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Economy squeezes OJ sales
News Press – August 8, 2011
Southwest Florida’s commercial growers have a lot of things to think about as they head to the Citrus Expo Aug. 17 and 18 in North Fort Myers.
These are sweet-and-sour times. Those who grow for the orange juice market are getting much better prices for their crop than 10 years ago, but worry as more of their potential profits slip away in the fight against plant diseases and pests.
Other challenges include a lingering recession that has cut into orange juice consumption.
“It is Florida’s signature crop. It is still wildly popular,” said Mark Colbert, citrus general manager for A. Duda & Sons Inc. in LaBelle. “But, with the economy as it is, people are buying less orange juice.”
“Thank goodness we do have a smaller crop,” said Wayne Simmons. He’s a sixth-generation Floridian and president of the Gulf Citrus Growers Association, whose members are commercial growers and allied businesses in Lee, Collier, Hendry, Charlotte and Glades counties.
August is the industry’s slow time, with most late-season oranges harvested by June.
Florida’s orange crop is expected to come in at 142 million boxes, up from 133.7 million in the 2009-10 season, but almost half that of the record 244 million boxes in 1997-98.
That’s a good thing, given the decline in U.S. orange juice consumption. U.S. households headed by people age 65 and older — the biggest OJ drinkers — went from buying nearly 10 gallons of OJ yearly in 2001-02, to purchasing just under seven gallons in 2009, according to the 2011 Citrus Reference Book.
Although citrus production isn’t as big as it was in the go-go years of the 1990s and early 2000s, it remains a major player in the region’s agribusiness, which produces an estimated $1.6 billion in sales to farmers and ranchers yearly.
Statewide, citrus plows more than $9 billion into the economy yearly, and employs more than 75,000 people, directly and indirectly.
Southwest Florida’s citrus industry started hitting its stride after the freezes in the 1980s, which prompted a major industry shift from Central Florida to counties south.
Between 1970 and 2000, the region’s citrus land grew from just over 43,000 acres to almost 179,000 acres in 2000.
However, by 2009, citrus acreage had dropped to just under 130,000 acres total in Lee, Collier, Charlotte, Hendry and Glades counties.
Association Executive Vice President Ron Hamel sees two main reasons total acreage fell: One was overproduction in the late 1990s and early 2000s. “Prices (to growers) dropped. A lot of growers got out and sold their acres, some for (residential) development.”
The second was disease.
A drive between 1995 and 2006 to eradicate citrus canker ultimately led to trees on thousands of acres being bulldozed and burned.
Thousands of non-commercial backyard trees also were sacrificed.
Canker is a bacterial disease that scars the peel, making fruit less marketable — other than for juice. It also weakens trees.
After the wild hurricane seasons of 2004 and 2005 were blamed for spreading the disease to every citrus growing region, the slashing and burning stopped. Canker management became the order of the day.
But a new threat had appeared: HLB or greening, which can severely weaken or even kill trees.
“People were scared,” said Bob Rouse, University of Florida associate professor and citrus specialist at the Southwest Florida Research Center, Immokalee.
“Some people walked away from their groves. ... Until last year, we went several years when nobody would plant a new tree —much less a block of trees,” Rouse said.
Those who stayed in commercial citrus growing are taking on higher costs — for nutritional sprays to strengthen trees and sprays to curtail the Asian citrus psyllid, an insect that spreads greening.
According to University of Florida research, treating a mature juice orange grove for canker and greening cost just over $1,561 per acre in the 2009-2010 season.
That’s more than double the $771 per-acre costs for a grove without greening in 2002-03.
Growers tax themselves to pay for much of the disease-fighting research. However, the Florida Legislature included $2 million in the 2011-12 budget to help citrus growers fight pest and disease.
And last month, the trade group Florida Citrus Mutual reported the U.S. Department of Agriculture will fund $11 million for citrus disease research between now and 2014.
For now, the smaller crops — combined with aggressive disease and pest management — appear to be working for the growers who stayed in the business.
Said Hamel: “We’re finding positive solutions to deal with these diseases and still turn a profit.”
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