45
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The powerhouse of American citrus is suffering a brutal, unrelenting decline
Link information
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- Title
- Who Killed the Florida Orange? Deep in Desiccated Groves, I Saw Some Haunting Answers.
- Authors
- Alexander Sammon
- Published
- Apr 20 2026
- Word count
- 6545 words
I knew they were struggling but I didn't know it was already that bad!
It wasn't nearly this bad even a couple of few ago, but it was still a huge drop from the greening and storms. I only moved away from FL a few years ago, and everything in the article is pretty spot on. And it is also true about the 100% infection rate of the trees. Even the trees I planted would get it unless I kept them in a big pot, which has obvious downsides. I always felt like an old man telling my kids how "oh that Home Depot used to be a grove. Those apartments too. Also that strip plaza."
This feels like one of those obvious, "don't make all your cash crop clones" things. It keeps happening and we keep repeating it, with bananas (RIP the Gros Michel and soon to be RIP the Cavendish), and now naval oranges, and hopefully not more things but then we pivot to methods to treat the clones that make them and the soil weaker?
I don't have an ag degree, and I know monocultures are how our farming is done... But maybe we should make different plans?
This is all citrus trees though. It doesn't really matter what kind of oranges you grow. This disease has been slowly spreading from China since the 70's and nobody has created a genetically modified orange tree yet that can resist the disease.
Sure, and that's fair, though they're all very closely related iirc. (Like, citron, pomelo and mandarin are the ancestors?)
But monoculture is also relevant in that if you have groves upon groves (or acres upon acres) of one thing you make the spread of a citrus blight much easier - or potato, or corn, or banana.
If the next navel orange grove is further away, or the groves are smaller, or intermixed you might have different outcomes. Maybe not in this case, but it doesn't feel sustainable the way we keep doing it, especially killing the soil in the process.
That wouldn't make much difference for the spread of this disease. If anything, random backyard orange trees make it easier for the bugs to hop from place to place. A few more acres between trees doesn't matter to the bugs spreading the contagion; it got from China to America.
The primary factor hastening its spread is climate change. Climate is the reason Spain and California still have oranges while Florida is basically dead.
I wrote a couple papers on the disease back in uni while studying genetic engineering. The best we can hope for is new cultivars, a la the rainbow papaya.
Makes sense in this case, still don't love our monoculture farming style but I get that it isn't the issue here.
I'm just tired of everything being awful I think
So I remember HLB coming up a lot in South Africa around 2017/8 back when I worked in the Agri space. The attitude back then was to treat infection as an inevitability and prepare accordingly.
I still have a briefing that was floating around back then and it was pretty dire.
That last part is important because the strategy is to flood everything around potential infection with Imidacloprid which is basically synthetic nicotine. The chemical is a soil drench so shouldn't cause too much (Immidiate) human health issues. But any bugs are getting wiped out.
Thankfully, apart from a brief scare that confused ACG with HLB, there's not been any outbreaks. I think it's largely due to a lot of tighter pest controls after PSHB has been wrecking urban trees for the last few years and that the local environment hopefully being hostile to the Asian citrus psyllid.
But it's scary that all of Florida Citrus is infected. Last I checked, Brazil was sitting at 50% and they were basically moving the entire industry to places that should be safer.
I’m going to organize my thoughts in most to least positive.
This is some fantastic journalism. It’s great that they put so much effort into making the big picture fleshed out.
This might end up slightly good for public health. The oranges they grow in Florida are meant to make juice with and juice is really bad for your health because it gets rid of the important fiber from the fruit and usually some of the vitamins as well; it’s basically a sugar bomb made worse because it is in liquid form and could be worse than soda in that respect, especially considering healthwashing. Furthermore the kind of things being sold as juice isn’t really “juice” anymore, it’s a mad scientist concoction made from oranges rather than of oranges.
As a Californian I hope the US realizes that California is the true citrus king; we make the eating oranges that people love. Nothing is better than a fresh local mandarin in my book.
Florida has some truly awful politics, and as a queer person I really don’t appreciate their attempts to erase my existence. They have the most comically exaggerated caricature of an evil conniving governor as I have ever seen. As much as I hate how negative things like this are going to hurt people I legitimately care about who live there, the government and the people who voted for it absolutely deserve every single bad thing that happens to it.
