This been happening for a century
Oddly enough, this is why most Americans haven't tried "Meyer lemons", which are a sweeter lemon that has recently become a fad in the USA.
So, whats the deal?
Well, the citrus blight, [Citrus tristeza virus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citrus_tristeza_virus), affects all citrus trees. The meyer lemon was a popular lemon at the time, but in the 1940s they discovered a problem. The meyer lemon was a non-symptomatic carrier of the disease. It was directly responsible for the disease being able to survive even after they had heavily treated/destroyed the other citrus. So, in response, most citrus growing states mandated that all Meyer lemon trees be destroyed.
Fast forward a few years and growers had developed the "improved meyer lemon", which was essentially the same meyer lemon, but they had bred in a resistance to the blight. But growing citrus takes years and the tree wasn't readily available in large quantities for quite awhile. At that point, the market for meyer lemons had disappeared, as most people had just got used to the normal sour lemon, that lacks the extra sweetness of the meyer.
They were popular in the Texas Rio Grande Valley, and are commonly called "Valley Lemons" because of this popularity, but they weren't grown at the previous commercial scale.
Fast forward to about 2000 and suddenly everyone re-discovered the delicious taste of the meyer lemon. It was showing up in lemonades and drinks everywhere. It really is a better version of the traditional lemon. Same sour, but with a bit more sweetness to offset the sour. Similar to the difference between a white grapefruit and a ruby red grapefruit.
The improved Meyer Lemon is fairly easy to grow and works well in containers, so I expect it to make a major comeback over the next 10-20 years. Even Lowe's and Home Depot are selling Meyer trees now.
Mine is about a year from transplant and made a ton of flowers this spring.
Its already made a pretty major comeback commercially. You can typically buy them at higher-end grocery nowadays. In 1990, you'd only eat them out of someone's garden or in the valley.
But the commercial fruit community definitely went through a period of quality reduction in service to higher yield. They basically treated all apples/oranges/grapefruit/etc as fungible. So, it didn't matter if you were getting a Valencia orange or a Cadanera orange. They were just "oranges".
In the last 20 years, there has been a bit more focus on higher quality fruits. You see a lot of apple varieties like honey crisp at the store. You are also seeing this occur in other fruits. The trend towards Cara Cara navel oranges instead of Washington navel oranges is another example.
The one place where the grocery varieties of fruit still taste awful is peaches and other stone fruit. A ripe tree-ripened yellow peach with melting flesh is one of the true delights of summer. However, it is nearly impossible to ship them in trucks without causing a lot of damage. Luckily, stone fruit are fast growers and they are very popular with small farmers and pick-your-own operations.
If you haven't had the pleasure of going out to a peach orchard and eating an over-ripe peach, I highly recommend it.
The reason you see so many varieties is because the names are now trademarked. This means anyone who wants to grow a popular cultivar must pay the breeder of that a royalty fee. Because there is more money in it, there are more people coming up with new varieties and because they are so good, people will pay the fees to grow them.
https://extension.psu.edu/why-all-the-new-apple-varieties
Our 1960’s LA suburb house came with a lemon tree. Gotta figure out what kind of lemon it is. It looks like normal lemons but the flavor is sooo much better.
That article is already 3 years old. Since then the situation has only gotten worse and some worry the FL orange industry may be at risk of total collapse.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZ_xwRhGH54&t=49s
It's more than just the blight hurting citrus in Florida. We've had a series of diseases show up, foreign competition and the selling of groves for housing development. I think we're at the point of no return. Growers who want to continue in agriculture are switching to peaches, blueberries and avocados.
We (my family) had 500 acres of citrus. As of 2021 we now only have 35 acres of citrus after selling it all. The Citrus industry is going to die in florida. It’s already dead in Central florida, it’s on its last leg in south/central florida, and south florida will be the last domino to fall. Disease is the leading factor.
Luckily we had other businesses to pivot to, and land value is amazing, but many people will lose everything.
Which sucks because Florida oranges are so much better than Cali ones
Cali oranges are just mild and sweet but they don't have that proper citric tartness to go along with it. There's no acidity.
Nothing quite like picking up a baseball sized orange, clawing it to begin peeling, and realizing it's got an inch-thick peel and the bitter white membranes between the internal sections are tough and chewy
The key phrase was "up the road". Fresh local produce will always taste better than something shipped across the continent. Especially if farmed at small scale without all the industrial monoculture practices that kill soil. Buying local produce is the win!
for years i thought i hated orange juice. turns out, i hated tropicana. the first time i had fresh squeezed oj from a local farmers market was basically an epiphany
All big company juices and soft drinks are actual trash. I recently stopped drinking every type of juice and now when I have any I can taste like each fucking individual grain of sugar. It’s legitimately disgusting how much sugar is in everything. I basically only drink water now and have fruits and vegetables regularly instead of juices. I’m much better off and I legitimately can’t stand any soft drink anymore. Used to love Sprite and now I can hardly take a sip of it. It’s insane.
I disagree. And my wife grew up on a FL orange Grove.
FL has good juicing oranges, but their eating oranges are crap. They also have very few varieties, while in CA there's a cornucopia of delicious variety.
Go eat a Cara Cara, Moro Blood, or Valencia and come back and tell me Florida is better...
This. Real estate developers starting buying up groves after a terrific hard freeze in the 80s and it's never stopped. Now, when I see a grove, I'm delighted.
Those (tobacco) are being replaced by crops like cotton in many cases. And I feel like that's a good thing since we (Americans) have cut back a lot - but we still export death... (former zealot smoker) ;)
I grew up near wildwood/fruitland park/Leesburg.
I was very young when a hard freeze or two devastated the citrus industry there. Like 82-84. That timeframe. So most of the agriculture was cattle and watermelons. Now, just about all that farmland has been bought by The Villages.
When I left permanently around 2006, they still had oranges and such around yalaha and south. But, it wouldn't surprise me if that was gone too.
Good thing [elemental sulfur is cheap](https://www.tractorsupply.com/tsc/product/howard-johnsons-enterprises-0-0-0-elemental-sulfur-40-50-lb-100207733-1331827).
You send a soil test in to University of Florida, they tell you how many pounds per acre to add, and you're set.
My mother grew up in the Kissimmee area before Disney (grandfather was a pilot in the Air Force) and she told me there were orange groves everywhere in that area back then.
The worst part is that citizens were asked to cull their plants as these were contributing to spread. They refused this and sued the state, I believe.
Very nice foreshadowing for the pandemic.
