STANDING ON THE CORNER, BIBLE IN HIS HAND, Jeremiah Sterling was a man possessed by the Lord. In worn, ill-fitting blue pants and workshirt, puffy patches of curly hair on his head, he paced, screaming and hollering indecipherably as if in tongues, his body and arms jerking about puppet-like, his small round face screwed up with fury. The streets were almost empty in downtown Arcadia that Thursday morning, Oct. 16. Straw men tied to lampposts for Halloween added to its ghostly dimension. A few people stared at the scene and walked the other way. After a few minutes, Mr. Sterling walked across the street toward me, calm now and smiling. I asked if he had heard of the disease that was killing Florida’s citrus trees, a terminal illness called citrus greening, or Huanglongbing (HLB), but he was there to save Man instead.

“Man has a disease,” he said. “You know what this is — sin. And the only cure is Jesus Christ and his blood.”

Kevin Shelfer with a young orange tree at his grove in Arcadia. A rootstock bred for HLB resistance, it is one of millions of new trees that Florida growers have planted to replace dead ones. EVAN WILLIAMS / FLORIDA WEEKLY I had been standing with Mr. Sterling’s friend, pastor and missionary C.E. Mainous, who had heard of the disease. Among citrus growers in the Christian, rural interior of the state, it has reached the almost biblical dimensions of plague, killing their trees and spreading to every grove in the past decade. And with no sure cure — but myriad ways to slow the disease, hopefully long enough to make a profit before the trees die — a cloud of uncertainty mixed with hope hangs over the industry. Mr. Mainous himself used to have three orange trees in his backyard. The disease took two, he figures, and one is left, a Honeybell tree.

“I don’t know if it’ll last another year or not,” he said. “If you’ve never ate a Honeybell orange you oughta get one. Fantastic. Juicy. Sweet.”

Dean Saunders at his downtown Lakeland office. The former state legislator and broker specializing in agricultural land advocates short-term financial help for citrus growers. Below: Of Florida’s more than 61 million commercial citrus trees, roughly 15 percent are young ones replanted in the past four years. EVAN WILLIAMS / FLORIDAS WEEKLY When I asked what spiritual advice he might offer growers, he said, “Pray.”

Many of them surely are, even as they wait for science to find a solution, and tend their groves more vigilantly than ever.

C.E. Mainous handed me a small pamphlet. Inside it read, “Life is very uncertain, and you have no guarantee that you will be alive this time tomorrow…” T

HE FLORIDA CITRUS BELT bands the state,” the writer John Mulliken observed in a Fort Lauderdale Sun- Sentinel article 30 years ago, “the same way a rural, Southern sheriff might wear his gunbelt — low-slung.” The description is true today. Once “clinched around the state’s midsection,” growers were forced south because of freezes, and over decades they were also squeezed inland by urban development. Now this rural, Southern belt —responsible for three-quarters of the nation’s orange crop, most of it used for notfrom concentrate juice — exists south of Interstate 4. The road is slung at an angle from Tampa up through the northwest corner of Polk County (Lakeland and the surrounding area), the geographic center of the Florida peninsula and defacto heart of the state’s signature industry. As of six years ago, the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agriculture Sciences reported that citrus had an $8.9 billion economic impact in the state and provided 75,800 jobs. The orange is the official state fruit, its juice the state drink, its trees’ heady blooms the state flower, its name gracing street signs and at least one diner in Frostproof, as well as the famous college football game held in Miami. And for the past 10 years, the citrus belt has been dying from citrus greening or Huanglongbing. That means “yellow dragon disease” in Chinese, China being the country where HLB is first known to have existed a century or more ago.