Look, I vastly prefer California's politics to Florida's for all the obvious reasons, but Florida makes (or, well, at least made) delicious eating oranges too. I'm from Ohio, so my access to fresh local citrus is naturally pretty limited, but this seems like unnecessary dick-measuring. I type this while enjoying a delicious Sumo orange, which afaik is grown in California, so I'm not knocking California citrus by any stretch, but come on. Your state's better politics don't make their oranges taste worse.
Also, while politics absolutely can affect the impacts of disease on agriculture, it's pretty callous to dismiss anything bad that happens in a red state as "the people there voted for it, so they deserve it". Do you think people throughout the US, including queer people and people of color, deserve "every single bad thing that happens to them" because Trump got elected? Because I certainly don't. Do I suddenly deserve to suffer more now that I live in Ohio compared to when I lived in Germany? And heck, it's not like you can pick up and move your orange grove because other Floridians voted in a horrible state government.
You have very badly misread what I had written. I am saying that it hurts me to know that the good people of Florida are being hurt. The people I am vindictive towards are the people who voted in the bad times, who I very much don’t think of as good people. The bad people deserve all the misery they have sewed.
The orange thing was partially in jest but in reality the vast majority of oranges grown in Florida are Valencia oranges, which are used nearly exclusively for juicing. AFAIK California also has some Valencia groves, but they are just not a very good breed of orange IMHO. They go bad very quickly, which is part of why they are grown for juice to begin with, and my memories of eating them have me remarking how bitter the flesh itself was.
We used to have so many varieties of oranges, grapefruits and tangerines in Florida. They just didn’t transport well. I’ve never been able to find any of the flavors I grew up with once we moved away. I’ve always considered California oranges as an inferior product and am never satisfied when I buy them (maybe there are good ones that just aren’t good for transport out of the state, but I wouldn’t know). It’s been sad watching all the groves disappear throughout the years. Since I almost always visit in winter, the first thing I used to do is buy citrus to gorge on, trying to get my fill until next time. Each year that became more and more difficult where now I don’t even try.
I am an orange fiend (my very favorite thing to eat — although, oddly, I have no tolerance for orange juice because it tastes foul and bitter, nothing at all like a fresh orange), and all the best oranges I've ever eaten in the US were grown in Florida.
The very best oranges I've ever eaten, full stop, were grown in Costa Rica, though. All from random backyard trees in the jungle while I was doing study abroad there for my Ecology degree.
I live in Australia now, and the oranges here all taste exactly like California oranges. They're fine. I still eat them. But they're nothing like a good Florida orange (much less a good Costa Rica orange), and I'm sad that's something I might never get to taste again.
The bitter peels make the best marmalade! That's why bitter Sevilla oranges are preferred for marmalade.
I did some poking around on Google maps and I found a country roads through an orange grove with a few decades of Google street view: https://maps.app.goo.gl/gi2upvLU34P1TdPa7
It's a pretty stark difference from 2008 to 2023, pretty fascinating!
They mention that the infection spread from Asia. How is it handled in those countries? Natural predators keeping it at bay?
The internet says they've destroyed over 100 million acres of trees to try to control it. Doesn't sound like it's solvable with natural predation. Not sure if they're also growing the naval orange clones or other varieties (and not sure how many of those other citrus varieties are also primarily cloned) and if that has any impact, but they may be able to afford letting the land lie fallow to recover (or switch crops, or not idk)
You've heard of the Irish Potato Famine? That killed a few hundred thousand people because they were entirely dependent on a single crop that was vulnerable. There's nothing in particular that stops this from happening to some other crop, and only the variety of crops available minimizes the impact to the global food supply these days. It could still ruin a region, though.
While we can consume other foods we can't quickly replace fruit trees. It takes decades to bring a new tree crop to full production, not to mention the generational farming knowledge lost as the current farmers lose their land.
It's possible to defeat with genetic engineering, just not socially palatable. The worst part of being an agricultural engineer might be realizing how many problems we could solve if better crops didn't get so much nonsensical pushback. Anyone remember golden rice?
This specific disease is contained to citrus trees, particularly sweet citrus. There's no risk of HLB spreading to any staple crops as far as I know.