hillsborough counties.

As for this year, “The 2023-2024 Florida all orange forecast released today by the USDA Agricultural Statistics Board is 17.9 million boxes,” the dry language of the USDA announced. “The total includes 6.76 million boxes of non-Valencia oranges (early, mid-season and Navel varieties) and 11.1 million boxes of Valencia oranges.” A lot less now than California.

Grapefruit, lemons and tangerines with mandarins are similarly depleted in number. The only sweet note in the numbers is poundage. A box of Florida fruit is special not only in taste and sweetness, but in weight.

“NOTE ON WEIGHT,” reads the USDA report: “Net pounds per box: oranges in California-80, Florida-90, Texas-85; grapefruit in California and Texas-80, Florida-85; lemons-80; and tangerines and mandarins in California 80, Florida-95.”

Still, “I would say things have gotten dark for the industry — people may not realize how bad it’s been. It’s been terrible,” said Trey English, a member of a multi-generation Florida farming family, who returned in recent years to his roots — but he’s also a freelance software professional who holds a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from Purdue University.

Greening isn’t the only challenge he, Simmons or many others have faced. There are hurricanes: both Irma in 2017 and Ian in 2022 devastated groves in the central and southwest parts of the state, with wind in some cases and water in others.

There’s pricey insurance that won’t pay more than half of any damages when a hurricane, for example, destroys 50 percent, 60 percent or 70 percent of a crop — or all of it.

“Oranges and really all of Florida agriculture is specialty crops,” Simmons explains. “So you don’t have crop insurance programs here like they do for corn, wheat and soy elsewhere.”

And, say the growers, there are sometimes stifling regulations.

“It would help for there to be some relief on regulation,” says English.

“There is a regulatory heavy hand in the U.S., and it’s there in the citrus industry in multiple ways — what you put out, how you use water, and so on. There’s no doubt that some regulation is needed. But it feels like there’s too much.

“We need some relief where it can be granted without hurting other people. That takes attention, understanding and reasoning about what growers might be doing to really cause problems.”

Or not cause them. And it might take more careful attention to the fact that soils and conditions vary across Florida. Growing citrus in the Lake Wales Ridge area or around Plant City where Simmons grew up is not like growing it in the flatwoods country along the southwest coast where Trey English grew up, or on the southern and western end of Collier County, or in Palm Beach County.

“That’s where regulation so often hurts,” English said. “It’s a blanket thrown over everything. But it’s very hard for the regulators, too, when they don’t have time or the reasoning behind a regulation.”

Cause for optimism

One reason both Simmons and Rogers begin to feel stronger optimism is that the more focused research and some carefully calculated experimentation show promise.

Gene editing, for example.

“Genetic improvement of citrus through gene editing means we can identify a gene of interest and turn it off. So you lose those disease response systems — it won’t respond to (the greening) bacteria,” explains Rogers.

“But are there negative effects? What else can’t they respond to? So we have field tests of gene-edited plants, and funding is now spent on things that have a high likelihood of succeeding. And if they do succeed, it will pay off tremendously for the industry. We don’t yet know if it will work.”

There may not be as much money for research as once upon a time, “But we don’t want money to be the limiting factor,” Rogers says. “The growers don’t have time. They’re struggling.”

There are physical interventions of sorts that can work — four-sided and topped screens covering mature trees to keep out the citrus psyllids. That can cost $40,000 an acre, which is often more than the land is worth.

Another newer strategy is the careful application of a bactericide antibiotic called Oxytetracycline, first devised by a private company.

“We’ve seen the response in trees where they do injections, and it’s like anything, whether you adjust fertilizer, or other therapies like plant growth regulators — they take time and multiple years to show a benefit.”

In the case of oxytetracycline, “that’s fairly new. Growers are still evaluating benefits. They do see some positive appearance in the trees, so time will tell.”

And Simmons is one of the growers trying it.

It’s labor intensive and more costly, and injections are nothing like the ones humans receive, explained Simmons.

“We’re having to treat each individual tree, drilling and injecting the bactericide into the tree.”

Nowadays, each acre may include about 70 more trees than it did in the old days, a total of as many as 220. That means for English — who will apply bags, not the bactericide to his new little trees — he’ll need about 8,800 bags if he plants 220 trees per acre.