Scott Young at his grove in Alturas. Run by his family since the 1930s, the grove’s high production costs related to HLB forced the Youngs to list the land for sale. EVAN WILLIAMS / FLORIDA WEEKLY It was officially first discovered in the United States in Miami-Dade County in 2005, before appearing in Texas and California. One Florida grower told me he saw the Asian citrus psyllid (Diaphorina citri), the tiny bug that carries the bacterium (Candidatus Liberabacter asiaticus) in its saliva and feeds on citrus tree leaves, as early as 2000. UF reported that in the four years through the 2010-11 growing season, HLB cost the state 8,257 jobs and $4.5 billion in lost revenue. Since then production has only continued to drop, and it’s not clear just how many of Florida’s citrus trees are infected, scientists said, because it can take up to five years for symptoms of HLB to express in a mature tree.

“If they don’t find a cure for it soon it’s going to devastate this economy,” said Polk County Commissioner Melanie Bell.

“The HLB greening situation is very frightening to our state,” said Hendry County Commissioner Karson Turner. “Florida has been known as a citrus producer my entire life. It puts us on the map internationally. The citrus industry is on life support in many ways. Maybe life support is a strong word but it’s definitely in critical condition. It’s a bad, bad disease right now. And there’s no answer. That’s the scary thing. No way to defeat this bug that’s out there.”

Meanwhile, Americans are drinking less orange juice, which industry experts believe is tied to the rising price of juice due to lack of supply. The decline in demand is also partly a reaction to the obesity epidemic and the perception that the beverage is too high in calories and sugar. B Y ALL ACCOUNTS, THE PAST decade has been the most challenging period for Florida citrus farmers in history. By last season, the more than 200 million boxes of oranges the citrus belt produced had been cut in half, with every commercial citrus grove in the state — if not every tree — infected with HLB.

“I don’t care how strong you are on the balance sheet or personally, it’s a very difficult time for all of us,” said Paul Meador, who owns Everglades Harvesting & Hauling in LaBelle.

“All the trees in the ground now, that have been around 10 to 20 years, are pretty much all infected,” said Fran Becker, vice president of fruit procurement for Peace River Citrus Products, a large-scale orange and grapefruit growing and packing operation with the capacity to process 20 million boxes of fruit per year.

“You see (HLB) in every tree, almost,” said Kevin Shelfer, a 53-yearold grower whose family has run the 300-acre Joshua Citrus groves near Arcadia since the late 1880s. Last year, his crop was half what it was the year before. On a tour of his groves, his wife, Lynn, pointed out that a side effect of HLB is a spike in salesmen pushing nutrients and chemicals designed to save their trees.

“Kevin gets phone calls all the time,” she said. “It’s like in the old days, everybody has a snake oil.”

Some may help more or less — it can be hard to tell. One of the frustrating aspects of HLB is that what works in one part of the state, or in one grove, or even from one tree to the next, isn’t always consistent.

“There’s a lot of uncertainty because we’re not sure the trees will keep going like they are,” said grower Bobby Mixon about the citrus trees on his 1,600 acres (some devoted to cattle) in Hardee and DeSoto counties. “I think the majority of growers is going to come up with a way to overcome it. That’s my feeling. I’m not giving up on it anyhow, and most growers aren’t. We think the citrus industry’s going to be here. I’m optimistic we’ll overcome the greening somewhere down the road. We’ll learn to live with it until we overcome it.”

But there has also been an increase in growers abandoning their groves or selling them, especially smaller operations that can’t afford the high upfront costs of caring for trees with HLB. Smaller or “marginal” producers who control maybe a few hundred acres, “those folks are gone,” said Carey Soud, who was one of them. His family harvested citrus on about 150 acres until a few years ago when a freeze killed off his trees, already weakened by HLB.

Mr. Carey, who is also president of First Bank of Clewiston, pointed out that HLB has affected lending. “We did a good bit of citrus lending up until really the past year,” he said.

Now the bank is mostly “not looking to do any citrus loans. There’s not a whole lot of confidence in the credit sector that you can plant a tree and control greening and have a viable citrus operation.”

HLB SHUTS DOWN AN orange or grapefruit tree’s vascular system during the course of roughly five to 10 years. The tree, unable to deliver nutrients through its roots and up into the fruit, becomes progressively weaker and dies. Costly, coordinated treatments of pesticides to reduce the psyllid population and a variety of nutrients to baby the sick plant have been found to keep many trees alive longer. But even with constant attention, it is not known how long growers can keep a tree with HLB in remission and the tree economically viable.