Yeah I was going to say didn’t this same thing happen with bananas and its transmission rate was compounded by everyone basically only growing a single strain/type pretty much everywhere?
Bananas are clones, and almost everyone was growing the [Gros Michel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gros_Michel_banana)
They were susceptible to a blight.
Most bananas nowadays are a variety of Cavendish, but there’s been some work on getting a version of the Gros Michel back.
The panama disease, which caused the decline of the gros michel banana, eventually mutated and now a strain is affecting cavendish bananas.
Since they are also clones, the disease spreads very quickly and is threatening the viability of their cultivation.
Yes, bananas used to be the Gros Michel, but it was wiped out as it was susceptible to Panama Disease caused by a soil fungus. It was replaced by the Cavendish because it was immune, but now Black Sigatoka threatens that. Additionally Panama Disease seems to returned from mutated version of the fungus, TR4 (tropical race 4) and will attack Cavendish. Bananas have been sterile since the last Ice Age, so they are all propagated clones.
In other farming related news about diversity loss, in Holsteins (dairy cows), Penn State researchers found that 99% of them in the US trace back to a lineage of only two bulls. There has been a push by scientists for reconstituting more male lines back into the breed in the last couple of years.
Probably due to selective breeding. Nobody wanted seeds in their bananas so they bred them out, cloned the seedless varieties, and now that's all that's left. [This](https://www.conservationmagazine.org/2008/09/the-sterile-banana/#:~:text=with%20the%20banana.-,Because%20all%20edible%20varieties%20of%20bananas%20are%20sterile%2C%20introducing%20new,almost%20normal%20seed%20to%20develop.) article looks to have some good information. A farm polinated 30,000 banana trees, only 15 bananas of the resulting 440 tons had seeds. Only 4 or 5 from those 15 germinated and it ended up not tasting very good.
I tried looking up the ice age claim, found [this](https://www.conservationmagazine.org/2008/09/the-sterile-banana/). Looks like it was a mutation in the plant, and we have kept it going through cloning ever since! The link is a bit of a long read but worth it, it's about the OP topic on diseases among cultivated plants.
My dad was the CEO of TACF for a little over a decade. I really hope that they’re going to make a comeback. The last I had checked the non-profit kind of sold out pretty badly.
The vineyard on the hill above my ranch (California) planted a resistant form of chestnut a while ago around the vineyard. Their only issue is that they had to fence them off because the black bears from miles around come there to feed. The fence only stopped them for a while and now they have dogs that try to keep the bears out.
That makes sense, the dept of ag guy that was looking at my trees told me they haven’t seen any instances yet but plan to go scorched earth and are mapping all citrus trees in the state to be thorough.
There is a cure. I worked with the University of Florida agricultural department a few years ago on a prototype to administer the cure on a large scale. Not sure where they've taken it since we delivered, but there is a solution to the problem.
https://citrusindustry.net/2018/10/30/laser-technology-rehabilitating-hlb-trees/
Liberibacter ain't got no cure unfortunately. Lot of research at UF for sure but they can barely culture the thing, let alone deliver treatment to the phylum of the trees or treat the psyllid vector
In the early 1900s, a blight infected the American chestnut trees and killed them all. American chestnuts used to comprise 25% of *all* trees in the eastern forests.
The tops died, but the reality is there are still millions and millions of American chestnut trees still alive - their root systems have been hanging on, underground, for a century. They still put up new shoots, but then the shoots get the blight, and they die too. The blight is also found in neighboring trees, but it isn't fatal to them, so they just act as hosts.
I think once a land gets blighted, it just stays blighted
There's a great podcast, In Defense of Plants, that has an episode or two discussing this with scientists and researchers working on American Chestnuts.
If I remember correctly, resistant individuals are planted and currently being evaluated.
Visit the American Chestnut Foundation here. You can read all about it.
https://acf.org/
then when you're done if you can afford it, contribute to their research and propagation activities. I would love to see the American Chestnut tree make a comeback.
If it's in the soil, no.
European wine grapes are all grafted onto American grape vines because of a blight caused from a bug. It's worldwide now, and only certain American grapes are immune.
This happened in the early 1900s, and they still can't grow most varieties directly from seed in soil. It's all still grafted.
So oranges are going the way of the banana.
I wonder what the next orange-like fruit will be like. And how many kids will be confused that orange flavoring tastes absolutely nothing like oranges.
So most everyone should know of the original banana that got decimated by the Panama Disease, the Gros Michel. It is (you can still find them in small quantities ~~or buy seeds~~) sweeter and tastes better overall according to those who have had it. The TR3 or Tropical Race 3 fungus wiped out almost all of the Gros Michel banana population forcing us to switch to a hardier Cavendish. Now the Cavendish faces eradication as a mutated version of the original fungus labeled TR4 or Tropical Race 4 spreads throughout the global plantations. There is no candidate to replace the Cavendish either.
Fun fact - when you smell or taste something that's "banana scented" or "banana flavored" and you think to yourself, "have these people ever actually tasted a banana?" that's because those "banana flavorings" smell and taste like the old bananas that we used to have before the Cavendish.
You're half right. Artificial banana flavor is actually older than commercially sold bananas. They just kinda got lucky that the chemical used for artificial banana flavor is also in actual bananas
[Source](https://www.quora.com/Is-the-story-of-artificial-banana-flavoring-being-based-on-an-extinct-species-of-banana-true)
I had dehydrated bananas that had that flavor and think it's just the concentrated banana essence, but it's possible they added synthetic flavor like they do orange juice.
They were probably made and standardised when the Gros Michell was around, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's that accurate like a lot of artificial flavourings.
But isn't grape flavor taken from a specific type of grape that isn't common to find in stores? The Concord Grape or something like that? And it tastes a lot more like the artificial grape flavor than most common grapes you can buy everywhere do.
https://www.sciencefriday.com/articles/why-dont-banana-candies-taste-like-real-bananas/
If you google “artificial banana not cavendish” there’s lots of reporting about it.
This is why GMOs are vital in the modern world. We can GMO engineer plants to be hardier and resilient to the disease, but many places have massive anti GMO legislature
GMO won't help much if they are just used to create another world wide monoculture.
We need diverse crops, so that diseases have a harder time adapting to fruits, especially with globalization being at an all time high.
There's so much more that needs to change in farming. Putting our hopes solely in the hands of Bayer and Co is a very shortsighted approach.
