Florida's Orange Crop Has Fallen to 5% of Its Pre-Disease Size

Citrus greening — Huanglongbing, or HLB — was confirmed in Florida groves in 2005, according to UF/IFAS's 2020-21 economic contribution report.▸ The bacterium has no cure. It spreads by a small invasive insect, the Asian citrus psyllid, and it starves a tree from the roots up, so fruit drops early, undersized and bitter, until the tree stops producing at all. Twenty-one years on, the USDA's final forecast for the 2025-26 season, released today, puts Florida's orange crop at 12.9 million boxes — one twentieth the size of the crop the state was growing two years before the disease arrived.

In 2003-04, two years before greening reached Florida, growers harvested 242.0 million boxes of oranges — close to the state's all-time record.▸ By the 2020-21 season the crop was down to 53.0 million boxes. It kept falling: 18.1 million in 2023-24, 12.3 million in 2024-25, and now a final forecast of 12.9 million for 2025-26 — a 94.7% decline from the 2003-04 baseline. The 2025-26 number is actually a rare bit of good news on the margin: it's 6% higher than USDA analysts had penciled in three months earlier, a small upward revision inside a multi-decade collapse.

The forecast isn't just a fruit count — it's built from a shrinking base of trees.▸ USDA's own survey series counts 13.97 million bearing Valencia orange trees in Florida for 2025-26, down from 28.68 million just four seasons earlier — a 51.3% drop in bearing trees since 2021-22 alone. That's not a one-time shock; it's the current pace of loss, still running. Over the longer run, UF/IFAS puts total commercial citrus grove acreage at roughly 750,000 acres in 2001, falling to 369,300 acres by 2021 — a 51% reduction — while the volume of fruit harvested for use fell 79% over the same span, per the same 2020-21 economic contribution report.

Even a crop this diminished still moves real money.▸ UF/IFAS's economic contribution analysis — the most recent full accounting, covering the 2020-21 season — found $6.94 billion in total industry output, $2.84 billion in value added to the state's economy, and 32,542 full- and part-time jobs, once supply-chain and household-spending multiplier effects are included. Most of that activity sits downstream of the grove: growing and harvesting accounted for $1.43 billion of output and 13,065 jobs, while juice processing, packing, and byproducts accounted for $5.51 billion and 19,477 jobs — meaning a shrinking harvest threatens jobs in plants and packinghouses well beyond the farm gate.

That $6.94 billion count is already out of date.▸ It was built on a 2020-21 crop of 53.0 million boxes — a crop more than four times the size of the one Florida just brought in. No newer full economic-contribution study has been published since; the true current jobs and output numbers are almost certainly smaller than the last official count, but nobody has recounted them.

This piece covers Florida orange production and the industry built on it; it does not model exposure to substitution by imported juice concentrate or to greening-tolerant rootstock varieties now in field trials.