It could take five years for a young tree to produce fruit and 10 to 15 to reach maximum yield. Historically, trees last 30 or 40 years, with heritage trees 80 and older in some places. But with HLB, that productive life could be reduced to 10 or 20 years at best, making it harder to break even on total costs. Because it is believed that most of Florida’s mature citrus trees now have the HLB virus, industry professionals are working under the assumption that the existing crop will die out by roughly 2025 unless a cure is discovered.

That’s why researchers and growers stress the importance of replanting and protecting new trees. Indeed, groves throughout the state are dotted with young citrus trees that have come fresh from nurseries.

“The maturely established groves… it’s safe to say a large majority of those trees are infected,” said Michael Rogers, an entomologist, associate professor and interim director of the University of Florida’s Citrus Research and Education Center in Lake Alfred, at the northern edge of Polk County. “And that’s why the tree replanting is so important because we know we are going to be losing a lot of these trees in the next five to 10 years. If we didn’t replant, 10 years from now we won’t have a citrus crop because of this disease.”

Today, almost 15 percent of Florida’s 515,000 acres of commercial citrus are trees that have come from nurseries in the past four years, Mr. Rogers estimates. That is based on the maximum number of trees a nursery can produce per year. Growers who can afford to stay in the business now are replanting at such a high rate that nurseries are all by and large on backorder, an indication of both optimism and that growers have little other choice. Many of the young trees are experimental rootstalks that may have a stronger tolerance for HLB.

“That doesn’t mean they’re not going to be infected but they seem to hold up and last longer,” Mr. Rogers said. “These are some of the first generation of new plant material that are coming through the breeding program.”

As an HLB-positive tree sickens, it produces less fruit, and a portion of the citrus fruit, unable to be sustained by an infected tree, drops to the ground while still green, before it has a chance to ripen. HLB, its “fruit drop” and other symptoms such as yellowing leaves account for the lion’s share of Florida’s enormous loss of production in the last decade, industry experts say. But the disease has also made the weakened trees — the leaves thinning out, skeletal branches appearing, the roots weakening, mirroring what happens above ground — far more susceptible to a long list of other diseases and pests, including freezes and canker.

“If people are taking care of the trees they can make a good profit,” said Mongi Zekri, a University of Florida IFAS citrus extension agent. “We have groves that have been infected since 2006 and they have been producing the same crop, almost the same yield.”

But he adds, “If you cause any stress to the trees, the tree will decline really drastically. A long time ago if you get greedy with the trees, they will still produce a decent crop, but nowadays, you have to spend money (on pesticide, fertilizer and management). You can spend money or you can stop but you cannot stay in the middle, because any kind of stress can cause the fruit to drop on the ground before it reaches maturity.”

SCOTT YOUNG’S GRANDFATHER established a grove in Alturas, a semi-rural Polk County community of about 4,200 just east of Bartow, near the start of the Great Depression. Polk County produces more citrus on more acreage than any other county in the state.

The Young family plans to keep a small portion of their roughly 500 acres “as a nucleus,” and sell the rest, said Mr. Young, who is 57. “We can’t hang on in the current situation.”

But it hasn’t sold yet, and for now he is still running the grove along with his family. His mother, Wanda, does the bookkeeping.

“We’re keepin’ on keepin’ on, that’s the best way to put it. And we’re praying for a miracle,” he said, talking with me in a barn filled with memorabilia, including an old Wurlitzer jukebox with a picture of the New York City skyline, including the Twin Towers, on the front. Governors and senators have hosted meetings at this barn, Mr. Young told me. His thoughts seemed to drift for a moment and he said, as much to himself as me, “(HLB) could run its course. Who knows.”

Mr. Young sees the problem through his father’s eyes as well. “It’s kind of disheartening to live your life and build up an empire and watch it go out when you’re going out,” he said.