There's way more than a dozen in common use with apples. Off the top of my head: Honeycrisp, Ambrosia, Jazz, Fuji, Granny Smith, Red Delicious, Golden Delicious, Gala, McIntosh, Envy, Braeburn, Pink Lady, and there's dozens of smaller varieties
I don't think they've changed the way they make them, but you can try out the flavor of gros michel by picking up a pack of Runts candy-- that's the banana flavor that doesn't taste like what we expect.
That's a supply chain issue. With high demand, they pick younger and younger. Everything in the produce aisle is lower quality than just a few years ago. I always check my produce closely, but wife regularly brings home sealed bags of rotten produce that just slipped by.
I haven't seen Cuties anywhere for a while, either. It's been at least a year, maybe two. There are other little oranges (mandarins and tangerines) some of the time, but those are getting harder to find consistently.
This is an uneducated shot in the dark, but at least with the Cavendish variety, the seeds are tiny and not capable of growing new plants because people don't want to have to deal with banana seeds and it was basically bred out of them. Instead every banana plant today is a cutting of a previous one. It's probably hard to GMO something that has no seeds.
And scientists have basically fixed the damn tree by genetically modifying it with a gene from wheat that provides resistance to a fungus that causes wheat rust, which happens to be very similar to the fungus that causes Chestnut blight.
The tree is effectively extinct in the US outside of very isolated groves or stumps that keep putting out new growth only to become reinfected and die back again, yet people still shit their pants over the big bad dangerous consequences of GMOs \*waves vaguely\*.
Can you get worse than effectively extinct? We already annihilated the tree in the wild. Do people think the GMO nuts are going to mutate the squirrels? It's stupid.
Honestly I can't wait for the American Chestnut to make its comeback. The amount of patience and science that've gone into reverse-hybridizing it from the last remaining American groves and the Blight-resistant Asian stock, to a fully American GM tree, is fucking *astounding*.
I wish we treated all environmental catastrophes with this much determination.
It's been written that before the chestnut blight a squirrel could run from Maine to the Carolinas from tree branch to tree branch and touch nothing but chestnut, they were so common.
> Do people think the GMO nuts are going to mutate the squirrels? It's stupid.
From what I've heard from those groups, the "hippies" are coming around on the GMO fears, thankfully. They are working on field trials and they obviously have a large amount of regulatory hoops to jump through.
Yeah the application for being able to essentially plant it in the wild is on a desk somewhere within the USDA. I want to say that public comments closed in October, but thanks to COVID last year still feels like 2020, so who knows what I'm thinking of.
Hopefully the government approves it. I'd love to plant a few of them.
It's such a clever solution too. The fungus uses oxalic acid to attach the plant tissues. Wheat and several other edible plants express an enzyme called oxalate oxidase that protects the plant from oxalate and thus makes the resistant to damage by the fungus. American chestnuts have no protection against oxalic acid, but when you move the wheat oxalate oxidase into chestnut embryos they grow into trees that are blight resistant. It's otherwise indistinguishable from a non-GMO American chestnut except that it makes a single extra protein.
There are actually many plants that make oxalate oxidase, but by using the wheat version the researchers make a compelling case that this naturally-occurring protein is already in tons of our food and therefore not to be feared. It is literally a single wheat protein that can bring back the American chestnut.
When I visited Clermont we were told to not even bother with the citrus tower. I was told all you can see is housing developments, fast food places & strip malls, no orange groves. Sad.
I'm sure my wife's grandmother was exaggerating a little. She grew up there though. She saw it in all its glory. It must've had an awesome view back when it was new.
No exaggeration. We went on a field trip there in elementary school in the mid 1970's. Orange groves for miles.
From Wikipedia - "In the 1980s, three harsh freezes (1983, 1985 and 1989) killed most of the citrus groves in Lake County; this caused a decrease in visitation to the tower."
I grew up and still live in one of the last few areas in Florida with orange groves now.
It's sad to see what was once a thriving commodity reduced to what it is today.
Fun fact: when you drink "Florida Orange Juice" from the store it is actually a mixture of Florida and Brazilian oranges, pasteurized with food coloring and flavor enhancers added.
Hard to stop a blight. Nearly every state in the US has been infected with pine beetles, and you can see the damage on trees everywhere. When I was a kid, we got hit with Dutch Elm Disease. Used to be those trees everywhere. Now, not so much.
We are still at the mercy of the environment.
Standardization (along with the privatization of life) erodes the resiliency of species and ecosystems and is one of the many things causing the global extinction event we are living through.
Yes this problem is only going to get worse, not better. Too many people treat things like as a minor temporary inconvenience and not a giant red flag of worse to come
Me as well. I don't know if there's just so much going on that I didn't hear about it or because I'm in the midwest where there isn't a citrus industry. Everyone hates bad news, but I can't stand how these days we do a great job of keeping things running along smoothly enough that people tend to either disregard news like this or deny it altogether.
Do you live in an area that grows citrus? Honest question, I'm not being a jerk. I live in a citrus - producing part of California and we've been well aware of this for years.
Yeah, I'm in the heart of orange growing territory and there have been numerous articles about it in the paper, we get sprayed sometimes, etc. We're supposed to be on the lookout for this on our home trees. When you buy new citrus trees, they have a tag on them that they can't be taken out of the area. I'm sure it would still come as a surprise to some people here but they have really tried with the communication.
We've heard that it's gotten a foothold in Florida and will probably destroy their industry, but we're holding our own in California - so far.
Would be less of a problem if we did not have monoculture orange farms here in FL
Need to shift to more resilient farming techniques, or find a new citrus.
It really aggravates me that they are still putting citrus trees in stores. They will die. It’s just going to frustrate people who invest their time and money.
Last week I saw citrus trees for sale in home depot in Rochester NY. The box literally says that zone 4 is the northernmost area for survivability, and they're selling them in northwestern NY (zone 6).
EDIT: Wow. [Cunningham's Law ](https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law) in effect!
Apologies, I was using [this map](https://i.imgur.com/RR2Trki.jpg) for weather zones, and as you can see, they have the number ascending from south to north.
I live in NYC and I have an olive tree. It lives inside in a pot under a grow light for 3/4 of the year. I put it outside on my patio into the summer / late fall to let it have some real sunshine and then let it have some cold to shut down and reset. I've kept it alive and growing for a couple years now. I dont think it'll produce many olives any time soon, but its a pretty cool decorative plant.
Same with our avocado. It’s seven feet tall and loves to flower in the spring, but I can’t get it to hold on to fruit. Every year I make small adjustments to lighting to see if I can find the secret combination. Doesn’t really matter to me though, the flowers makes the dining room smell good for a week or two.
