In a Central Florida field, out in the wind and the sun and near a pen holding baby goats, sit two symbols of Florida's citrus industry. They were school buses in the 1970s and sometime later were converted to do duty as fruit loader trucks.
The seats and sides were moved long ago. Each has a large rectangular flat bed with a crane welded to it. A claw on the end of the crane is designed to lift large wooden crates weighing about 900 pounds and filled with oranges and grapefruit.
But the last time these fruit loader trucks hoisted a crate of Florida citrus was in 2021.
" When we were done, I parked the fruit loader trucks and I thought, 'I don't think I'll ever need these again,'" said Steve Crump. "Right now, they're still sitting where I parked them five years ago. And there's a tree growing between them."
Crump runs Vo-LaSalle Farms in Volusia County with his mother and brother. Even by the shrinking standards of Florida's orange groves, it's a small operation. Over the course of a two and a half hour visit, Crump drove a fork lift, ran a fruit washer and picked several trees worth of grapefruit. And that was after filling one crate with Valencia oranges earlier in the day.
"Farming has been my profession," he said.
It was his parents' life and his grandparents' life and his great grandparents' life, when they left Illinois for sunnier pastures in Florida in the 19th Century.
But now, the fruit that helped build Florida is disappearing. The orange is falling victim to disease, disasters and development.
Just how far the orange crop has fallen is shocking. Thirty years ago, 225 million boxes of oranges were picked from Florida orange groves. That was almost enough for one box of oranges for every American in the mid-1990s. This year, the forecast from the U.S. Agriculture Department is 12 million boxes. That is a drop of 95% in one generation.
Crump remembered when he would come in from the groves with dozens of crates of oranges piled up waiting for semi-trucks from wholesalers and juice companies to drive off with them. But these days, he often returns to his warehouse with just a single crate.
" It would be embarrassing to come in with just one," he said. "Literally, we sold them by the semi-load, which would be 50 of those [crates] at a time. Today it's one. It's because we've had to completely change how we sell."
READ MORE: 'Changing of the guard': How farming families preserve slices of old Florida agriculture
For half a century, from the 1950s to the early 2000s, Florida orange juice was inescapable on a traditional American grocery shopping list. Tens of millions of trees grew on hundreds of thousands of acres, concentrated in central Florida. The American thirst for OJ seemed insatiable. It was challenged by changing diets and views on fruit juice, but those forces were nothing compared to the forces of nature.
"Before we would sell wholesale everything to Tropicana, Minute Maid and Florida's Natural by the semi-load. Now there's so little fruit that we grow that I'm forced to sell it myself and get the premium price by selling it here," Crump said as he leaned over to turn on a water spigot before flipping a switch to start up the fruit washer – a machine from last century.
A crate of fruit was suspended over a trough of water. The bottom slat was unhinged and Crump jiggled the crate to dump the oranges into the water. A conveyor belt of wooden slats picked up the fruit and brought it under a spray of water while a series of rollers spun the spheres around. Another conveyor belt then carried the oranges to a farm employee who sorted them. They were ready to be sold within two hours of being picked out of the sunshine.
A few bushels were diverted and headed off to a side room where Ashley Schultz worked the juicer.
"It's awesome. It's probably one of my favorite jobs I've had," she said as fed whole oranges into an automated juicer. Between loads she grabbed half gallon jugs to fill them with the freshly squeezed orange juice, which had a bit of a pleasantly sour aftertaste.
"I usually prefer the sweeter taste, but it's still just as good," she said.
And that less sweet taste was because this juice comes from oranges dealing with two forces facing Florida's citrus industry — disasters and disease.
The cold weather in February cost the citrus industry almost $700 million according to a preliminary estimate from the state agricultural commission. Most of the loss is from a smaller crop and damaged trees.
And then there's the decades-long fight against a small bug that has been turning Florida's oranges green. Citrus greening disease is caused by a bacterial infection spread by the Asian citrus psyllid. The bug showed up in Florida almost 30 years ago. The first signs of the disease were visible in citrus groves about 20 years ago.
" The green fruit is the indicator that that the tree's sick and the fruit won't taste as good as the fruit that's bright orange," Crump said.
