Metro Jacksonville

Another victim of the urban sprawl in our state, the citrus industry.  From the NY Times:

QuoteJanuary 1, 2010
Indian River Journal
Deep Roots, Sweet Oranges and a Taste of Florida’s Past
By DAMIEN CAVE

Jeffrey Schorner darts through Al’s Family Farms like a car salesman in a crowded showroom. He brags about his orange juice. He climbs under the packing machine. He grabs a tangelo for a gift box, then orders his 15-year-old son to the nearby groves.

“Pick me two sunbursts,” he shouts, sounding like his own father, Al, who founded the company. “Then pick lemons.”

Before Interstate 95, Starbucks and Sbarro, roadside citrus stands like Al’s lined nearly every major thoroughfare in Florida. They made buying local fun before the locavore food movement made it fashionable, but increasingly they are a dying breed.

Hundreds if not thousands of family citrus farms and their roadside stands have disappeared since the 1960s â€" victims of freezes and disease, highways that diverted customers, corporate consolidation, and the relentless pressure on growers to sell their land to developers. Since 1996, Florida has lost more than 200,000 acres of citrus land, according to state figures, mainly to homes that no longer sell like the oranges they replaced.

Only here, in the 90-mile bluff along the Indian River from Cocoa to Fort Pierce, can one find the last handful of citrus stores that offer the stickiness and tart scent that once defined the state.

The land gets part of the credit. It has been famous since 1835, when Douglas Dummett’s plantation on Merritt Island survived a brutal freeze thanks to the nearby rivers that stabilized temperatures. Dummett also bred sweeter fruit â€" after the Civil War, his oranges commanded $1 more a box in New York than oranges from any other grove â€" and Indian River went on to become one of Florida’s most famous farming brands.

Northerners like Roy and Blanche Harvey, who arrived in the area from Cleveland in the ’20s, could hardly resist. Larry Harvey, their grand-nephew, said their family business started when Blanche picked a few oranges and started selling them on U.S. 1., then the main road running north and south. Now, at essentially the same location in Rockledge, Harvey’s Groves is the last citrus shop around.

Like most of its counterparts farther south, the store has a homeyness that comes from its white-painted barn and bins of fruit, its kitschy extras (turtle earrings, anyone?) and from employees who have worked there for more than 20 years.

Harvey’s displays braggadocio, too. The giant orange in the green elfin costume on the roof and the large sign boasting of the “world’s best orange juice” might as well be museum pieces for Florida hucksterism. Although Mr. Harvey, 64, refuses to admit it. A leukemia survivor with a bushy mustache, he is the softer side of a management team that includes his brother, Jim. “World’s best” is accurate, Larry Harvey insists, and as proof he showed off his shiny FMC extractor, a stainless steel juice machine that resembles a truck engine attached to rubber straws.

He said three types of oranges go in: tangerines, tangelos and golds. What pours out tastes fresher than what is in the average supermarket carton, he said, because of the blend, and the lack of pasteurization. “This is superchilled,” he said. “It doesn’t have the shelf life, but it tastes better.”

Juice, it seems, is where the roadside stands still like to compete. Dixie cups of the stuff are handed out to all who enter at Al’s and Harvey’s. At Hale Groves on U.S. 1 in Wabasso, the sign out front offered all you can drink for 10 cents in 1951, but now it says “the freshest and best tasting. Guaranteed since 1947.”

Still, with a smirk, owners like Mr. Schorner acknowledge that the juice is half vanity project, half marketing gimmick. Even the stands are “merely showplaces,” as John McPhee wrote in “Oranges,” his book from 1967, because the bulk of the business comes from shipping gift boxes north.

This accounts for 80 percent of Harvey’s sales. It’s a similar proportion for the others. Basically, without orders placed through the stores, catalogues or the Internet, all these companies would be out of business.

Holiday gifts matter most of all, and this year, sales are up. According to the Florida Gift Fruit Shippers Association, volume increased by 1.75 percent this season.

Not that there are any hallelujahs around Indian River. The growers sell optimism, but sleep with fear. Mr. Harvey said there were 152 members of the Gift Fruit Shippers Association when his father helped start it in the late ’40s. Now there are 37.

