CAPE CORAL, Fla. — The state of Florida is known as the orange state, but that orange and citrus industry is coming off the worst season in nearly a century. This comes as the industry has been hampered by the ongoing citrus greening disease crisis, as well as impacts from recent freezes and hurricanes, like Ian and Nicole last year.
Citrus production in the state of Florida has dropped significantly in recent years. In the early 2000s the state produced 200 to 240 million 90 lb. boxes of oranges per year. This past year, that number was less than 15 million boxes.
That said, the CFO of Tamiami Citrus, LLC said if Hurricane Ian never hit us, they may have produced double that, which is still a far cry from 20 years ago.
“A lot of groves lost anywhere from 60-80% of their fruit from the event of the hurricane,” said Ron Mahan, the CFO and Vice President of Tamaimi Citrus.
Mahan said Hurricane Ian negatively impacted 95% of the groves in the state of Florida. Those impacts only added to stress that growers have been seeing in recent years.
“Smaller growers haven’t been able to keep up at all and mid-sized growers like ourselves, we are struggling to keep everything going,” said Mahan.
Despite this, Mahan said the industry might have found a silver bullet in fighting the greening disease that has been decimating the groves — that proverbial bullet being new microbial injections into the trees that help fight the autoimmune response to green disease bacteria.
“A well producing grove could produce 300 to 400 boxes per acre. With greening we were at 200, 210, 250 boxes to the acre,” said Mahan. “And at that level you’re barely making money at all, you're just covering your expenses. So, if you get your production level back up to 300 plus boxes to the acre, its profitable and you’re able to create amenable levels of production.”
But there is one problem.
“It’s expensive, both in terms of labor and the product,” said Mahan. “And having gone through the weather events and the decrease in production that we have experienced, most of the growing operations are cash strapped.”
Not only are growers cash strapped from reduced production, they are also still waiting on federal disaster aid. While the FDA has the money approbated, their method of distribution hasn’t been approved by the Senate, despite passing in the House months ago.
“It really depends on getting that disaster relief out to help us keep the groves going and to get them back into production,” said Mahan. “We are working on trying to keep the trees and groves alive, but to really spur their healthy recovery to full productivity, we need more resources to do that.”
But Mahan is optimistic about this year’s crop and what it could mean for the struggling industry.
“We have a reasonable crop that is out there on the trees,” said Mahan. “If we are able to keep it on the trees and get it harvested, assuming there is no hurricane, we should have a crop that certainly would be bigger than last year, and it should get us on our road to recovery.
The citrus industry will get an estimate on the production in late August or early September with harvest in the fall, but growers likely won't see revenue from that crop until the winter months.