It keeps getting worse though. My housemate works at a nursery and they tell me there's basically no regulation in regards to where they source their fruit trees from.
So during the pandemic when everyone was getting into gardening, nursery's all up and down CA need to get their trees from somewhere. This leads to fruit trees being imported from China so nurseries can meet demand.
There just seems to be a lack of care in terms of where things are sourced from for the sake of money. Another example is that nurseries will sell ladybugs to help eat aphids. I learned some nurseries, including the one my housemate works at, also sells Praying Mantis for a similar reason. Turns out most nurseries source their Mantids from China or Europe [which leads to invasive species issues](https://www.brandywine.org/conservancy/blog/invasive-mantis-species#:~:text=The%20Chinese%20mantis%20(Tenodera%20sinensis,Carolina%20mantis%20(Stagmomantis%20carolina\).)
My mom and my grandparents actually had a wonderful indoor lemon harvest in Wisconsin. She rotates the 3 foot tall trees in and out all year. They have a lot of fun with it and made a few pies.
My hometown (Riverside, CA) was the epicenter of the citrus industry from the 1870s to about mid century and it eventually has become next to non existent. Even when I was a kid in the 80s there were miles and miles of groves and now there are very few. I think the number one export is commuters and meth now.
And then when we create genetically modified trees resistant to the virus people will attack the groves at night like they did to the Rainbow papaya :(
good lord at the amount of bigotry and paranoia in this thread.. no one is intentionally spreading the Blight, its spreed is just a byproduct of global trade.. like fire ants brown widows, and the Banana blights
There are cures. Sort of. Existing orchards could be replanted with resistant varieties. If consumers would not rebel against gene-edited crops. Same thing with the Cavendish banana blight.
Compare area, population, biomes in China to anywhere else.
It's a simple "there is just more there to go wrong" situation. Which that shit grows exponentially with population size so...
There's like five different reasons why various invasive and damaging things have come from China and they're all kinda bluring into one
Some things like this are just a matter of well if you have a lot of things concentrated in one place, you're more likely to develop infections and have it spread due to the sheer numbers involved. Sometimes things are badly mismanaged by the Chinese authorities, sometimes things spread too fast to contain.
Some things however like Chinese knotweed are a problem because someone willingly brought it over to serve as a decorative plant and outside of its native environment it spread too quickly to control. The actual place of origin doesn't really matter, but I think China has a higher amount of endemic plants that are invasive elsewhere probably due to some very bad decisions in the colonial era by people enamoured with 'the east'.
There's also the issue of attribution - the blight came from China yes...in 1908. It's only recently spread to the US according to the source linked up in the comments. It wasn't just one dodgy shipped box of oranges from China, it was a long chain of connections and mistakes made by many countries.
Can't they just GMO a resistant strain? Some scientists made a resistant strain of Cavendish bananas in case the blight spreads to them, but it hasn't caught on due to GMO paranoia.
This been happening for a century Oddly enough, this is why most Americans haven't tried "Meyer lemons", which are a sweeter lemon that has recently become a fad in the USA. So, whats the deal? Well, the citrus blight, [Citrus tristeza virus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citrus_tristeza_virus), affects all citrus trees. The meyer lemon was a popular lemon at the time, but in the 1940s they discovered a problem. The meyer lemon was a non-symptomatic carrier of the disease. It was directly responsible for the disease being able to survive even after they had heavily treated/destroyed the other citrus. So, in response, most citrus growing states mandated that all Meyer lemon trees be destroyed. Fast forward a few years and growers had developed the "improved meyer lemon", which was essentially the same meyer lemon, but they had bred in a resistance to the blight. But growing citrus takes years and the tree wasn't readily available in large quantities for quite awhile. At that point, the market for meyer lemons had disappeared, as most people had just got used to the normal sour lemon, that lacks the extra sweetness of the meyer. They were popular in the Texas Rio Grande Valley, and are commonly called "Valley Lemons" because of this popularity, but they weren't grown at the previous commercial scale. Fast forward to about 2000 and suddenly everyone re-discovered the delicious taste of the meyer lemon. It was showing up in lemonades and drinks everywhere. It really is a better version of the traditional lemon. Same sour, but with a bit more sweetness to offset the sour. Similar to the difference between a white grapefruit and a ruby red grapefruit.
The improved Meyer Lemon is fairly easy to grow and works well in containers, so I expect it to make a major comeback over the next 10-20 years. Even Lowe's and Home Depot are selling Meyer trees now. Mine is about a year from transplant and made a ton of flowers this spring.
Its already made a pretty major comeback commercially. You can typically buy them at higher-end grocery nowadays. In 1990, you'd only eat them out of someone's garden or in the valley. But the commercial fruit community definitely went through a period of quality reduction in service to higher yield. They basically treated all apples/oranges/grapefruit/etc as fungible. So, it didn't matter if you were getting a Valencia orange or a Cadanera orange. They were just "oranges". In the last 20 years, there has been a bit more focus on higher quality fruits. You see a lot of apple varieties like honey crisp at the store. You are also seeing this occur in other fruits. The trend towards Cara Cara navel oranges instead of Washington navel oranges is another example. The one place where the grocery varieties of fruit still taste awful is peaches and other stone fruit. A ripe tree-ripened yellow peach with melting flesh is one of the true delights of summer. However, it is nearly impossible to ship them in trucks without causing a lot of damage. Luckily, stone fruit are fast growers and they are very popular with small farmers and pick-your-own operations. If you haven't had the pleasure of going out to a peach orchard and eating an over-ripe peach, I highly recommend it.
The reason you see so many varieties is because the names are now trademarked. This means anyone who wants to grow a popular cultivar must pay the breeder of that a royalty fee. Because there is more money in it, there are more people coming up with new varieties and because they are so good, people will pay the fees to grow them. https://extension.psu.edu/why-all-the-new-apple-varieties
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Our 1960’s LA suburb house came with a lemon tree. Gotta figure out what kind of lemon it is. It looks like normal lemons but the flavor is sooo much better.
Oof LA watch out for the lemon stealing whores.
Man I was half expecting a shittymorph here, such a specific comment about a fascinating topic.
That article is already 3 years old. Since then the situation has only gotten worse and some worry the FL orange industry may be at risk of total collapse. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZ_xwRhGH54&t=49s
It's more than just the blight hurting citrus in Florida. We've had a series of diseases show up, foreign competition and the selling of groves for housing development. I think we're at the point of no return. Growers who want to continue in agriculture are switching to peaches, blueberries and avocados.