Meanwhile, the famous Indian River citrus region has come to look a little more like the rest of Florida in recession. Driving U.S. 1 now offers views of a closed packing house named Victory, silent strip malls offering three months free rent, and at least one development with empty lots where groves used to be and where new homes may never rise.

Economic ups and downs, of course, are not unfamiliar to the roadside citrus crowd. And the bust has brought a bonus: Mr. Schorner said a few former growers are returning to citrus after failing at real estate.

But if you ask the older owners what will happen next with their businesses, or how they have survived, you are likely to get a humble shrug. “It’s my charm,” said Ed Peterson, 73, whose family has been selling oranges from its grove in Vero Beach since 1923.

“No,” said his brother and co-owner, Fred, 70, standing behind the counter in red shorts faded pink. “We’ve worked hard; that’s what it is. We’ve refused to give up.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/01/us/01citrus.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

I grew up in the middle of citrus processing country (Polk County).  I remember the largest change was the 1989 freeze.  A ton of citrus processing plants and packing houses closed for good after that season, along with hundreds of thousands of acres of groves that died.  This coincided with the region's rapid growth and within 10 years, a good amount of the old groves (at the time, cheap land near Disney) had given way to sprawl.  This is best seen by taking a drive on US 27 or SR 50 in the vicinity of Clermont.  It was really shocking to see the rapid transformation from agriculture to sprawl.

Lake - You can probably pull out photos of I-4 before and now, showing the area from the River all the way down to the begining of Seminole County where the sides of the interstate used to be nothing but orange groves. I remember it when we would go to Disney from Jax. It was a beautiful thing. You are right, the 89 freeze killed many trees, as is the Citrus Disease, for which there is no cure, only to kill the aphids that spread the disease. I have seen the US Dept of Agriculture wipe out 10 acres of trees that surround 1 acre of bad trees, just to try and contain the disease. It is sad, but I am sure we can find a way to control the disease some day.


Till then, we will just have to be thankful we have Orange Pickers Road and the pick your own program as well as Satsumas available in Mandarin every December.

My grandparents' family use to own groves in Seville, FL, a little town just outside Deland. In fact one of the main roads in Seville is Raulerson Rd, named after the family. When I was little my grandfather would take us down there and we would go fishing on Lake George. We use to walk the rows and pick oranges right off the tree and my grandfather would take out his pocket knife and slice it up for us. Those were great times.

While I bemoan the sprawl and loss of citrus groves, the owners of these lands sold them.  They were not lost or taken.  Families sold their land... probably for more than it was worth as a citrus grove.  I suppose if it was more profitable for the strip malls and homes to grow citrus... they would bulldoze the structures and plant trees.

In Central Florida, the 80s freezes killed the groves and it really made no sense to replant on a large scale so far north.  The industry lives, its just further south although Central Florida is still home to a good number of processing plants (i.e. Florida's Natural, Cutrale, Coca-Cola, Tropicana, etc.).  Like the large phosphate plants in the area that remain, too much is invested in them to move.

Florida's Natural Growers - Lake Wales
(http://www.foodmuseum.com/images/Brazilian%20citrus%20plant.jpg)

After this week, the industry may not thrive AT ALL in FL. Lows Monday and Tuesday nights in Miami are supposed to be 40. The Suburbs, WEST of 95 are supposed to have frost.

I think we will be hearing from Crist in a few weeks about help to the farmers for damaged crops. Its already chilly here in S. Florida, but not the chill you have in Jax right now, or this weekend. OMG, teens? Really???

Here is an article that ran in the Lakeland paper last week about the 1989 Christmas Freeze.

Quote1989 Christmas Freeze: Florida's Citrus Industry Was Changed Forever

(http://www.theledger.com/apps/pbcsi.dll/bilde?Site=LL&Date=20091225&Category=NEWS&ArtNo=912259950&Ref=AR&Profile=1178&MaxW=600&border=0)
ALTURAS CITRUS GROWER Scott Young surveyed the damages to part of his 400 grove acres following Florida's worst citrus

By Kevin Bouffard

Published: Friday, December 25, 2009 at 4:49 a.m.
Last Modified: Friday, December 25, 2009 at 4:49 a.m.

HAINES CITY | The ghosts of Christmases past evoke mixed feelings among Florida citrus growers in their 40s and older.

This year brings particularly bad memories for the 20th anniversary of the Christmas freeze of 1989, considered to be one of the worst citrus freezes in the state's history. It began Dec. 23 and lasted until Christmas Day.

