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Growers Faced Many Losses This Season | 6-25-09

Rumors of the death of the Florida citrus industry have been greatly exaggerated, Mike Sparks told journalists at the beginning of his annual "State of Florida Citrus" address Thursday.

Tongues will continue wagging, however, until the industry conquers its No. 1 threat, citrus greening.

"Certainly the first words that come to mind is a sense of urgency," said Sparks, the chief executive at Lakeland-based Florida Citrus Mutual, the state's largest growers' representative. "The spread of (greening) makes it the most serious disease on the planet. It's put a $9 billion industry at risk."

The Sparks address came at the Florida Citrus Industry Annual Conference hosted by Citrus Mutual in Bonita Springs.

Greening is a fatal bacterial disease that has spread to every commercial citrus county in Florida, he said. Because many citrus growers won't replant groves destroyed by greening, it's a factor in the continuing decline of citrus acreage and fruit production across the state.

The just completed 2008-09 Florida citrus season has been particularly tough because, while greening increases grove caretaking costs, many growers of oranges, the state's largest citrus commodity, sold this season's crop at a loss.

Sparks put the growers' break-even point for juice oranges at $1.25 per pound solids, a measure of how much juice processors squeeze from the fruit. Processors, who buy 95 percent of Florida oranges, pay based on pound solids.

But the cash-market price, paid for fruit delivered to the processor's door on the spot, hovered around 80 cents to 90 cents per pound solids for most of the season, Sparks said.

Factors holding down farm prices this season include high inventories of juice from previous seasons held by Florida processors and declining U.S. retail OJ sales, Sparks said. Those highlight the need for stronger OJ marketing at the Florida Department of Citrus.

But, he added, "if we don't beat greening, we simply won't have a product to sell."

In morning seminars at the conference, growers got a complicated picture of current federal immigration reform efforts from Brian Koji of the Tampa law firm of Allen, Norton and Blue PA.

The Obama administration has announced a shift in immigration policy to enforcement actions against employers who "hire illegal immigrants to drive down wages," Koji said.

The previous Bush administration had targeted the workers themselves, he said. Administrative actions rose from 25 cases in 2002 to 4,077 cases in 2007.

The Bush administration also attempted to toughen the rules that allowed employers to retain workers after receiving "no-match letters" from the Social Security Administration. That notifies employers the worker's name and Social Security number don't match its records.

However, opponents successfully challenged the new rule in federal court, he said. A subsequent Department of Homeland Security revision returns to the old law.

But employers still need to strictly follow new procedures for filling out the new DHS I-9 forms and dealing with no-match letters to avoid legal liability, Koji said.

The Obama administration also quashed a last-minute Bush reform dealing with the federal H-2A program, which allows agriculture employers to bring in temporary foreign workers legally. The Bush reform, favored by Florida citrus and other agriculture groups, eliminated H-2A red tape.

Click here to read the original article from FDOC Grower.