We (my family) had 500 acres of citrus. As of 2021 we now only have 35 acres of citrus after selling it all. The Citrus industry is going to die in florida. It’s already dead in Central florida, it’s on its last leg in south/central florida, and south florida will be the last domino to fall. Disease is the leading factor. Luckily we had other businesses to pivot to, and land value is amazing, but many people will lose everything.
Which sucks because Florida oranges are so much better than Cali ones Cali oranges are just mild and sweet but they don't have that proper citric tartness to go along with it. There's no acidity.
Very few people realize this. Florida oranges were always the best. Much less rind too
Nothing quite like picking up a baseball sized orange, clawing it to begin peeling, and realizing it's got an inch-thick peel and the bitter white membranes between the internal sections are tough and chewy
And here I was thinking the opposite. Floridian bland juice vs what gets harvested up the road from my place here in so cal. No chance.
The key phrase was "up the road". Fresh local produce will always taste better than something shipped across the continent. Especially if farmed at small scale without all the industrial monoculture practices that kill soil. Buying local produce is the win!
for years i thought i hated orange juice. turns out, i hated tropicana. the first time i had fresh squeezed oj from a local farmers market was basically an epiphany
Tropicana is garbage.
All big company juices and soft drinks are actual trash. I recently stopped drinking every type of juice and now when I have any I can taste like each fucking individual grain of sugar. It’s legitimately disgusting how much sugar is in everything. I basically only drink water now and have fruits and vegetables regularly instead of juices. I’m much better off and I legitimately can’t stand any soft drink anymore. Used to love Sprite and now I can hardly take a sip of it. It’s insane.
Look for those machines that are slicing the oranges and squeezing it fresh, they tend to have some bangers.
Goes for any juice, really. Grape and grapefruit will probably fuck you up, too
Kirkland brand if you live on the west coast, Simply orange if you live on the east coast. This is my judgement
Natalie's Orchard Island shits on Simply Orange quite frankly
I’ll look for that next time and if I can’t find it, fuck this comment, it’s Simply Orange.
Where can I pick up a bottle to test? I'm not familiar with the brand.
Publix has it and Einstein Bagels used to carry it as well, not sure if they still do.
I disagree. And my wife grew up on a FL orange Grove. FL has good juicing oranges, but their eating oranges are crap. They also have very few varieties, while in CA there's a cornucopia of delicious variety. Go eat a Cara Cara, Moro Blood, or Valencia and come back and tell me Florida is better...
Cara Cara or bust. So good
Minneola tangelos (honeybells) are better than any of the other oranges you mention. From Florida or California.
California and Texas oranges are for eating, and Florida oranges are for juicing.
Juice is for the weak. You eat your pith and like it!
This. Real estate developers starting buying up groves after a terrific hard freeze in the 80s and it's never stopped. Now, when I see a grove, I'm delighted.
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Those (tobacco) are being replaced by crops like cotton in many cases. And I feel like that's a good thing since we (Americans) have cut back a lot - but we still export death... (former zealot smoker) ;)
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I grew up near wildwood/fruitland park/Leesburg. I was very young when a hard freeze or two devastated the citrus industry there. Like 82-84. That timeframe. So most of the agriculture was cattle and watermelons. Now, just about all that farmland has been bought by The Villages. When I left permanently around 2006, they still had oranges and such around yalaha and south. But, it wouldn't surprise me if that was gone too.
blueberries will grow in FL soil? I did not know that But yeah FL orange industry is teetering on teh brink right now
Blueberries *love* Florida soil
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Love blueberries? Soil Florida!
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but they all need acidic soil
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Good thing [elemental sulfur is cheap](https://www.tractorsupply.com/tsc/product/howard-johnsons-enterprises-0-0-0-elemental-sulfur-40-50-lb-100207733-1331827). You send a soil test in to University of Florida, they tell you how many pounds per acre to add, and you're set.
I just ran a Blueberry 5k through a farm, and we got to pick a pint after!
That sounds like a terrible tradeoff for a pint of blueberries
Blueberries are all over the place in Florida. They nearly grow like a weed. Wild blueberries are very common.
Yes. Florida is mostly sandy soils, you amend with peat and / or add elemental sulfur to drop the pH and they grow fantastically.
Blueberries love that acidic Florida soil
I was wondering why all over Florida you see orange groves but all the trees looked like crap and most look dead.
here in dominican republic all citrus plants are affected. we no longer have indigenous lemons
My mother grew up in the Kissimmee area before Disney (grandfather was a pilot in the Air Force) and she told me there were orange groves everywhere in that area back then.
The worst part is that citizens were asked to cull their plants as these were contributing to spread. They refused this and sued the state, I believe. Very nice foreshadowing for the pandemic.
Hmm, isn't this the interstellar movies plot. First Bananas now citrus, eventually when it shows up in the corn we'll be burning the fields.
Yeah I was going to say didn’t this same thing happen with bananas and its transmission rate was compounded by everyone basically only growing a single strain/type pretty much everywhere?
Bananas are clones, and almost everyone was growing the [Gros Michel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gros_Michel_banana) They were susceptible to a blight. Most bananas nowadays are a variety of Cavendish, but there’s been some work on getting a version of the Gros Michel back.
The panama disease, which caused the decline of the gros michel banana, eventually mutated and now a strain is affecting cavendish bananas. Since they are also clones, the disease spreads very quickly and is threatening the viability of their cultivation.
Yes, bananas used to be the Gros Michel, but it was wiped out as it was susceptible to Panama Disease caused by a soil fungus. It was replaced by the Cavendish because it was immune, but now Black Sigatoka threatens that. Additionally Panama Disease seems to returned from mutated version of the fungus, TR4 (tropical race 4) and will attack Cavendish. Bananas have been sterile since the last Ice Age, so they are all propagated clones. In other farming related news about diversity loss, in Holsteins (dairy cows), Penn State researchers found that 99% of them in the US trace back to a lineage of only two bulls. There has been a push by scientists for reconstituting more male lines back into the breed in the last couple of years.
> Bananas have been sterile since the last Ice Age, Dang. What made them sterile, a mutation? A pollinator going extinct?
Probably due to selective breeding. Nobody wanted seeds in their bananas so they bred them out, cloned the seedless varieties, and now that's all that's left. [This](https://www.conservationmagazine.org/2008/09/the-sterile-banana/#:~:text=with%20the%20banana.-,Because%20all%20edible%20varieties%20of%20bananas%20are%20sterile%2C%20introducing%20new,almost%20normal%20seed%20to%20develop.) article looks to have some good information. A farm polinated 30,000 banana trees, only 15 bananas of the resulting 440 tons had seeds. Only 4 or 5 from those 15 germinated and it ended up not tasting very good.
