Citrus, strawberry growers ready for cold weather

WINTER HAVEN — Local citrus and strawberry growers aren’t exactly sanguine about facing the threat of freezing weather the next three nights, but they know they’ve been through it — and a lot worse — before.

“We definitely are prepared for it,” said Dustin Grooms, the manager of his family’s strawberry-growing company, Fancy Farms Inc. of Plant City. “It’s always a threat.”

After the punishment Florida citrus growers took from Hurricane Irma in September — loss of an estimated 50 percent of the 2017-2018 crop — growers are feeling a little shell-shocked about facing another harmful weather event, said Andrew Meadows, a spokesman for Bartow-based Florida Citrus Mutual, the state’s largest growers organization.

Trees are in a weaker condition not only from Irma, but also from more than a decade fighting citrus greening, a fatal bacterial disease, said Gene Albrigo, a retired professor of horticulture at the Citrus Research and Education Center in Lake Alfred.

Greening-infected trees in particular don’t handle additional stresses as well as healthy trees, Albrigo said.

“We don’t know how citrus trees with [greening] are going to react to any more stress. I can’t say cold stress would be any more of a problem than anything else,” he said. “If it doesn’t do more than [fall below 30 degrees], I don’t think they’ll have much of a problem. My worry would be [the forecasts] are wrong, and it could get colder.”

Growers might have some concern that their trees could see additional fruit loss even if the temperatures stay above the 28-degree Fahrenheit threshold for a citrus freeze, said Albrigo, recently named to the Florida Citrus Hall of Fame. Citrus generally holds up until the temperature falls to 28 or colder for at least three hours.

But current forecasts don’t project that happening in the Florida citrus-growing belt from Interstate 4 south.

Both citrus and strawberry growers protect their crops by running irrigation systems once the temperature approaches 32 degrees. The freezing water creates ice, which releases heat that protects the fruit.