For his father, Leland, who was out back working on a mechanical part of some kind —his ability to fix brokendown vehicles apparently legendary — uncertainty defines the disease: the feeling of feeling your way in the dark, that in spite of your own best knowledge and the best efforts of science, your efforts may be in vain. When his son asked him if he had anything to say to a reporter about greening he said, “I don’t know anything about it. Nobody does.”

“We’re fighting blind,” his son said.

After a moment, his father walked over to where we were standing in the storied barn, talking, his body moving in a way that was wooden but forceful. He flashed a smile, revealing a surprising row of perfect, straight white teeth. “I’ve been growing for more than 60 years,” he added. “I did a pretty good job of it and now I can’t. That’s what I know.”

As a grower, his son has battled one pest after another, but nothing like this. The only thing he can compare it to is the boll weevil beetle, which his relatives once faced.

“They came from Georgia where the boll weevil ran them out of the cotton industry,” Mr. Young said — and they came to Alturas and founded his citrus grove. “So it’s kind of happening again. But we’re a tough bunch.”

DEAN SAUNDERS, A FORMER state legislator who has for years run a large real estate practice specializing in agricultural land, put me in touch with the Young family when I visited his expansive, third-floor office in downtown Lakeland earlier that day. Born in Clermont, Mr. Saunders graduated from the University of Florida — where he was a member of the Citrus Club — with a degree in fruit crops, food and resource economics. He served as a Democrat in the state House of Representatives between 1992 and 1996, before establishing his current brokerage.

“The small guys (growers) can’t afford to keep going, paying the money they are for production costs,” he said. “There’s a paradigm where the small guys are getting out and some of the larger guys want to get larger and see an opportunity: you know there’s always an opportunity with this stuff. I think everybody is optimistic that we will get some solution and some resolution but the question is when and can people survive between now and then?”

He sums up the problem for a smaller grower: “I was producing 400 boxes to the acre now I’m producing around 200 and I’m afraid I’m less than 200. They start doing the math. It’s costing you close to $2,000 per acre to grow it now and if you’ve only got 200 boxes of fruit, those economics don’t work.”

With citrus production hovering at about 100 million boxes per year, Mr. Saunders said, “the infrastructure around the industry is now going to have stresses and strains on it. And so you couple all those things with declining juice consumption — there’s just a lot of things going on as far as a perfect storm in the industry. But again where some people see doom and gloom or some people just are faced with the reality of what’s going on with their individual groves, other people see some opportunities maybe to expand their acreage at some point in the future.”

Mr. Saunders also believes government, including Florida legislators, should consider short-term financial help for grove owners intended to “stabilize” the citrus-processing infrastructure by offering growers a way to produce at lower costs, thereby lowering the cost for consumers and making orange juice a more attractive choice.

“I’m not an advocate of long-term government intervention at all,” he said. “But if there’s a time and place for (short-term intervention), it’s now. We need to start talking about it now.”

FOR FLORIDIANS WHO WORK IN the citrus business, including some 8,000 growers, their families, friends and neighbors, living under the cloud of HLB has become routine.

“That’s kind of old news, isn’t it?” said one of a group of men from this crowd in downtown Arcadia. They filter in to Wheeler’s diner almost every morning about 5 a.m. for breakfast, said a waitress there. Most of them know about the citrus business, she’d heard “bits and pieces” of conversation about greening, and suggested I might speak with them.

Walking along the dark streets at 5:40, I met the disciple Jeremiah Sterling, the possessed man who responded to my question about citrus greening with proselytism. Wheeler’s open door glowed. Inside the small bright room, early morning conversations percolated. A rotating group of men, a few middle-aged but most with roughened faces and silver hair, were hunched around two tables. None of them agreed to give their names to the reporter who showed up unexpectedly so early in the day. They were cagey about revealing their occupations. A few may have been politicians, another said he was a grower who housed seasonal grove workers (“slumlord” his friends goaded him) but later seemed to deny it; another’s brother was a grower, one was in the funeral business, and so on. Yet, they let me have breakfast with them nonetheless and suggested others I might speak with. They paused for a brief, almost unnoticeable but distinct moment of silent prayer before digging in to eggs, bacon, grits, buttered toast and conversation.