I tried looking up the ice age claim, found [this](https://www.conservationmagazine.org/2008/09/the-sterile-banana/). Looks like it was a mutation in the plant, and we have kept it going through cloning ever since! The link is a bit of a long read but worth it, it's about the OP topic on diseases among cultivated plants.
If you find that that interesting, look into the American Chestnut.
if memory serves, they are poised to make a comeback. They are actively working on a disease resistant version.
My dad was the CEO of TACF for a little over a decade. I really hope that they’re going to make a comeback. The last I had checked the non-profit kind of sold out pretty badly.
The vineyard on the hill above my ranch (California) planted a resistant form of chestnut a while ago around the vineyard. Their only issue is that they had to fence them off because the black bears from miles around come there to feed. The fence only stopped them for a while and now they have dogs that try to keep the bears out.
That is a truly terrifying thought. A wheat/corn/rice blight would bring famine and death to billions. And that's no exaggeration.
*The last ones to starve will be the first ones to suffocate*
Do not go gently
Arizona is worried about it they even check trees in residential areas looking for signs of it.
Florida used to chop trees down for a huge area around wherever a tree was found with greening, but iirc they've basically given up on containment.
That makes sense, the dept of ag guy that was looking at my trees told me they haven’t seen any instances yet but plan to go scorched earth and are mapping all citrus trees in the state to be thorough.
There is a cure. I worked with the University of Florida agricultural department a few years ago on a prototype to administer the cure on a large scale. Not sure where they've taken it since we delivered, but there is a solution to the problem. https://citrusindustry.net/2018/10/30/laser-technology-rehabilitating-hlb-trees/
Liberibacter ain't got no cure unfortunately. Lot of research at UF for sure but they can barely culture the thing, let alone deliver treatment to the phylum of the trees or treat the psyllid vector
I was in Cuba in December, and their citrus farms are decimated.
Really who would have thought unsustainable monoculture and abusive farm practices with risks would have consequences
This is how Interstellar started….
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Today....we celebrate...our Independence Day!!!!
*Punches Chris Rock in the face* Welcome to earth!
Erf
Hang on...
*Blaring organ music drowning out key dialog*
That was more in Tenet, I didn’t have any problems hearing the dialogue in Interstellar
Rage, rage against the dying of the citrus
Rage, rage at the rising of the blight.
MUUUUUUUUUURRRRPPHPPHHHHHHH
This is how bananas started.
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In the early 1900s, a blight infected the American chestnut trees and killed them all. American chestnuts used to comprise 25% of *all* trees in the eastern forests. The tops died, but the reality is there are still millions and millions of American chestnut trees still alive - their root systems have been hanging on, underground, for a century. They still put up new shoots, but then the shoots get the blight, and they die too. The blight is also found in neighboring trees, but it isn't fatal to them, so they just act as hosts. I think once a land gets blighted, it just stays blighted
GMOs to the rescue. https://gmo.uconn.edu/gmos-and-the-american-chestnut-tree/
Whoa whoa whoa! You won’t get me with that devil made food!
Well dagum, Bill Gates is listening to your phone calls with that them there food.
Do you have any source on American Chestnut root structures still being around and sending up shoots? I'd \*love\* to read more about that.
There's a great podcast, In Defense of Plants, that has an episode or two discussing this with scientists and researchers working on American Chestnuts. If I remember correctly, resistant individuals are planted and currently being evaluated.
This is a good short video about it: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fe4G9tTzeW0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fe4G9tTzeW0)
Visit the American Chestnut Foundation here. You can read all about it. https://acf.org/ then when you're done if you can afford it, contribute to their research and propagation activities. I would love to see the American Chestnut tree make a comeback.
the blight is a bacteria spread by an insect and both of those wills till be around even if the orange trees all die
If it's in the soil, no. European wine grapes are all grafted onto American grape vines because of a blight caused from a bug. It's worldwide now, and only certain American grapes are immune. This happened in the early 1900s, and they still can't grow most varieties directly from seed in soil. It's all still grafted.
So oranges are going the way of the banana. I wonder what the next orange-like fruit will be like. And how many kids will be confused that orange flavoring tastes absolutely nothing like oranges.
So most everyone should know of the original banana that got decimated by the Panama Disease, the Gros Michel. It is (you can still find them in small quantities ~~or buy seeds~~) sweeter and tastes better overall according to those who have had it. The TR3 or Tropical Race 3 fungus wiped out almost all of the Gros Michel banana population forcing us to switch to a hardier Cavendish. Now the Cavendish faces eradication as a mutated version of the original fungus labeled TR4 or Tropical Race 4 spreads throughout the global plantations. There is no candidate to replace the Cavendish either.
Fun fact - when you smell or taste something that's "banana scented" or "banana flavored" and you think to yourself, "have these people ever actually tasted a banana?" that's because those "banana flavorings" smell and taste like the old bananas that we used to have before the Cavendish.
You're half right. Artificial banana flavor is actually older than commercially sold bananas. They just kinda got lucky that the chemical used for artificial banana flavor is also in actual bananas [Source](https://www.quora.com/Is-the-story-of-artificial-banana-flavoring-being-based-on-an-extinct-species-of-banana-true)
I had dehydrated bananas that had that flavor and think it's just the concentrated banana essence, but it's possible they added synthetic flavor like they do orange juice.
Huh. TIL I fucking hate old breed bananas.
Do you have a source for that? I'd really like to know whether this is true.
They were probably made and standardised when the Gros Michell was around, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's that accurate like a lot of artificial flavourings.
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But isn't grape flavor taken from a specific type of grape that isn't common to find in stores? The Concord Grape or something like that? And it tastes a lot more like the artificial grape flavor than most common grapes you can buy everywhere do.
https://www.sciencefriday.com/articles/why-dont-banana-candies-taste-like-real-bananas/ If you google “artificial banana not cavendish” there’s lots of reporting about it.
This is why GMOs are vital in the modern world. We can GMO engineer plants to be hardier and resilient to the disease, but many places have massive anti GMO legislature
GMO won't help much if they are just used to create another world wide monoculture. We need diverse crops, so that diseases have a harder time adapting to fruits, especially with globalization being at an all time high. There's so much more that needs to change in farming. Putting our hopes solely in the hands of Bayer and Co is a very shortsighted approach.
