The January forecast for the U.S. citrus harvest is looking bleak for Florida orange growers. The 2021/22 season, running from fall into the summer, is expected to consist of fewer than 45 million 90-pound boxes in the state. If the predictions are true, California’s orange crop would be larger than Florida’s for the first time, as the Western state is expected to harvest more than 47 million of the boxes.
One of the results of the meager harvest could be rising orange juice prices. The threat is more existential to Florida citrus growers, however, which have for many years been dealing with a worsening outbreak of bacterial disease citrus greening, which is behind the calamity.
According to Newsweek, the Florida harvest would be the worst in more than 75 years.
While USDA is providing disaster assistance to growers needing to replace trees that the disease killed, the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences is lobbying for nutrient treatments to foster defense responses in the plants. Soil scientist and head of the Institute, J. Scott Angle, said his organization was trying to get nutrient management guidelines updated. In 2021, UF/IFAS received an additional $2.2 million in federal funding to combat the crisis.
Blowbacks to the U.S. citrus industry have happened before, but mostly because of adverse weather. Dips in crop size were always temporary, like in the case of cold winter weather in the 1998/99 season and Hurricane Irma in the 2017/18 season (affecting only Florida). Florida’s recent crop decline brought about by citrus greening has been much more gradual and concerning, however. The crop losses starting after the 2003/04 season, when citrus greening first emerged in a commercial context, are starkly visible in USDA data. In that season, Florida still produced 242 million 90-pound boxes – more than five times this year’s projected harvest.
The road to defeating the disease is still unclear: Citrus greening bacteria are transmitted by a bug called the Asian citrus psyllid, which has spread to citrus growing regions first in Asia, then in Africa and the Americas, wreaking havoc along the way. The bug in question has also been found in California, where an extensive eradication and border control program is in place to limit the spread of the disease.