'Everybody who is still in the citrus industry is aware of it (the 20th anniversary),' said Scott Young, an Alturas grower who had 400 acres then as well as today.

'There were a lot of growers in the industry on Christmas Eve and out of it the next morning.'

As devastating as it was, the 1989 freeze also capped a decade of citrus freezes that ruined many businesses, including packinghouses and small juice processors in addition to growers.

'I remember it meant another job change for me,' said Dennis Broadaway, the chief executive at the Haines City Citrus Growers Association, which runs one of the state's five largest fresh fruit packinghouses.

Broadaway was working at the former B.G. Harmon Fruit Co., which ran a packinghouse near Clermont until the 1989 freeze, when it shut down and never re-opened.

'There wasn't anything left to pack,' he recalled.

It was the second time that decade a freeze had put him out of business, Broadaway said.

He previously worked on his family's farm, which had more than 600 acres of citrus groves in Lake and Orange counties. The first major freeze of the decade from Dec. 24 to Dec. 26, 1983, left them with just seven acres of tangelos and they couldn't afford to replant.

A 'major citrus freeze' is one that causes significant fruit or tree damage. It takes a temperature below 28 degrees for at least four hours to begin causing damage.

In addition to the 1983 and 1989 freezes, the decade saw another major freeze Jan. 20 to 22, 1985, and minor freezes in 1981, 1982, 1986 and Feb. 25, 1989.

In more than a century of growing commercial citrus in Florida, the 1980s were widely regarded as having the greatest impact on the industry that is, until this decade.

Florida citrus started in 2000 with a statewide canker outbreak that would eventually destroy nearly 100,000 acres in an unsuccessful attempt to eradicate the bacterial disease. The three 2004 hurricanes destroyed an estimated one-third of that season's crop as well as with an assist from Hurricane Wilma in October 2005 spreading canker so widely in Florida it became impossible to eliminate it.

Most ominously, citrus greening, a bacterial disease fatal to trees, was discovered in fall 2005, generating an unprecedented scientific research effort to find a cure. That research will determine whether this decade outstrips the 1980s for notoriety.

Twenty years later, it's clear the 1989 freeze accelerated two long-term impacts on Florida citrus that began earlier that decade.

The first was the nearly total destruction of commercial citrus growing north of Interstate 4, the area hardest hit by freezing weather.

Almost all freeze-related replantings happened south of that line, and new groves opened up much farther south, particularly in Hendry and Collier counties, with the regularity of condos in other parts of Florida.

In 1980, Lake County had 122,700 commercial grove acres compared to 6,706 acres in Collier and 30,086 in Hendry, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The 2009 USDA census shows 12,884 grove acres in Lake while Hendry has grown to 66,821 acres and Collier to 31,247 acres.

Polk has remained the biggest citrus-producing county over that time with 132,124 acres in 1980 but just 82,629 this year.

Much of Polk's lost acreage happened along U.S. 27 north of I-4, now housing and shopping malls.

'The movement down south never got anywhere as big until the 89 freeze,' said John Attaway, author of 'A History of Florida Citrus Freezes,' the definitive 1997 book on the subject. 'So many people who had good groves gave up and sold.'

Most of those groves measured less than 100 acres, contributing to the second long-term impact ó the diminishing number of small and medium-sized growers to the large grower with 1,000 or more grove acres.

The large growers with more financial resources led the way south, Attaway, Young and Broadaway agreed.

'It's very similar to what happened to wheat or corn in the Midwest,' said Norman Todd, a LaBelle citrus consultant.

http://www.theledger.com/article/20091225/NEWS/912259950/1178?Title=1989-Christmas-Freeze-Florida-s-Citrus-Industry-Was-Changed-Forever

In the '60's we used to drive out to Mandarin (named for the oranges) to buy blood oranges which you couldn't get in any stores.  They are a Spanish variety that are thin skinned and deep red inside and delicious.  Almost impossible to find now unless you grow your own.

As of this afternoon, our prolific Key Lime tree is tented and heated.  We gave away pounds and pounds of limes and still have about two gallons of juice frozen from this one, three year old tree.   We found out last two ripe limes on the tree while protecting it.

Mojito time!

Limes are lovely. I need to plant a couple citrus trees.