- February 14, 2025
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Bill Eshenbaugh, the longtime and well-known Florida land broker, remembers driving across central Florida when he first moved here from Pennsylvania.
It was January 1983.
He was living in Hernando County at the time and would head to Winter Park, just north of Orlando, to visit his daughter, an 18-year-old attending Rollins College.
The drive took him along Highway 50 through Clermont.
“We loved it across 50,” he says. “You just smelled orange blossoms all the way. It was just one orange grove after another.”
The orange groves that famously lined Highway 50 are largely gone today, replaced by miles of homes and commercial developments connecting Clermont and the western suburbs of Orlando.
For many, this change represents the explosive growth and expansion that’s come to Central Florida in the past 40 years.
But the change also represents something else: the decline of the Florida’s citrus industry.
Florida, where you are handed a glass of orange juice when you cross the state line on Interstate 95, has seen a steady decline in citrus production that’s brought one of its premiere industries to its knees.
According to the United States Department of Agriculture, Florida’s citrus production has decreased 90% in the past 20 years, dropping from 300 million boxes in the 2003-2004 season to 20 million boxes in 2023-2024 season.
And it’s not going to get better. The USDA predicts 12 million boxes of citrus will be produced during this current season.
The decline has been obvious to those who follow the industry for years. But the public got a peek at how much its costing Florida Jan. 6.
That day one of the biggest citrus producers in the state, Fort Myers-based Alico Inc., announced it was shutting its citrus division after about 125 years because it was no longer financially feasible to keep on.
The company, which laid off 172 employees because of the decision, said its citrus production had dropped 73% in the past decade.
Alico said, and industry insiders confirm, that the company had made significant investment in land, trees and disease treatments. Despite that, “we must now reluctantly adapt to changing environmental and economic realities.”
“Unfortunately, we came to the conclusion that it's not economically viable for Alico to grow citrus in Florida,” Alico President and CEO John Kiernan says in an interview. "And we hope that that doesn't apply to everyone else.”
There are a lot of reasons why Florida’s citrus industry got to this point.
But, to be fair, growing citrus in Florida has never been easy.
The first orange trees were planted in Florida near St. Augustine in the 1500s, most likely by Ponce de Leon, says the Florida Department of Citrus, a state agency. Commercial development came about 300 years later, when railroads made it possible to ship nationwide.
The trouble started soon after.
In 1894 and 1895 freezes destroyed much of the citrus crops.
By the 1950s more than 100 million boxes of citrus were picked, and the number reached 200 million in 1970, according to a history on the agency’s website.
The winter following Eshenbaugh's move to Florida in 1983, a Christmas day freeze killed trees on an estimated 120,000 acres and caused nearly $1 billion in damage.
Another freeze in 1989 wiped out 30% of Florida’s citrus crop, according to a December report issued by Florida TaxWatch. Both of those were preceded by a 1977 freeze that damaged 15% of the state’s citrus crop.
In the nonpartisan Tallahassee think tank’s report it cites a 1996 study for the Florida State Horticultural Society by a USDA researcher that found that in the 1980s there were five major freezes over a 10-year period.
This, George Yelenosky, the researcher, wrote, “prompted some climatologists to temporarily raise doubts about commercial growing of citrus in freeze-vulnerable areas in Florida.”
But what’s been happening in the more recent past is more detrimental and long lasting to the industry and is exacerbated by a rash of recent hurricanes.
The main problem? Citrus greening.
Citrus greening, according to the Florida Department of Agriculture & Consumer Affairs, is a bacterial disease that attacks the vascular system of plants. “Once infected,” the department says, “there is no cure for the disease, and in areas where the disease is endemic, citrus trees decline and die within a few years.”
Greening first popped up in about 2005 and despite millions of dollars in research, it remains a defining issue.
“There's some serious academic and scientific talent that has been invested in this disease, not just from Florida, but across the country and across the world,” says Fritz Michael Roka, a professor and director of the Center for Agribusiness at Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers. “Scientists have invested their careers into figuring out how to deal with greening, and no one's come up with a definitive answer.
“So that's been a real frustration that we, the industry, has not been able to come up with a total strategy to deal with this. The best we can do is to manage it. And I say manage it in quotes.”
The issue with greening is that it starves a tree.
