How A Single Disease Collapsed Florida's Citrus Empire

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For most of the 20th century, Florida produced over 70% of America's citrus. More than 832,000 acres of orange groves. An industry worth $9 billion. That morning glass of orange juice? It came from Florida.

Today, that empire is almost gone.

Florida went from producing 244 million boxes of oranges in 1997 to just 14.5 million today—a 94% collapse, the lowest production in more than a century. And this isn't a bad decade. This is the permanent end of Florida as America's citrus powerhouse.

The cause: a tiny insect called the Asian citrus psyllid and the incurable disease it carries. Once a tree is infected, it dies within five years. And after more than $300 million in research, scientists are still at least a decade away from a real solution.

We went to central Florida to document what's left of an agricultural empire—abandoned groves, struggling survivors, and the researchers racing to save what remains. We climbed the Florida Citrus Tower, built in 1956 to showcase endless orange groves, to see what surrounds it now: housing developments, shopping centers, and scattered patches of trees.

This is the story of how America lost its orange juice. And a warning about what monoculture, global trade, and climate change could do to other crops next.

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