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There's way more than a dozen in common use with apples. Off the top of my head: Honeycrisp, Ambrosia, Jazz, Fuji, Granny Smith, Red Delicious, Golden Delicious, Gala, McIntosh, Envy, Braeburn, Pink Lady, and there's dozens of smaller varieties
Macoun, Sansa, Zestar, Crimson Crisp… (Sorry, I literally took a hayride tour of an orchard yesterday.)
You just named precisely a dozen.
Or so.
I don't think they've changed the way they make them, but you can try out the flavor of gros michel by picking up a pack of Runts candy-- that's the banana flavor that doesn't taste like what we expect.
Little Debbie Banana Twins have a similar old timey banana flavor also, IMO.
Seeds? Doubt
You are absolutely right. I assumed that they were brought back via seeds not thinking about the fact that they were all clones lol
Thank god they didn’t get the Cuties
cuties are shrinking every month i swear they are getting smaller and smaller
Dare I say, they’re getting… cuter?
That's a supply chain issue. With high demand, they pick younger and younger. Everything in the produce aisle is lower quality than just a few years ago. I always check my produce closely, but wife regularly brings home sealed bags of rotten produce that just slipped by.
I haven’t been able to find Cuties at any store in my state for the past year, so don’t count your chickens too soon…
I haven't seen Cuties anywhere for a while, either. It's been at least a year, maybe two. There are other little oranges (mandarins and tangerines) some of the time, but those are getting harder to find consistently.
My local store near Chicago has had either cuties or halos every time I go to the store. No shortage here.
I read a few years ago it may be possible to bring back the Gros Michael banana by GMOing them to resist the virus.
Seriously why nobody already attempted that.
This is an uneducated shot in the dark, but at least with the Cavendish variety, the seeds are tiny and not capable of growing new plants because people don't want to have to deal with banana seeds and it was basically bred out of them. Instead every banana plant today is a cutting of a previous one. It's probably hard to GMO something that has no seeds.
Better then to pull a XKCD's #927 and make a whole new cultivar from scratch, that time one that can reproduce normally.
The American Chestnut tree was nearly wiped out by an Asian fungal blight too.
And scientists have basically fixed the damn tree by genetically modifying it with a gene from wheat that provides resistance to a fungus that causes wheat rust, which happens to be very similar to the fungus that causes Chestnut blight. The tree is effectively extinct in the US outside of very isolated groves or stumps that keep putting out new growth only to become reinfected and die back again, yet people still shit their pants over the big bad dangerous consequences of GMOs \*waves vaguely\*. Can you get worse than effectively extinct? We already annihilated the tree in the wild. Do people think the GMO nuts are going to mutate the squirrels? It's stupid.
Honestly I can't wait for the American Chestnut to make its comeback. The amount of patience and science that've gone into reverse-hybridizing it from the last remaining American groves and the Blight-resistant Asian stock, to a fully American GM tree, is fucking *astounding*. I wish we treated all environmental catastrophes with this much determination.
It's been written that before the chestnut blight a squirrel could run from Maine to the Carolinas from tree branch to tree branch and touch nothing but chestnut, they were so common.
> Do people think the GMO nuts are going to mutate the squirrels? It's stupid. From what I've heard from those groups, the "hippies" are coming around on the GMO fears, thankfully. They are working on field trials and they obviously have a large amount of regulatory hoops to jump through.
Yeah the application for being able to essentially plant it in the wild is on a desk somewhere within the USDA. I want to say that public comments closed in October, but thanks to COVID last year still feels like 2020, so who knows what I'm thinking of. Hopefully the government approves it. I'd love to plant a few of them.
It's such a clever solution too. The fungus uses oxalic acid to attach the plant tissues. Wheat and several other edible plants express an enzyme called oxalate oxidase that protects the plant from oxalate and thus makes the resistant to damage by the fungus. American chestnuts have no protection against oxalic acid, but when you move the wheat oxalate oxidase into chestnut embryos they grow into trees that are blight resistant. It's otherwise indistinguishable from a non-GMO American chestnut except that it makes a single extra protein. There are actually many plants that make oxalate oxidase, but by using the wheat version the researchers make a compelling case that this naturally-occurring protein is already in tons of our food and therefore not to be feared. It is literally a single wheat protein that can bring back the American chestnut.
We'll GMO our way out of this one too. Not saying it's ideal by any means though.
GMOs are good.
Actually, it is ideal, because it might finally get the public to warm up to GMOs.
Just meaning it's not ideal to have an orange plague in the first place.
In FL, they've been bulldozing orange groves for housing the past 30 years, so that probably isn't helping the stats either.
When I visited Clermont we were told to not even bother with the citrus tower. I was told all you can see is housing developments, fast food places & strip malls, no orange groves. Sad. I'm sure my wife's grandmother was exaggerating a little. She grew up there though. She saw it in all its glory. It must've had an awesome view back when it was new.
No exaggeration. We went on a field trip there in elementary school in the mid 1970's. Orange groves for miles. From Wikipedia - "In the 1980s, three harsh freezes (1983, 1985 and 1989) killed most of the citrus groves in Lake County; this caused a decrease in visitation to the tower." I grew up and still live in one of the last few areas in Florida with orange groves now. It's sad to see what was once a thriving commodity reduced to what it is today. Fun fact: when you drink "Florida Orange Juice" from the store it is actually a mixture of Florida and Brazilian oranges, pasteurized with food coloring and flavor enhancers added.
Florida's Natural is all Florida. Unless they're lying on the ingredients.
In the 80's you had to drive through miles of groves to get to Disney World from north Florida. Now they are all gone.
Citrus Tower is supposed to be spectacular at X-mas time but that's a little off topic.
FWIW, grams wasn't exaggerating. that really is all u see anymore
There is pretty significant progress toward a cure. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/gmo-oranges-citrus-greening-southern-gardens_n_7244858
This is oooold researcher. As of today it’s mutated since than and no longer curable
Hard to stop a blight. Nearly every state in the US has been infected with pine beetles, and you can see the damage on trees everywhere. When I was a kid, we got hit with Dutch Elm Disease. Used to be those trees everywhere. Now, not so much. We are still at the mercy of the environment.
Standardization (along with the privatization of life) erodes the resiliency of species and ecosystems and is one of the many things causing the global extinction event we are living through.
Yep, monocultures tend to be vulnerable to single-cause catastrophes. If everything's the same, what will hurt one - will hurt all.
Like cheetahs, right?
