Word: florida
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...made for this night, Story chattered by push-to-talk cell phone with his father Vic and brother Matthew, who were operating pumps on other tracts of the family's 5,000 acres (2023 hectares) of oranges, tangerines and grapefruits, which lie across four counties in central Florida. When Matthew radioed in that some of his pump pipes had frozen, a setback that could result in a good deal of lost fruit, Kyle summoned a stoic voice and replied, "We can only do what...
...that decade's citrus-killing winter freezes. But the moniker has been sorely tested during this month's Arctic blast, not so much because of the plummeting nighttime temps but because of how long they're lasting this year - almost two continuous weeks so far. And that has Florida farmers as well as American consumers fretful about lower harvests and higher prices for everything from orange juice to strawberries in the coming year...
...Storys' fruit damage from that night and morning - which was forecast to be the worst of the spell - was in the 2% to 5% range, not great but hardly catastrophic. But elsewhere around the state, farmers haven't been so lucky. According to Florida Agriculture Department spokesman Terence McElroy, a full assessment won't be known for days or weeks, but "we hear anecdotally that there has been substantial losses in tropical fish, significant damage to the fern industry, and citrus - especially in the northern counties - has sustained damage." The same is true, he says, in South Florida for vegetables...
...Sunshine State has a $103 billion stake in agriculture, second only to tourism. At this make-or-break stage in the state's growing season, there are $300 million worth of crops in the ground, on the trees or in the ponds. (Florida is also the second largest supplier of tropical fish.) On Jan. 10, the Storys, who own one of the largest grower and grove caretaker companies in the county, had $500,000 in potential citrus loss on the line: the fruit's juice sacs start to rupture if they are exposed to freezing temperature for too long...
...past frosts are any gauge, that shouldn't raise U.S. juice prices by more than 2 to 3 cents a gallon, especially since Florida has hundreds of millions of gallons of the stuff stored in reserve tanks. Noncitrus fruits like strawberries, however, which have also been hard hit this month in Florida, are another story: their price per pound is forecast to rise significantly...