Florida was ravaged by a pair of hurricanes this fall.
The damage from those storms will impact the entire country.
And breakfast suffered a stunning blow after Florida farmers got this bad news.
Florida expected to have the worst citrus crop in nearly a century after hurricanes
Hurricane Milton slammed into Florida in September causing massive devastation.
The storm did $2 billion worth of damage to the state’s agriculture industry.
One of the staples of breakfast, orange juice, could see higher prices as a result of output from Florida’s citrus crop tumbling.
Florida orange production will be down from the result of Milton according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).
The state produced 17.96 million 90-pound boxes of oranges during the 2024 to 2024 growing season.
Florida’s production is expected to drop by six million boxes for the 2024 to 2025 season according to USDA estimates.
Al’s Family Farms general manager Matthew Schorner said his farm was pounded with tornadoes because of Milton.
“It may have been twenty tornadoes,” Schorner recalled. “Who knows how many popped up in that giant black cloud.”
The building where the farm packaged citrus fruits to ship nationally was leveled by one of the tornadoes.
“It’s amazing to see how many hurricanes this building endured, and then it was all just crushed,” Schorner said. “I looked at it and I was like wow. I couldn’t believe it – I’m in tears – I can’t believe it. What am I going to do? Then I slowed down and prayed, and then I felt God told me to ask to rebuild.”
The farm was able to resume shipping after two weeks.
Hurricane Milton damaged some of the farm’s crop and the subsequent tornadoes ripped peach trees straight out of the ground.
Schorner had help from the community to get the farm up and running again.
“We are always the ones that grow, picks, packs, and ships,” Schorner explained. “We are there through the whole process. We may not be able to do 100% of the work, but we are able to make it happen through friends, family and other businesses who come in and work alongside of us.”
It could be a while before Florida citrus farms recover
Jeff Schorner, the owner of Al’s Family Farm, said that the holiday season was the busiest time of the year for them.
“This is our main season. We have about six weeks of ‘let’s go, go, go’ packing fruit for Christmas,” Jeff said. “We’re a winter business, this is when all the tourists come to see us, so we had to get it up and running.”
Florida Citrus Mutual CEO Matt Joyner warned that it could take years to recover from the storm damage.
“These are a tree crop,” Joyner explained. “They don’t recover in one year, it is usually about three years before they get back to pre-storm production. To have this many hurricanes hitting over the last seven years is impactful for growers because they don’t have a chance for those groves to recover and trees get back to peak production.”
Joyner said that the price of citrus products was likely to rise as a result of the decreased production.
DeSantis Daily will keep you up-to-date on any new developments in this ongoing story.
