The Race to Save Florida Orange Industry From Total Collapse

Reporting by Julie Wernau | Photography by Zack Wittman for WSJ Sept. 19, 2026 12:26 pm ET

After groves were ravaged for decades by a disease, new EPA-approved genetic technologies are giving citrus growers a chance to rebuild

Grower Phil Rucks, of Frostproof, Fla., has been forced to diversify since citrus greening hit.

FROSTPROOF, Fla.—Scientists may have found the solution to Florida’s orange-production crisis.

For 20 years, its orange groves have been ravaged by an incurable disease that causes fruit to drop before it is ripe, and leaves it tasting bitter. Florida’s orange production—more than 90% of which is used for juice—is down 95% since the arrival of the disease, called citrus greening. Last year, 60,000 orange acres went out of production—26% of Florida’s remaining total. Now about half a million acres are sitting dormant, and other abandoned groves have been absorbed for cattle grazing or Florida’s lucrative development sprawl.

This year, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency approved two technologies that are giving the battered industry a chance at rebirth. One creates disease-resistant trees through Crispr gene editing. The other puts a harmless virus into trees to help them resist the citrus greening.

Growers have ordered hundreds of thousands of resistant trees for planting in the spring, with about a million in production. Florida is giving the growers subsidies for those purchases, as part of a $330 million package over two years to revitalize the industry.

It will be two years before the first oranges are ready for juice. The question is whether Florida’s citrus industry can hang on that long. While the businesses make up a small portion of Florida’s overall economy, counties that rely on orange growing have been devastated: The industry lost more than half its workforce between 2003-04 and 2020-21, according to University of Florida studies.

Citrus greening clogs trees’ vascular systems, choking off water and nutrients.

“What we really need is people to come back into the business. If we don’t, I’m scared of where we might end up,” says Fran Becker, senior vice president at Peace River Citrus Products, one of just four companies left in the state that process Florida oranges for juice. That is down from a peak of 54 in the 1980s.

Even if the growers can make a comeback, it isn’t certain that there will be enough demand to sustain the business. The industry will also have to win back consumers. Since the onset of the greening crisis, soaring prices for not-from-concentrate juice and competition from other beverages—particularly at breakfast—have driven down orange-juice consumption by more than half.

A far-reaching solution

Florida’s orange growers have faced a number of catastrophes over the years. In the 1980s, freezes ruptured oranges’ cell membranes and turned new growth black. In the early 2000s, when citrus-canker lesions dotted Florida oranges, state contractors fanned out with woodchippers to destroy trees. Three successive hurricanes tore through the spine of Florida’s citrus belt and uprooted entire groves.

All of these took a toll on the industry, but none of them proved as ruinous as citrus greening, a disease that clogs trees’ vascular systems, choking off water and nutrients.

The disease is carried by the Asian citrus psyllid, a non-native insect so tiny it can be mistaken for pollen. It spreads a bacterium—Candidatus Liberibacter asiaticus—as it sucks sap from the plants, traveling from grove to grove with little more than a light breeze. And it is difficult to control with pesticides.

Genetically altered orange trees, like the one seen at right, can tower over conventional, diseased ones, like those at left.

The pest psyllid, seen here in larval form, transmits citrus-greening bacteria.

Some longtime citrus growers and nurseries have set up plots of land where researchers can experiment on real trees, and gather data to help fight the disease. The businesses hope to license and sell the new, healthy trees or purchase them for their groves.

Philip Rucks, a longtime citrus and nursery owner, is one of the growers who has turned his nursery into a real-world laboratory. About a decade ago, with greening pushing him toward bankruptcy, Rucks began diversifying: blueberries, bamboo, ornamental plants.

“We’re just desperate trying to find alternatives,” he says.

Recently, driving through the city of Frostproof, where he grew up, Rucks pointed toward the railroad tracks, once lined with citrus packing houses. Today, a giant junkyard sells equipment from dismantled juicing plants.

“This used to be a vibrant town,” he says.

A pair of solutions

One of the new technologies has already hit the market—the first commercially released Crispr-edited crop specifically edited to fend off disease, says Nian Wang, the microbiologist at the University of Florida who identified the genes that enabled the technology.

The company that created the resistant trees—Soilcea—submitted data to the EPA showing that its creations are thousands of times more resistant to the greening bacterium than existing trees—high enough to be considered uninfected by scientific standards. The EPA approved commercial use in April.

“This is the future of our industry,” says Becker of Peace River Citrus Products.

An orange tree is really two plants grafted into one. The rootstock forms the roots and lower trunk and helps determine how well the tree withstands disease and its environment. The scion above it determines the type of fruit.

Soilcea sells only the rootstocks. It uses a harmless bacterium to insert DNA into the rootstock exactly where it is needed to give the tree resistance.

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