“I'm not sure - other than maybe grazing land - any other single commodity has probably more than that,” Joyner added. That’s a massive footprint,” Matt Joyner, CEO of the Bartow-based Florida Citrus Mutual, said. But we still have almost 400,000 acres of citrus in the state of Florida. “There's always going to be pressures from development and other things. Also, they are looking for federal disaster-relief money to start flowing. The industry uses a standard of 90-pound boxes.Ĭhances of a rebound might be two or three years off, as new plantings take hold and surviving trees recover from the stresses of getting hammered last fall by Hurricane Ian.īut growers hope that ongoing testing will help make trees resistant to citrus greening disease, which has ravaged groves for two decades. The state also produced 480,000 boxes of specialty crops, mostly tangerines and tangelos, down from 750,000 boxes in 2021-2022. In the 2022-2023 season, growers produced 1.81 million boxes of grapefruit, down from 3.33 million boxes in the 2021-2022 season. A little more than two decades ago, annual production topped 200 million boxes of oranges and 50 million boxes of grapefruit. Growers produced 15.85 million boxes of oranges during the 2022-2023 season, down from 41.2 million boxes during the 2021-2022 season, which itself marked a continued decrease in production. The industry would have to go back to the 1929-1930 season to find comparable numbers. Department of Agriculture on Wednesday issued a final report that showed a huge dropoff in production from the 2021-2022 season. Numbers released Wednesday, July 12, confirmed that Florida’s 2022-2023 citrus season was the worst in nearly a century, as growers tried to recover from an early-season hurricane that exacerbated industry struggles.
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