Officials in Miami-Dade County are dealing with an infestation of the Asian fruit fly; it has not spread beyond Miami-Dade, but citrus growers through the whole state still face another issue: citrus greening.
To find out how greening is still affecting the crop, WMNF recently spoke with Larry Black, general manager of the Peace River Packing Company, which owns 2,000 acres of citrus near the Polk County community of Ft. Meade.
“Right, it’s a big challenge on the grow side. We are faced with very high input costs to grow our crops: to manage both the insect vector that transmits citrus greening from tree to tree and also the nutritional therapies that we’re using to maintain the trees’ productivity for the trees that are infected by greening, which by some estimates are 80-90 percent of the trees in the state are impacted by greening.”
And in your fields do you have that similar percentage?
“We do.”
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