With a major grower set to exit the business, Florida’s struggling citrus industry saw little change Friday in a production forecast for the hurricane-damaged growing season.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture released an updated forecast that kept projections for orange and grapefruit production the same as in a December forecast. The December numbers were the first projections after Hurricane Milton pounded citrus-growing areas in October.
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Meanwhile, Friday’s forecast lowered projections for specialty crops, mostly tangerines and tangelos, by about 14 percent.
The forecast projected Florida will produce 12 million 90-pound boxes of oranges and 1.2 million boxes of grapefruit this season. It projected 300,000 boxes of specialty fruits, down from an estimate of 350,000 boxes in December.
Overall, the industry is facing a harvest in the 2024-2025 season that would be 19.64 percent lower than what was projected before Milton hit the state. It also would be 33 percent below the 2023-2024 harvest, which itself was a 94-year low — and would be the lowest overall since the 1918-1919 growing season.
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Matt Joyner, executive vice president and CEO of Florida Citrus Mutual, said Friday the numbers mostly “holding steady” might be a positive for the rest of the season.
“I anticipated that we might see another slight downward trend,” Joyner said. “It’s not a lot better, but holding steady is a victory right now.”
Joyner said the industry continues to await post-hurricane assistance from the state and federal governments.
“We’re going to rebuild this industry,” Joyner said.
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The new forecast came after Alico, Inc., a major Fort Myers-based grower, announced this week it will get out of the citrus business. John Kiernan, the company’s president and chief executive officer, said in a prepared statement that after more than a century growing citrus “we must now reluctantly adapt to changing environmental and economic realities.”
Alico Inc. said it will not spend additional money on citrus operations after the current crop is harvested. It said about 3,460 acres of its citrus land will be managed by other operators through 2026.
Alico’s decision is estimated to remove about 12 percent of the acres used in Florida for citrus.
“No doubt we’re going to miss the large footprint that Alico had, but we’re convinced that they’ll still be good partners in the industry,” Joyner said.
The industry has been devastated in recent years by a series of hurricanes, with blows from Hurricane Ian in 2022 and Hurricane Milton last year particularly damaging. The industry has long faced pressure from residential and commercial development and grappled with the deadly citrus greening disease.
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Scientists at the University of Florida offered a glimmer of hope Wednesday when they announced they are testing a new type of tree that can fight off tiny insects responsible for citrus greening. The university’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences described the trees as “one of the most promising discoveries to date in a challenge that has plagued growers, researchers and consumers.”
The approach involves inserting a gene into trees. The gene produces a protein that can kill baby Asian citrus psyllids, the bugs that transmit the disease, according to a news release from what is commonly known as UF/IFAS.
“We are trying to deploy a biotechnological solution that is sustainable, easy for growers to deploy and replaces the need for spraying insecticides,” entomology professor Lukasz Stelinski said in the news release.
The new federal forecast of 12 million boxes of oranges this growing season is 3 million less than what was projected before Milton. The industry produced 17.96 million boxes of oranges in the 2023-2024 season, which ended in July.
The projected 1.2 million boxes of grapefruit are 200,000 below expectations at the start of the season, before Milton, and down from 1.79 million boxes during the 2023-2024 season.
The projected 300,000 boxes of specialty fruits are 100,000 boxes less than the forecast when the season got underway. Specialty crops ended the 2023-2024 season at 450,000 boxes.
Before the arrival of citrus greening, the industry in the 1990s produced more than 200 million boxes of oranges a year and 50,000 boxes of grapefruit.
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