Citrus growers in Florida received some positive news Thursday with forecast production increases for the current season.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture posted slight increases in the yields for the current growing season for oranges, grapefruit, lemons, and the specialty fruits tangerines and tangelos.
Florida Citrus Mutual Executive Vice President and CEO Matt Joyner said, “growers have a long history of meeting adversity with resilience.”
“Going forward, we are really going to start to increase that overall box count for the industry. But it’s just going to take time,” Joyner told the News Service of Florida. “We didn’t get here overnight, and it’s going to take us time to rebuild.”
The forecast shows orange production up 2% from the initial forecast, grapefruit up 4%, lemons up 29%, and tangerines and tangelos up 13%.
The industry still faces historic lows for production, but the new numbers for lemons and tangerines, and tangelos would surpass the 2024-2025 totals.
But because oranges and grapefruit make up the bulk of the production, the overall harvest remains below the 2024-2025 harvest, which was the lowest in more than 100 years.
The updated forecast for the 2025-2026 season estimates Florida will produce 12.2 million industry-standard 90-pound boxes of oranges, still below the 12.28 million boxes in the 2024-2025 season.
The forecast also estimates Florida will produce 1.25 million boxes of grapefruit, down from 1.3 million in 2024-2025.
Specialty crops, which include tangerines and tangelos, are now at 450,000 boxes, up from the 400,000 boxes produced last season.
Lemon production, first recorded last year by the USDA, is now 900,000 for the current season. Last year, the state produced 670,000 boxes of lemons.
Florida’s citrus industry has been in a steady decline for the past 25 years because of Huanglongbing (also known as HLB and citrus greening disease), a bacterial disease that devastates citrus trees. The downturn has been exacerbated by recent hurricanes, freezes, and development on what had been citrus groves.
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“We can’t do much about hurricanes. We can’t do much about freezes, droughts, and weather conditions,” Joyner said. “Certainly, when you look at the most pressing and dire issue, which is greening, that we’ve been dealing with as an industry, we now have solutions and answers to that, that will allow us to start to rebuild and be productive.”
Recently, Congressman Scott Franklin, R-Lakeland, led members of the Florida delegation to request that the Environmental Protection Agency conduct a review of emerging citrus rootstock technologies to combat citrus greening.
“These technologies represent one of the most promising paths forward by enabling the development of citrus trees with greater resilience to HLB,” Franklin wrote in the March 30 letter. “They can work in tandem with existing tools and provide the long-term durability needed to support commercial production. Florida growers are prepared to invest in over 2.5 million new trees this year alone, but that investment depends on regulatory certainty and access to solutions that can sustain productivity over time.”
Meanwhile, state legislators are working to return in the coming weeks to negotiate a budget for the next fiscal year. Among the issues that scuttled lawmakers’ first effort to craft the spending plan was funding for citrus research.
Senate President Ben Albritton, a citrus grower from Wauchula, pushed for $204.5 million in funding, against $4 million from the House. The budget for the current fiscal year, which ends June 30, included $100 million for research.