Irma gave Fla. citrus growers a gut punch
Driving along State Road 60 near Yeehaw Junction in late August, I looked at all the fruit hanging on citrus trees and wondered what would happen if a hurricane were to strike those groves.
Lamentably, we have found out. Irma, a massive, powerful storm, blew through Florida’s citrus crop, too, on Sept. 10, littering the ground with the precious fruit and flooding fields for days.
“We got kicked in the teeth,” said Dan Richey, president of Riverfront Packing Company in Vero Beach. “This storm took no prisoners.”
While most of us in Palm Beach County are getting back to normalcy — for the most part — it’s a new normal for Florida’s iconic agricultural industry.
Richey said his grove, which numbers 4,000 acres with close to half a million trees, is undergoing intense “restabilization” efforts. He said that means employing methods, including liquid fertilizers, to restore and preserve the health of those trees still standing, from their roots to their leaves.
Irma struck at a bad time — is there ever a good time for a hurricane? — arriving just weeks before the start of the grapefruit and orange harvests. Ultimately, Richey said it may not be until the end of the season — March for grapefruits, May for oranges — before he and other citrus farmers know the full impact of what Irma did to their business.
They still have a chance to make juice out of this sour situation, though.
Richey estimates nearly half to 60 percent of the fruit is still on the trees, so there will be oranges to squeeze, carton and sell in supermarkets. The outlook for grapefruit is a bit more tricky. About 80 percent of the grapefruit is earmarked for export to Europe and Asia, so Richey’s team is busy testing the fruit that can be harvested and gauging its stamina for the treks across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
The double whammy of wind and torrential rain — some areas got 24 inches as Irma slowly churned up the peninsula’s west coast — is something Richey said citrus farmers have never experienced before.
“It was unprecedented,” he said. “We’ve not see something like this before. So there’s just a lot that is uncertain going forward right now.”
This much, however, he does know already.
e going to have losses,” Richey said. “We’re trying to monetize what we have, and we do have fruit on trees. But there will be losses.”
Irma was a significant blow to an industry that’s been hard hit by disease, first by canker a decade or so ago, and most recently by greening. Up until Irma, the focus had been on scientific answers to combat greening — including genetics.
Battling greening is now a battle for the future. A future that won’t exist if the industry withers post-Irma.
It’s a hard-luck business, citrus farming, but don’t tell Richey and his peers to throw in the towel.
“We’re down, but this industry is not out. We’re not going away,” Richey adamantly insisted. “We’re doing all we can to make sure this is a sustainable industry going forward. And it will be.”