“You get rid of oranges in this county and we’re in trouble — it’s citrus and cattle,” said one of the men, the only clearly identifiable member of the group, a highway patrolman in uniform. Earlier in his life he had considered being a grower, but he shakes his head at the idea now. You couldn’t give him a grove for free.

The one whose brother is in the business thinks groves will be largely wiped out within 10 years.

“A lot of people are more optimistic than I am,” he conceded, speculating about other things that could be grown instead of citrus trees: marijuana, nuts, grapes.

“Who knows, you might be able to grow cocoa beans,” he said, or coffee.

To date, researchers and growers said they have not found any alternative to take the place of citrus.

One man walked in later than the others, shortly after 6 a.m. He recounted learning to drive in citrus groves, hunting rabbits in them, and getting a job picking fruit and watering trees, along with his wife, almost 60 years ago when they were newlyweds.

“It was a different town back then,” he said. “It was a different country.”

AS FALL BEGINS, GROWERS continue to weather uncertainty as they wait for what could be, at least according to U.S. Department of Agriculture predictions, a year in which production stops hemorrhaging. Because of ideal growing conditions, a rainy summer and babied trees, many groves look as full and loaded with fruit now as they ever have. But even the best-looking trees may carry the HLB virus, and as much as they try to put it in remission, as nice as the trees look now, it could potentially cause a lot of the fruit on them to drop off before it’s harvested in the next few months.

Growers’ bid to delay the death of trees is matched only by a vast, sustained effort by the scientific community. The Citrus Research and Development Foundation was founded in 2009 to raise money to fund HLB research. It has already spent more than $92 million and partnered with experts all over the world (HLB is a threat to citrus farmers everywhere). The foundation is funding 130 projects at public and private institutions, including more than two dozen universities in the U.S. In spite of all this, a “silver bullet” solution to the disease has eluded them.

There is still no cure, no antibiotic, no disease-immune rootstalk, or genetically engineered tree whose genes are not susceptible to the bacterium. But researchers leading the effort, as well as some growers, believe they have found a toolbox full of methods to keep trees alive at least long enough to stay economically viable, pulling the citrus industry back from the edge of an apparent widespread collapse.

“Long term like with most problems in agriculture, it’s kind of a system integration where you adjust a bunch of things and collectively it solves a problem,” said Harold Browning, the foundation’s chief operations officer. S

SINCE HLB APPEARED IN THE United States, knowledge about it has exploded.

“We’ve learned more in the past seven or eight years than has been learned in 100 years elsewhere,” said entomologist Mr. Rogers. “We’ve had so many scientists working on this we’ve really come a long way in how to deal with and manage this disease. We’ve got some of these new rootstocks that are out there that are a little more tolerant now, and people see there is a future for citrus industry in Florida. If you want to stay in this industry, you’ve got to replant and move forward.”

One of the most successful means of slowing HLB has been coordinated pesticide sprays across numerous groves under different ownership, or Citrus Health Management Areas. That helps prevent psyllids from grove hopping from a recently treated field to an untreated one. There are now 52 CHMAs in the state. The program began in 2011.

“Since that time we’ve seen about a 60 percent reduction in psyllid population statewide,” Mr. Rogers said.

The UF Citrus Research and Education Center (not to be confused with the Citrus Research and Development Foundation, also in Lake Alfred) has studied all aspects of citrus exclusively for close to a century, but its more than 20 faculty members are now all focusing on HLB. Until his current administrative role, Mr. Rogers studied how psyllids breed and transmit the pathogen (bacterium) to trees.

“All the faculty here has transitioned their programs to focus on citrus greening research,” said Mr. Rogers. “It’s the most important problem facing our industry right now. “There have been a lot of diseases that have come through the industry and said this will be the disease that will wipe out the industry.

But greening is a little bit different. It’s origins are back more than 100 years in Asian countries — despite the fact that this disease has been out there nobody has found a cure for it. It’s considered to be the most dangerous (disease affecting citrus trees) worldwide.”

