CREC‘s director shares recommendations for growers looking to trim their citrus grove budgets in the face of citrus greening and a poor market.
Florida citrus growers are facing a poor market with low prices and few buyers, which leads to an effort to reduce citrus grove budgets to break even. Citrus Research and Education Center Director Michael Rogers shared recommendations for citrus growers when it comes to reducing grove budgets in a Citrus Industry article. See details below.
Advice on Citrus Grove Budgets
In the article, Rogers said, “We’ve come a long way since HLB came to Florida. We’re learning how to live with this disease and how to manage it better to increase our yields. But as everybody’s aware, we’ve got a new problem that our growers are facing right now, and it has to do with juice inventories. Oversupply is pushing our prices down. And this is weighing particularly heavy on growers right now … that don’t have contracts (for their fruit).”
Growers are looking for ways to cut costs, and while Rogers didn’t list areas to trim, he did say “If you’re committed to staying in citrus for the long term, you cannot stop managing your groves…it takes a couple of years for the trees to respond, and for health to improve and the yields to come back.”
The two areas that Rogers maintained are of vital importance are:
- Water and nutrients, including soil and leaf nutrient analysis. “It’s what you’re doing with the nutrients and water that’s really what’s keeping those groves alive and maintaining tree health, and this should absolutely be the number one consideration for growers,” he said.
- Controlling Asian citrus psyllids. “There’s still value to controlling psyllids, but we probably don’t need to be spraying as much as we have in the past,” he shared.
Rogers suggested that growers “think about fine-tuning management practices to the specific grove situation.”
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