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| 09-03-2010
Citrus greening has infected at least 1,000 trees in Polk County groves since the deadly bacterial disease arrived locally in the fall of 2007, two years after it first surfaced in Florida, The Ledger has learned.
Considering the state's largest citrus-producing county had more than 9.8 million citrus trees over 82,629 acres in the most recent 2009 count, that number might seem cause for relief among Polk growers and Florida citrus officials.
Except that nothing else suggests greening in Polk is limited to 1,000 or even a couple of thousand trees.
"I would say it would be much higher than that by some multiple," said Vic Story Jr., a Babson Park grower, president of Lakeland-based Florida Citrus Mutual, the state's largest growers' representative, and vice chairman of the Florida Citrus Commission.
Jim Graham, a soil microbiologist at the Citrus Research and Education Center in Lake Alfred and a leading greening researcher, also is sketical.
"If that's the number (of confirmed infections), it's definitely an underestimate," he said. "We're now living with greening. It (the number) is a moot point."
Greening is a deadly bacterial disease that threatens the existence of the commercial citrus industry in Florida, the state's signature agriculture commodity. No commercial citrus industry has survived in countries where the disease became widespread. It was first reported in China in the late 19th century.
Growers and greening researchers cited many reasons for the absence of any firm statistics on the number of greening-infected trees in Polk and Florida.
Read the original article from The Ledger.