Florida's orange crop will fall 23 per cent to 10 million boxes in the 2026-27 season, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) said in its first forecast for the season, the latest step in a long decline for a state that was once the heart of the American citrus industry.

The department's National Agricultural Statistics Service, which published the forecast on 9 October, expects Florida to pick 10 million 90-pound boxes of oranges against 12.95 million last season.

The Florida Department of Citrus ties the drop to the slow erosion of the state's groves and to adverse weather.

The steepest fall is in the early and midseason fruit. Non-Valencia oranges, which include Navel varieties, are forecast at 3 million boxes, down 37 per cent, from roughly 4.7 million bearing trees, with fruit size expected to stay below average.

Valencia oranges, picked later and pressed mostly into juice, held up better at 7 million boxes, down 14 per cent, though the department expects lower fruit counts and higher-than-average fruit drop from the state's 12.3 million bearing Valencia trees.

The cuts tighten a US juice supply that has been shrinking for years.

Florida's oranges go mostly to the juice vat rather than the fresh-fruit aisle, so the fall in the Valencia crop, the main juicing variety, bears directly on processors.

The country already imports a large share of the orange juice it drinks and leans heavily on Brazil, the world's biggest producer, to cover the gap. A smaller home crop leaves buyers more exposed to the Brazilian harvest and to the global price of fruit.

"The tenacity and grit of Florida citrus growers cannot be overstated," said Shannon Shepp, executive director of the Florida Department of Citrus, the state agency that markets and regulates the crop. Last year's freezing weather, she told the Business Observer, "may be a reason to be conservative" about the opening estimate.

Florida's growers are still working through the damage of past hurricanes and freezes and the long spread of citrus greening, a bacterial disease also called huanglongbing that has no commercial cure, starves trees and leaves their fruit small, green and bitter.

Bearing acreage has shrunk year after year as dead and dying trees are pushed out faster than groves can be replanted.

[explore layer="production" commodity="oranges" view="chart" countries="US" yearTo="2024" title="US orange production, 1961–2024" subtitle="Tonnes, all US states (FAO): down from a peak of 12.4m tonnes in 1998 to 2.5m tonnes in 2024"]

The rest of Florida's citrus is slipping too. Grapefruit is forecast at 1.3 million boxes, about 4 per cent lower, with red grapefruit at 1.2 million and white unchanged at 100,000.

Tangerines and tangelos are seen down about 2 per cent at 450,000 boxes. Only lemons are forecast higher, up 6 per cent at 950,000 boxes.

TEXAS HEAT

In Texas, growers in the Rio Grande Valley, the citrus belt along the state's border with Mexico, are also reporting smaller fruit as the grapefruit harvest begins after a summer of extreme heat.

The National Weather Service recorded 101 days at or above 100°F (37.8°C) at McAllen this year, beating the previous record of 97 days set in 2023.

"We need water to grow, but 96 days of triple digits is painful for everything," Michael Flowers, field operations manager at Lone Star Citrus, told trade publication FreshPlaza. "So with the mix of lack of water, we are having size issues."

The dry spell has since broken hard. Cropli's weather monitoring points in the valley recorded about 123 millimetres of rain at Mission and 108 millimetres across the wider Rio Grande Valley in the two weeks to 13 October, against totals below 50 millimetres in the same fortnight in each of the past five years.

A wet opening to the harvest raises the chance of fruit splitting and decay in groves already short of pickable fruit.

Florida's harvest is also opening in the wet. Cropli's monitoring point in the central citrus belt at Dundee logged rainfall over the past week at about four times the seasonal norm, enough to threaten split and rotting fruit that growers can ill afford to lose.

USDA will update its Florida forecast on 12 January, the first of three revisions scheduled before the season closes. Florida citrus contributes about $6bn a year to the state's economy.