And for Simmons, if he injects 200 acres of trees with oxytetracycline, he’ll have to care individually for as many as 44,000 trees.

Is that feasible?

“We didn’t think it was feasible,” he says. “But with H-2A labor coming in from Mexico — and we’re in year two of that — we can do it. They’re very hard workers and able to get it done.”

H-2A is for agricultural workers who can help employers unable to find domestic workers.

“That’s stopped some of the loss, and turned production around. Under H-2A, they bring labor in and they can stay 10 months on a temporary work visa, then they have to go back.

“Nobody in the United States wants to do that work.”

Whether any of this comes in time for English to stay in the business of growing citrus remains to be seen.

Like a number of farmers whose lives started in citrus groves, he does other things besides farm, but he’s not giving up the life. He had the unenviable task after Ian of scraping bare hundreds of acres of grove that flanked Cemetery Road in east Lee County, trees planted by his father and other family members many decades ago.

Passersby wondered aloud, as it were, on social media what would become of that land. A quiet country cemetery lies at the dead end of a one-lane road bisecting the fields, now stripped of trees. The cemetery cradles the bodies of those who once worked the English or neighboring farms, or smelled the blooming grove perfume drifting on the wind even from miles away on March nights, or tasted the groves’ sweet juice or fruit, like many other Americans.

Would it become houses or get rezoned as commercial property like so much other farmland lost now to development?

“A lot of agricultural land has been lost,” acknowledged English, “but we’re planning to plant about 40 acres along there — we’ll try a variety of fruits. When a citrus tree is planted, the root is a different plant than the top. You get the genetics you want for the roots” — they may be able to withstand drought or disease better than once-upon-a-time roots — “and you get the genetics you want for the top, with fruit people want to eat.”

Scraping the land clean and starting with young trees is not simply a matter of bulldozers.

“You have to prepare the soil — add organic material to the soil, plant material chopped up, and you have to prepare it for irrigation.”

Irrigation is key and different, perhaps, than once upon a time because some roots affected by greening or redesigned to resist it may not take up water and soil nutrients at the same rates as citrus historically.

And another step: “We’re going to plant trees under little bags. The bags serve to protect them from the Asian citrus psyllid.

It seems wise.

The way forward

In Michael Rogers’s eyes, wise applications of the new knowledge have a good chance of solving the greening problem over time.

“We’ve known how it spreads, but how it affects trees, and what we can do to mitigate those negative effects on the tree — and protect the yields — that’s newer.”

One of the things researchers learned in recent years is the strategy of the pathogen. “Getting in a tree, we found out this pathogen is destroying the root systems below ground. It prevents trees from picking up sufficient water and nutrients, starting a whole cascade to a downward spiral that makes them susceptible to all kinds of things, whether drought or other disease.”

Coming to understand how the path of the disease damages the root system “changed how we water and irrigate or feed and fertilize trees,” Rogers said.

“We’re not applying more water or nutrients. We’re applying them in small doses to provide what the root systems can pick up.”

Armed with a knowledge they can apply, growers “have adjusted their nutrient water practices, and they’re doing better. They have trees with fuller canopies. In the last decade you could see through the trees, but now they’re a lush, dark green.

“That’s what’s critical — you have to have those leaves because they collect sunlight, and photosynthesis takes place.”

And you have to have those scientists and those stalwart growers, because they collect knowledge and robust harvests take place. ¦

In the KNOW

USDA FORECAST for 2023-2024:

· ALL ORANGES: 17.9 million boxes

· Non-Valencia Oranges: : 6.76 million boxes

· Valencia Oranges: 11.1 million boxes

· ALL GRAPEFRUIT: 1.79 million boxes

· TANGERINES AND MANDARINS: 450,000 boxes

A great map of Florida can be found here, showing its highest citrus production of all time by county. Collier, Lee and Hendry, along with Palm Beach, all produced significant citrus yields that year: www.nass.usda.gov/Statistics_by_State/Florida/Publications/Citrus/Citrus_Summary/2002-03/cs0203.pdf

Last year’s numbers reflect the lowest of all time, after two decades of greening and some devastating hurricanes. Here’s the USDA’s JUNE Forecast for this year: www.nass.usda.gov/Statistics_by_State/Florida/Publications/Citrus/Citrus_Forecast/2023-24/cit0624.pdf

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