Florida's Gene-Edited Trees Won't Rebuild What 95% Collapse Already Took

Florida is paying for gene-edited trees while the citrus towns are already gutted.

I know what a commodity collapse does to a county from the inside. Wisconsin lost more than 70% of its dairy farms between 1997 and 2022 — from roughly 15,400 operations to about 6,100 — while total milk production hit all-time highs. The cows didn’t disappear. The farms did. The processing consolidated into fewer and larger plants. The small towns that depended on the small operations — the creameries, the feed stores, the co-ops, the equipment dealers on Main Street — those are the things that went. Adams County has watched that story from the middle of it. So has every county along Highway 13 from here to Wisconsin Dells.

Florida’s citrus collapse is the same arc, just faster. Citrus greening arrived two decades ago, carried by an insect so small it can be mistaken for a pollen grain. Since then, Florida’s orange production — more than 90% of which goes to juice — is down 95%. Last year, 60,000 acres went out of production, 26% of what was left. Half a million acres are sitting idle now, and abandoned groves have been swallowed by cattle pasture or Florida’s development sprawl. The state went from 54 orange-juice processors to four. The industry lost more than half its workforce between 2003 and 2021. Orange-juice consumption has been cut in half since greening took hold, killed by soaring prices and every other drink competing for the same spot at breakfast.

This year, the EPA approved two technologies that give the trees a chance. One is a Crispr-edited rootstock from a company called Soilcea that resists the greening bacterium — the first commercially released Crispr crop edited specifically to fight a disease. The other is a harmless virus from a company called Silvec that helps trees already standing fight the infection. Growers have ordered hundreds of thousands of resistant trees for spring planting, with about a million in production. Florida is subsidizing the purchases as part of a $330 million package over two years. The biology is real: Soilcea’s data shows the edited trees are thousands of times more resistant than existing ones, and Silvec’s virus treatment has cut bacterial levels by at least 90%.

But a real technology for a real problem is not the same thing as a rebuilt community. The first oranges from the Crispr rootstocks won’t be ready for juice for two years. Two years for the four remaining processors to hold on with the fixed costs of plants built for an industry that was ten times their current volume. Two years for half a million idle acres to sit there while development pressure keeps building. Two years for a workforce that has already lost more than half its people to get older and smaller and harder to find.

This is where the story stops being about biology and starts being about what a commodity collapse does to the place where the commodity used to be grown. I have watched it here. When the Sand Hill mill closed in Adams County in 2009, the building didn’t just go quiet. The payroll left. The people who had been earning middle-class wages driving trucks and running equipment scattered — some to Stevens Point, some south, some just out of the workforce because there was nothing left to work at. When the bank Sara’s mother worked at for thirty years was bought by a regional chain in 2014 and her position was consolidated, that wasn’t one job lost. It was a branch gone — a place where people did their banking, a reason to walk down Main Street. Friendship had three local hardware stores when my grandfather ran the shop. It has none now. It has a Dollar General.

Florida’s citrus towns are the same story on a larger scale. When 54 processors become four, the packing houses don’t just close. The rail sidings go unused. The trucking contracts end. The supply shops that served the groves lose half their customers. The diner that fed the workers at five in the morning loses its breakfast crowd. The school district that funded itself on property taxes from active groves watches its tax base shrink. The county that called itself a citrus county has to figure out what it is instead. And the growers age out. Philip Rucks, a nursery owner in Frostproof, watched greening push him toward bankruptcy and started diversifying into blueberries and bamboo. “We’re just desperate trying to find alternatives,” he says. Driving through Frostproof, he pointed at the railroad tracks once lined with citrus packing houses. Today, a junkyard sells equipment from dismantled juicing plants. “This used to be a vibrant town.” I know that sentence. Every small town in Adams County has someone who can say the same about the mill or the bank or the creamery that used to be on the corner.

The Crispr rootstock and the virus treatment can fix the tree. But the tree was never the whole industry. The industry was the people who picked the fruit, the plants that squeezed it, the county that taxed it, and the schools that educated the kids whose parents earned their living from it. Wendell Berry calls that the membership — the web of work and obligation that holds a place together. The membership doesn’t come back on a two-year growth cycle. It comes back, if it comes back, on a generational one.

Fran Becker, a senior vice president at Peace River Citrus Products, says she needs people to come back into the business. “If we don’t, I’m scared of where we might end up.” The right question is not whether Crispr can regrow the fruit. It can. The right question is whether the county that the fruit sustained can survive long enough for the trees to bear.