He has treated his trees with Oxytetracycline for the past two years. Crawling under the branches of an orange tree, the trunks are pockmarked with a scar in their bark at the site of the annual injection.
Crump has been happy with the early results. His trees "look better with less green fruit and more properly colored fruit," he said. Still, it hasn't solved the problem. He estimated about 20% of his crop is left on the ground to rot because it's too green or too small.
"We're bringing in the good stuff. We're leaving the junk out there," he said.
Another tool in the fight against citrus greening was stretched out over a few dozen rows of trees, just beyond the rusted-out and retired fruit loaders.
" You see how fine these holes are?" asked employee Alton Whyte, fingering a fine screen mesh. "This keeps out the greening disease – the microscopic bugs that you can hardly see with your naked eyes."
Whyte has worked in Florida's citrus groves for 20 years. He grew up in Jamaica where he was a rapper. He recalled a melody of one of his group's old tunes with an easy laugh.
He may not sing much anymore, but said he talks to the plants, especially the tomatoes, onions and red lettuce growing in a nearby vegetable garden that was still recovering from the recent cold weather. He was proud about plants that survived the freeze and practical about those that didn't. The garden represents the farm's effort to diversify its business as the citrus crop continues shrinking. Snow peas, carrots and spinach line the rows of pots waiting for customers to come and pick them.
Just beyond the onion patch was a field dotted with evidence of livestock. Then a metal gate and the screenhouse. It had a large roll-up garage-type door next to a white door with a small concrete slab.
Whyte opened the door, entered and quickly spun around to close the door. "We don't want any of those microscopic bugs in here," he said.
Once inside, the wind dies down, the humidity level rises and the direct sunlight becomes more diffused. This screenhouse covers two acres. Large wooden telephone poles hold up the screen roof over orange, kumquat and tangerine trees. In one row, Crump was finishing loading up one crate with Ray Ruby grapefruit.
" This is fantastic grapefruit. This is some of the best I've ever grown. I've done it for 35 years. This has the best flavor, best-looking grapefruit," Crump said.
And he credited the healthy fruit to his screenhouse. "The citrus trees really respond. They grow outrageously fast inside here," he said as he took off the large bag he had slung over his shoulder collecting the fruit. "They are thriving. They're growing great. They're beautiful trees."
It is a substantial investment for his small operation. It costs about $44,000 per acre to build. This screenhouse cost almost $90,000 when it was built four years ago. Crump figured he would make that back after seven years. And he's doing it again. Work starts this spring on a much larger, four-and-half-acre screenhouse. That will cost about $200,000 – a large investment for an operation that generates less than $300,000 of revenue each year.
The screenhouse is not a guarantee against the disease, though. Hurricanes Ian in 2022 and Milton in 2024 tore off parts of the screened roof.
"When it rips, we can't get it up quickly. It takes us several weeks to get it all repaired," Crump said. "During that time, the insects enter through the holes."
It takes 14 months before there are signs of infection on a tree. Crump has pulled several trees out of the screenhouse as soon as there is evidence the bug has been at work.
"We're watching every day because invariably there's going to be more," he said in an almost whisper as if the insects were listening. "We have a hard time killing them."
The solution is as obvious as it is complicated. "What we need is a tree that's resistant or tolerant to this disease, and I thought we would have it during my career. But that was 15 years ago, and I thought by now we'd already have it. So now I'm just trying to hold on maybe for 10 more years until there is a tree that's resistant," he said.
The citrus industry generates about $7 billion a year and employs around 30,000 people in Florida. That's less than half of the number of full-time jobs the industry supported 20 years ago. Beyond the economic cost of a shrinking industry, Crump said the greatest threat is the loss of knowledge.
"People like myself, I'm almost 60, we're retiring or dying, and that knowledge is being lost with us," he said. "There's lots of stuff that we know that there's no one to pass it on to because there's no industry left to support a younger generation to get a job."
Crump said he makes videos for his grandkids, showing them out to fix equipment around the farm, like an injector pump. His grandchildren are all under five years old. He hoped they would enjoy playing in the sprinklers and playing hide and seek in the groves like he did growing up.
" There's lots of other things in this world you can do that are more enjoyable," he said.
As his tractor rounded a corner of the grove, the trailer hitch broke.
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