Nat Roberts pointed out his flame grapefruit trees, standing amid an endless sheet of fallen citrus, as if someone had dumped a million baskets of tennis balls on his Callery-Judge Grove. Then he stopped by his honeybell tangelo trees, some stripped bare of their leaves, others snapped in half or ripped to the ground by Hurricane Frances.
The tour ended in front of a $50 million high school, built on land that the grove recently sold to the county, a gleaming vision of the future of Florida citrus.
"Give it time, and this grove is going to look a lot more like that school," said Roberts, the grove's general manager and general partner. "The land is going to be developed; there's no question in my mind. The only question is when."
Frances slammed into the famous Indian River citrus belt, which stretches from Cape Canaveral down to Loxahatchee, and it wiped out most of Florida's $200 million grapefruit crop. The hurricane came less than a month after Hurricane Charley inflicted an estimated $285 million in damage to Florida's $1.4 billion citrus industry, mostly to juice oranges in central Florida.
Now Hurricane Ivan is bearing down on southwest Florida's groves, and could deliver another blow to an industry synonymous with Florida in the public mind.
The brutal storms are just the latest recurring nightmares for a business already battered by freezes, hailstorms, a canker epidemic, increased competition from abroad and an out-of-nowhere decline in demand caused by the low-carb diet craze.
Citrus is no longer even Florida's top agricultural industry; that distinction now belongs to nurseries, which supply trees, shrubs, flowers and sod to the suburbs that are sprouting in former groves.
With about two-thirds of this year's grapefruit crop now sitting on the ground, and the possibility that high water may cause permanent root damage to many trees, more growers are sure to succumb to offers from developers eager to convert farmland into subdivisions.
'Citrus and Mickey Mouse'
Growers will make out just fine -- some groves have already sold for as much as $50,000 an acre -- but they worry that a way of life as symbolic of the Florida experience as sunshine, bikinis and golf may become as endangered as the Florida panther.
"People all over the world know Florida for two things -- citrus and Mickey Mouse," said Charles Bronson, the state's agriculture commissioner. "I'm in hopes that people who have been in agriculture for decades are going to stick it out, but selling is a big temptation right now. They're going to have some tough decisions to make."
There are still 800,000 acres of citrus land in Florida, providing jobs for about 90,000 seasonal and permanent workers. Indian River citrus is still world-renowned for its sweetness. The industry still has ideal soils, an unmatched government research program, state-of-the-art technology and 21st-century marketing strategies that have moved far beyond the old Anita Bryant ads.
The losses from Charley and Frances will be cushioned by federal crop insurance, and the decreased fruit supply will help boost prices that have been depressed by years of overproduction. Despite the current immense popularity of the Atkins and South Beach diets -- the main factor in the unprecedented 8 percent decline in juice sales after decades of steady growth -- some growers still cling to the hope that the low-carb crusade will turn out to be a passing fad.
But Doug Bournique, executive vice president of the Indian River Citrus League, cannot help but wonder whether the economics of the industry have turned permanently sour. Land prices around Vero Beach have increased sixfold in the past few years, while citrus prices have been ravaged -- first by competition from countries such as Brazil, Israel and South Africa, then by the low-carb diets, and finally by Charley and Frances.
A tough business
Growers make money only once a year, at harvest time, and bankers have been increasingly reluctant to help tide them over with loans. And if local citrus prices soar after the hurricane season, big buyers such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. can now take their business offshore.
"It used to be that a guy and his wife could have 150 acres and afford a pickup and send their kids to the University of Florida," Bournique said. "Those days are gone."
Small growers are not the only ones feeling the pinch. The Callery-Judge Grove in western Palm Beach County covers nearly 4,000 acres in a tract shaped like a machine gun pointing at the Everglades, but it has not turned a profit in eight years. Roberts, who gave up a banking career in Boston to run the grove, shut down its packing house last year, the last one left in the county.
Several times, he has been forced to ask the grove's investors to send more money to cover its mortgage and taxes. One partner asked wryly: "You're aware you're supposed to be sending me money, right?"
Roberts said he has standing offers from about 100 developers to call whenever he is ready to sell his land. Public agencies are also buying land in the area for an $8 billion project to restore the Everglades, and the Scripps Research Institute is looking at citrus groves for conversion into a massive biotech campus.
The market is tempting, because the Callery-Judge Grove would fetch considerably more than $1 billion; it could easily be converted into a sprawling new city.
Frances was a cruel reminder of the frustrations of farming: After 11 months of spending money and tending the trees, at least half the crop was ruined just a month before the payoff. It is not easy to look at nearly ripe fruit piled up in ditches, gnarled branches strewn across the land and Australian pines that were supposed to serve as windbreaks torn from the soil.
"Some growers are going to look at this damage and say: Screw it," Roberts said. "It's a tough business, and the pressure to sell is unbelievably intense."
The California example
Trey Smith, 28, vice president of a packing house and citrus grove that his great-grandfather founded after World War II, said his family had always warned him that the citrus business is not for the weak of heart. The Smiths have already sold about 80 acres, but they are determined to hold on to their remaining 500. Growing citrus may not be as lucrative as growing condos, but it is a family tradition as much as it is a family business. "It's in our blood," Smith said. "I don't know how to explain it, but we're survivors. This is what we do."
University of Florida economist Tom Spreen is skeptical of the "doom and gloom" comments he hears about the future of Florida citrus. He points to the example of California, another state with a history of rabid land speculation and epic water manipulation.
The groves of California's Orange County are gone now, paved over by developers who had promoted the area as paradise. But the California citrus industry has simply shifted inland and now produces almost as much as it did before the land development boom. Spreen is confident that the same thing will happen here -- less citrus near the coast, but more in the interior.
"There is still a lot of vacant land in Florida where you could grow citrus," he said.
But Spreen's own balance sheet reveals the overwhelming pressure to cash out. The economist who insists that Florida's citrus industry will persevere is also part of a citrus cooperative in the interior of southwest Florida, where the impending development of the enormous Ave Maria University has sent land prices through the stratosphere. Of the 34 farmers in the cooperative, 33 were finalizing a deal this week to sell their land to a developer.
The lone holdout was not Tom Spreen.
