Growers worry about citrus' future

Three issues loom large over the state’s citrus industry: canker, greening and labor. As they wait for each one to unfold, growers are uncertain what exactly is in store.

This year for the first time the citrus industry has stopped a canker eradication program and growers will be learning to live with the disease, said Marty McKenna, owner of McKenna Brothers Inc., a company that manages 8,000 acres in Polk, Highlands, Hardee and Lee counties.

“We are going to have to learn how to raise citrus with the presence of canker and we don’t know what that’s going to entail,” McKenna said. “Today it’s not a huge problem but as time goes on the canker is going to get worse. We don’t know yet how we are going to live with it. It’s an uncertainty.”

Unfortunately, there are a lot of uncertainties in the business right now. One of the greatest unknowns is greening, a new disease that not only infects trees, but kills them. It spreads through an insect that already is present in just about every citrus grove, making it almost certain that growers are going to have to deal with the disease soon.

What makes greening difficult to address is that no one knows anything about it, said Jay Clark, interim executive vice president and CEO of Florida Citrus Mutual, which is having its three-day annual conference at the Hyatt Regency Coconut Point Resort & Spa in Estero.

“We have already lost 80,000 acres because of canker and now greening is relatively new and we don’t really know how big it’s going to be,” said Clark, who is also a grower. “We don’t have any experience to deal with it. We don’t have any research at all and we don’t really know where it came from. It just showed up here and no one really knows how it was introduced here.”

And no one knows how long it will be before it shows up in a grove, said Mongi Zekri, a multi-county citrus agent for the University of Florida’s Extension Service in Southwest Florida.

“Once greening affects a tree, you can’t even salvage the fruit for juice. It’s a total loss,” Zekri said. “Plus, the visual symptoms may take a long time to show up after a tree has been infected. And there is no way to establish through lab tests whether a tree has been infected either until it is symptomatic. So the disease could spread and we wouldn’t know until it’s too late.”

With another active hurricane season being predicted, growers already hurt from the last couple of years of hurricanes are anxious, Zekri said. In addition, they’re worried about the increasing cost of labor.

“One of the long-term issues is what’s going to happen in Brazil. They are our biggest competitor,” said Ron Hamel, executive vice president of the Gulf Citrus Growers Association, which represents growers in Lee, Collier, Charlotte, Glades and Hendry counties. “Right now growers are getting pretty good returns, particularly on processed oranges that go into juice, but in the long term, world production and imports are going to affect production and profits.”

That’s why most growers are watching the immigration debate closely.

“People were short of labor this year,” Hamel said. “With this immigration reform going through, whatever happens there is going to affect businesses that need immigrant labor to stay in business.”

And citrus is one of those businesses, McKenna said.

“The state of the citrus industry is in flux right now. We are in uncharted waters,” said McKenna, who has been a grower since 1980. “Our production is down to numbers we haven’t experienced since 1983 and we are unsure how to get those back up with disease and we don’t know how to get crops to the processor plants with the labor situation.

We have more questions than answers right now.”