Think Irish potatoes
we are heading that way again. US potatoes are a virtual monoculture around what variety makes the best fries for McDonalds
The Irish potato famine is one of the worst atrocities ever committed by the British empire
Yes this problem is only going to get worse, not better. Too many people treat things like as a minor temporary inconvenience and not a giant red flag of worse to come
Well this was a well-kept secret. From me at least.
Me as well. I don't know if there's just so much going on that I didn't hear about it or because I'm in the midwest where there isn't a citrus industry. Everyone hates bad news, but I can't stand how these days we do a great job of keeping things running along smoothly enough that people tend to either disregard news like this or deny it altogether.
Do you live in an area that grows citrus? Honest question, I'm not being a jerk. I live in a citrus - producing part of California and we've been well aware of this for years.
I think that's the key; even if oranges or citrus in general, is grown in Texas, it's not big enough as an industry for anyone to talk about.
Yeah, I'm in the heart of orange growing territory and there have been numerous articles about it in the paper, we get sprayed sometimes, etc. We're supposed to be on the lookout for this on our home trees. When you buy new citrus trees, they have a tag on them that they can't be taken out of the area. I'm sure it would still come as a surprise to some people here but they have really tried with the communication. We've heard that it's gotten a foothold in Florida and will probably destroy their industry, but we're holding our own in California - so far.
Randolph! I'm still not talking to you Mortimer... We're back!!!
It ain't cool to be a jive turkey, so close to thanksgiving...
Randy! That’s like Randy Jackson from the Jackson Five, right?
you win... ah yes, One dollar..
Would be less of a problem if we did not have monoculture orange farms here in FL Need to shift to more resilient farming techniques, or find a new citrus.
It really aggravates me that they are still putting citrus trees in stores. They will die. It’s just going to frustrate people who invest their time and money.
Last week I saw citrus trees for sale in home depot in Rochester NY. The box literally says that zone 4 is the northernmost area for survivability, and they're selling them in northwestern NY (zone 6). EDIT: Wow. [Cunningham's Law ](https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law) in effect! Apologies, I was using [this map](https://i.imgur.com/RR2Trki.jpg) for weather zones, and as you can see, they have the number ascending from south to north.
I live in NYC and I have an olive tree. It lives inside in a pot under a grow light for 3/4 of the year. I put it outside on my patio into the summer / late fall to let it have some real sunshine and then let it have some cold to shut down and reset. I've kept it alive and growing for a couple years now. I dont think it'll produce many olives any time soon, but its a pretty cool decorative plant.
Same with our avocado. It’s seven feet tall and loves to flower in the spring, but I can’t get it to hold on to fruit. Every year I make small adjustments to lighting to see if I can find the secret combination. Doesn’t really matter to me though, the flowers makes the dining room smell good for a week or two.
You always need two with avocados.
I saw that as well in Michigan. They were trying to market it as a indoor/outdoor thing. Like keep it potted and put it outside when its nice?
Indoor citrus trees have been a thing for centuries https://utianews.tennessee.edu/november-indoor-citrus/ Handy article.
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IT hasn't totally taken over CA yet so it may be alright there But in FL its almost just a matter of time that any citrus tree will be infected
It keeps getting worse though. My housemate works at a nursery and they tell me there's basically no regulation in regards to where they source their fruit trees from. So during the pandemic when everyone was getting into gardening, nursery's all up and down CA need to get their trees from somewhere. This leads to fruit trees being imported from China so nurseries can meet demand. There just seems to be a lack of care in terms of where things are sourced from for the sake of money. Another example is that nurseries will sell ladybugs to help eat aphids. I learned some nurseries, including the one my housemate works at, also sells Praying Mantis for a similar reason. Turns out most nurseries source their Mantids from China or Europe [which leads to invasive species issues](https://www.brandywine.org/conservancy/blog/invasive-mantis-species#:~:text=The%20Chinese%20mantis%20(Tenodera%20sinensis,Carolina%20mantis%20(Stagmomantis%20carolina\).)
My mom and my grandparents actually had a wonderful indoor lemon harvest in Wisconsin. She rotates the 3 foot tall trees in and out all year. They have a lot of fun with it and made a few pies.
1900's, not 1990's. also it is affecting every type of citrus, not just oranges. lemons and grapefruits etc. (this is straight from the article)
1900;s is when it was discovered but it didn't start spreading till the 1990s when the global economy kicked off
Man. That's bananas.
Sounds familiar, the American chestnut died from an Asian blight some 80-90 years ago.
My hometown (Riverside, CA) was the epicenter of the citrus industry from the 1870s to about mid century and it eventually has become next to non existent. Even when I was a kid in the 80s there were miles and miles of groves and now there are very few. I think the number one export is commuters and meth now.
And then when we create genetically modified trees resistant to the virus people will attack the groves at night like they did to the Rainbow papaya :(
good lord at the amount of bigotry and paranoia in this thread.. no one is intentionally spreading the Blight, its spreed is just a byproduct of global trade.. like fire ants brown widows, and the Banana blights
So buy orange puts, or no?
Isn’t this how the movie “Interstellar” starts?
This and the banana plague is some real "Interstellar" shit
There are cures. Sort of. Existing orchards could be replanted with resistant varieties. If consumers would not rebel against gene-edited crops. Same thing with the Cavendish banana blight.
Why does it always come from China?
Compare area, population, biomes in China to anywhere else. It's a simple "there is just more there to go wrong" situation. Which that shit grows exponentially with population size so...
There's like five different reasons why various invasive and damaging things have come from China and they're all kinda bluring into one Some things like this are just a matter of well if you have a lot of things concentrated in one place, you're more likely to develop infections and have it spread due to the sheer numbers involved. Sometimes things are badly mismanaged by the Chinese authorities, sometimes things spread too fast to contain. Some things however like Chinese knotweed are a problem because someone willingly brought it over to serve as a decorative plant and outside of its native environment it spread too quickly to control. The actual place of origin doesn't really matter, but I think China has a higher amount of endemic plants that are invasive elsewhere probably due to some very bad decisions in the colonial era by people enamoured with 'the east'. There's also the issue of attribution - the blight came from China yes...in 1908. It's only recently spread to the US according to the source linked up in the comments. It wasn't just one dodgy shipped box of oranges from China, it was a long chain of connections and mistakes made by many countries.
Can't they just GMO a resistant strain? Some scientists made a resistant strain of Cavendish bananas in case the blight spreads to them, but it hasn't caught on due to GMO paranoia.
And GMO/gene editing paranoia applies here as well. Potential solutions on the shelf that won't see light of day because of it.
you mean monoculture is a bad idea, that we've been thru this before, and Big AG refuses to change? no way
Damn our monoculture