Until a cure is found, the best way to deal with the problem is understanding how greening stresses a tree and them compensating for it through various practices —fertilization, irrigation, water quality, applying nutrients.
One promising development is a treatment called oxytetracycline hydrochloride.
It’s not a cure, but it’s like taking a child to the doctor to treat an ear infection and getting an antibiotic. The drug doesn’t actually eradicate the bacteria that caused the ear infection, but it treats the symptoms and the child feels better.
According to the National Center for Biotechnology Information, OTC, as it’s called, has been used to treat several other plant diseases for about 70 years, including fire blight and spot disease on peaches and to control of several bacterial pathogens on vegetables.
While it’s still a relatively new treatment for citrus trees, there are signs treated trees are looking better. Roka says the question moving forward is whether the trees can recover and start to produce and adequate crop of fruit. “All these things people have been learning and they've achieved some success. But ultimately the trees are just declining,” he says of OTC and compensating with other practices.
Florida citrus production | ||
Year | Tons | % Growth |
2019-2020 | 3,287,000 | |
2020-2021 | 2,599,000 | -20.93% |
2021-2022 | 2,032,000 | -21.81% |
2022-2023 | 811,000 | -60.88% |
Note: The 2022-2023 season was impacted dramatically by Hurricane Ian. Source: Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services |
Further complicating the life of weak and stressed trees are hurricanes. That goes back to Irma in 2017; Ian in 2022; and Milton last year. Wind toppled trees and knocked down fruit and heavy rains inundated the land for more than three or four days.
“Since 2017, whole groves have just been collapsing,” Roka says. “And despite the best cultural practices and efforts, a lot of generational growers are out of the business. I will include Alico in that group.”
Alico is not alone in quitting citrus
According to its annual Lay of the Land Market Report, Lakeland-based Saunders Real Estate says it has seen a higher-than-average volume of transactions from the citrus industry in the past several years.
In 2023 it saw 40 groves sell across 10 counties, including in Polk, Lee and Manatee. The size of the citrus groves that sold ranged from 19 acres to 3,065 acres with the average at 392 acres. In total, 15,699 acres sold for a combined $140.59 million.
There was a wide range of buyers as well. The “typical buyer,” the firm formerly known as SVN Saunders Ralston Dantzler Real Estate says, included growers, investors and packers.
But, it found “citrus groves located in the short-term and long-term path of progress are still highly attractive for residential and commercial developers.”
The reason groves are attractive for residential developments is not all about available space.
It is because the land has already been leveled and drained, and there is infrastructure already there. That means it can be a lot less expensive to develop on citrus land than it would be if you went into just natural habitat.
Eshenbaugh says groves are also attractive for developers because they are on high, dry and sandy soils “and that’s exactly what houses love.”
“The other thing in developing a grove, there's no endangered trees on that site. There's probably no endangered species on that site other than something that might have crawled into a gopher hole.”
In Alico’s case, given the vast amount of acreage it owns, the company has the luxury of splitting its future land use.
It owns approximately 53,371 acres across eight counties in the state, as well as approximately 48,700 acres of oil, gas and mineral rights.
According to a statement announcing it was shutting its citrus division, the company says it expects to continue “diversified farming operations on nearly all its land holdings following this citrus production transition” but says some land will be set aside for commercial and residential development.
“Alico said they're going to convert 10% of theirs for housing and 90% for other crops,” Eshenbaugh says.
“I think that's been going on for a lot of folks — just figuring out, how do we do it? Is it time right to sell?”
Roka, who has a self-described “emotional attachment to citrus,” says there is some reason for hope that citrus can make a comeback. This, despite greening, storms and Alico's exit.
One reason is a number of growers in the business remain. Another reasons is the OTC treatment is showing some positive results.
Then there is the fact that juice processors prefer to use Florida oranges for their products because they can be cheaper than what is being imported now and the quality is good.
The Holy Grail for saving the state’s citrus industry remains finding a tree that will be resistant to greening, though. Trying to engineer one has been in the works for more than 20 years, with tens of millions of dollars being invested by both the public sector and growers.
The days of sweet citrusy smell of orange blossoms on a country road drive are likely never coming back, though. Ditto for Florida returning to 200 million annual boxes.
But Roka sees victory in maybe getting back to 50 million to 75 million boxes.
“There’s hope,” he says. “There’s always hope.”