EMILY FENG, HOST:
Florida used to be the land of citrus. Oranges and grapefruit were grown by the billions and shipped or squeezed across the country. But the state's citrus industry isn't what it once was. Tom Hudson with member station WLRN takes us to a citrus farm in Central Florida.
TOM HUDSON, BYLINE: In a Volusia County, Florida, field out in the wind and the sun, near a pen of baby goats...
(SOUNDBITE OF GOATS BLEATING)
HUDSON: ...Sit two symbols of Florida's citrus industry. They're fruit loader trucks with cranes designed to lift large crates, weighing about 900 pounds, filled with oranges and grapefruit. The truck's seat cushions have worn away, paint has peeled off, and there's rust everywhere. The last time these fruit loader trucks hoisted a crate of Florida citrus was in 2021.
STEVE CRUMP: And right now they're still sitting where I parked them five years ago, and there's a tree growing up between them.
HUDSON: That's Steve Crump. He runs Vo-LaSalle Farms. It's a small family operation that stretches back to the founding of Florida's citrus business.
CRUMP: Currently, I live 200 yards away, so I didn't get very far in life.
HUDSON: It was his parents' life and his grandparents' life, and his great grandparents' life when they left the Midwest for sunnier pastures in Florida in the late 1800s. But now the fruit that helped build Florida is vanishing. The orange is falling victim to disease, disasters and real estate development. Thirty years ago, 225 million boxes of oranges were picked from Florida orange groves. This year, the forecast from the U.S. Agriculture Department is about 12 million boxes. That's a drop of 95% in one generation. When Crump would return from an orchard years ago, he would have 50 crates of oranges. The day I visited, he was hauling a single crate.
CRUMP: It would be embarrassing to come in with just one.
HUDSON: Starting in the mid-20th century, oranges were a key crop in Florida and near ubiquitous on television screens across America. Commercials in the 1950s touted the fruit's health benefits.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Florida orange juice is the most delicious way to restore the vitamin C and energy you've used up since breakfast.
HUDSON: In the 1980s, it was the uniqueness and the superiority of Florida's oranges.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PEOPLE: (Singing) Valencia.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Of all the oranges, the Valencia is nature's sweetest, and of all the orange juices, only new Florida Gold is 100% pure Valencia.
HUDSON: And in the 2000s, those ads made oranges synonymous with Florida's sunny climate.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: The best start under the sun - Florida orange juice.
HUDSON: Florida orange juice was inescapable on a traditional American grocery shopping list. Tens of millions of trees grew on hundreds of thousands of acres concentrated in Central Florida. Twenty-five years ago, almost half of the orange juice produced worldwide was from American-grown fruit, and most of that ripened in the Florida sunshine. Today, Brazil controls about 70% of the global orange juice production, and the U.S. has only 6%.
CRUMP: Before, we would sell wholesale everything. We would go to a Tropicana, Minute Maid, Florida's Natural by the semi-load. Now there's so little fruit that we grow that I'm kind of forced to sell it myself and get the premium price by selling it here.
(SOUNDBITE OF MACHINERY WHIRRING)
HUDSON: A few bushels are diverted off the fruit washer and head off into a side room where Ashley Schultz works the juicer.
ASHLEY SCHULTZ: Have you tried the orange juice here?
HUDSON: I have not tried the orange juice here.
SCHULTZ: Do you want to try it?
HUDSON: I'd love to try it. Fresh out of the machine, here it is.
(SOUNDBITE OF SLURPING)
SCHULTZ: And because of the cold, it has a little more sour aftertaste than usual. It's usually a lot more sweeter.
HUDSON: I like it 'cause it's not quite so sweet.
SCHULTZ: Yeah.
HUDSON: That less-sweet taste is because this juice comes from oranges dealing with two forces facing Florida's citrus industry - disasters and disease. The cold weather in February cost the Florida citrus industry almost $700 million, according to the state agricultural commission. And then there's the citrus greening when the Florida orange instead is green because of bacteria.
CRUMP: The green fruit is the indicator that the tree is sick, and the fruit won't taste as good as the fruit that's bright orange and colored like it should be.
HUDSON: A tiny bug called the Asian citrus psyllid feeds on the sap of citrus trees. An infected bug spreads the bacteria that first showed up in Florida in 2005. An infected tree can die within a few years. But if treated, a tree can grow some fruit for sale. The disease does not threaten people or animals, and there's no cure for it. There is another strategy to avoid it altogether.
(SOUNDBITE OF GATE OPENING)
HUDSON: Walking through a gate here. We're inside the screenhouse. And here we are, right? The wind dies down. The screen stretches over two acres here.
CRUMP: This is fantastic grapefruit. This is some of the best I've ever grown. I've done it for 35 years - best flavor, best-looking grapefruit.
HUDSON: To what do you attribute the healthiness of it to?
CRUMP: Well, we're inside our screenhouse. This is an enclosed environment, so it's got sides and a roof. It's made out of screen to keep out the insect that's the psyllid insect that's spreading greening disease.
HUDSON: The investment that it takes to build this kind of infrastructure, though, is not insignificant, I would think. There's a lot of cash wrapped up in these wooden poles and the acres of screen here.
CRUMP: Yeah, the cost is about $1 a square foot. So you're going to...
(SOUNDBITE OF WHISTLING)
CRUMP: ...Say 43,000 to $45,000 an acre.
HUDSON: An acre, yeah.
CRUMP: ...Is what it costs to build it. Now, the problem I've had is hurricanes.
HUDSON: Yeah.
CRUMP: It works great until you have a hurricane.
HUDSON: Yeah.
CRUMP: Then it fails. And if you were to look up, you'll see that the roof is ripped and it's patched multiple times 'cause we've had two hurricanes in the four years we've had it up. And the problem is, when it rips, we can't get it up quickly. It takes us several weeks to get it all repaired. During that time, the insects enter through the holes.
HUDSON: What's needed to help this industry find a bottom as measured by production, really?
CRUMP: What we need is a tree that's resistant or tolerant to this disease. And I thought we would have it during my career, but that was 15 years ago, and I thought by now, we'd already have it.
HUDSON: There are several research projects underway trying to save citrus trees from greening disease. There's still hope that one day the industry will blossom again. For NPR News, I'm Tom Hudson in Volusia County, Florida.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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