One of the largest stumbling blocks to finding a way to control the HLB pathogen is that so far it can only be studied in a natural setting, making gold-standard scientific research impossible.

“Here we’re trying to find a way to cure and prevent this disease, but we haven’t even cultured the disease in a laboratory,” Mr. Rogers said.

Too, the psyllid that spreads the disease has a high rate of reproduction. A female can lay 800 eggs in a short period, with the population exploding in just a few weeks.

“It only takes one psyllid feeding on a healthy tree which begins the process of the death of that tree,” he said. “We have to have pretty much perfect psyllid control. Our goal is to eliminate all the psyllids.”

A tree bred to be disease tolerant or a genetically engineered tree — such as adding a gene from spinach that would make it immune to HLB — offer two of the most promising long-term solutions to greening.

“I think one of the biggest hindrances of (genetic engineering) is trying to get the public to understand there’s nothing wrong with a genetically modified citrus,” Mr. Rogers said.

Among numerous short-term methods to keep trees productive are heat or steam therapies that temporarily raise the temperature of the tree enough to kill off bacteria inside it.

ON FRIDAY EVENING NEAR Frostproof, I turned off the road and took a smaller road around a bend, and then an even smaller road that was paved but in disrepair. The citrus trees on both sides were so thick and tall, the branches heavy with large clusters of perfect green oranges — green as they should be before harvest season, roughly November through May — the dark shiny leaves so thick on the branches that they almost completely blocked out the evening sun dropping behind them. And then I came to a field that stood out starkly from the rest. The rows of orange trees were almost all skeletons, nearly fruitless. At the front of this ghost grove were staked two small signs, each one a picture of a cross, like a roadside memorial for the state’s dying groves and its embattled growers. The quiet and peacefulness was overwhelming, and I lay down in the grass to get a good angle on some pictures of the crosses.

After a few moments a white truck rambled up over a small hill at the crest of the grove and down one of the alleys toward me. I got up and stood by the road. The truck pulled up and the driver beckoned for me to open the passenger side door. Bob Harvey had not been expecting company. Shirtless and with his white hair somewhat disheveled, he regarded me with only the faintest hint of suspicion, and said he was just taking out the garbage and then he’d talk with me.

He and his wife own 10 acres, and they’re surrounded by big growers, companies that manage thousands of acres, Mr. Harvey said. They pour enormous amounts of money into keeping the trees healthy, while he hasn’t tended his 10-acre plot since Hurricane Charley wiped out his irrigation system in 2004. After that, citrus greening sped up the process of killing the trees, he believes. He and his wife used to make around $10,000 per year from its produce but now that has been reduced to spending money for the Harveys, who enjoy eating out. Even this stark-looking grove produces enough for that. His wife will pick a few bushels and sell them at a market. One boon of letting the trees take their natural course is that their Valencia oranges qualify as certified organic.

As it turns out, the crosses were not a memorial or prayer for dying trees, at least not intentionally. Mr. Harvey explained that he and his wife are also deeply religious, and their driveway runs up through the orange grove. They put out the crosses to mark a spot that company can find when they come to visit. ¦

Orange you glad you know

>> A box of oranges or “field box” weighs 90 pounds, and is the equivalent of 1 and 3/5 bushel, two-compartment open-top wooden container used in the field to hold citrus fruits during harvesting operations. The same box of grapefruit weighs 85 pounds; tangerines 95 pounds.

>> Crop estimate: a monthly appraisal of crop size, issued by the United States Department of Agriculture. The first estimate of citrus production — the number of boxes picked — is announced in early October each year, with updates through July. This October’s estimate for oranges was 108 million boxes out of a total of 160.5 million boxes in the United States; 15 million boxes of grapefruits; 9 million boxes of tangelos; and 2.8 million boxes of Tangerines.

>> Truckload: 1,000 4/5 bushel containers (commonly known as corrugated cardboard) of fresh citrus fruits.

— Source: Florida Citrus Mutual and USDA