In 1960, the TV show “The Twilight Zone” aired an irony-soaked episode called “Eye of the Beholder” that played around with the axiom about where beauty truly lies. In it, a bunch of grotesque doctors try to make a gorgeous woman (played by Donna Douglas from “The Beverly Hillbillies”) look like them, because conformity matters more than anything to their grotesque leader.

I was reminded of this episode last week while reading up on the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that Congress has been debating.

In case you haven’t heard about OBBBA and how controversial it is, consider this: Despite being strongly endorsed by our own grotesque leader, the bill squeaked through the House of Representatives by a single vote. Now it goes over to the Senate, where it’s liable to face even more opposition. I sure hope it does, anyway.

This “beautiful” bill contains a lot of ugliness. It will add trillions to the federal deficit, news that led to none other than Elon Musk calling it an abomination. It slashes food stamps for seniors to give billionaires a tax cut. And it makes such drastic changes to Medicaid that it’s led to a dispute in Iowa over how many people will die.

But what grabbed my attention is the really big favor it includes for Florida’s Big Sugar.

The feds already prop up our sugar industry with expensive government subsidies. This bill boosts that subsidy even higher, from 19.75 cents per pound to 24 cents per pound.

Bear in mind that the sugar industry produces about 8 trillion tons of sugar every year. A hike of a nickel on a pound of sugar equals an awful lot of dough.

“It’s egregious that this polluting industry — which Florida taxpayers have paid well over $2 billion to clean up after — is poised to reap even more profits if this budget bill passes the U.S. Senate,” said Eve Samples, executive director of Friends of the Everglades.

Samples questioned how boosting the profits of the sugar industry fits in with the goals of an administration that says it’s going to “Make America Healthy Again.”

Maybe in this case the slogan should be altered to “Make Big Sugar’s Profits Healthy.”

Protected at every level

The sugar industry may be headquartered in South Florida, but it’s long been king in both Tallahassee and Washington.

“This industry is protected at every level,” Samples said.

For instance, take its horrible air pollution.

From October to May every year, Florida’s sugar companies burn their 400,000 acres of fields to prepare for harvest, thus getting rid of the outer leaves of the cane stalks.

It’s an old-fashioned practice that other countries have banned. So much burning sends billows of thick smoke floating across the little towns by Lake Okeechobee, showering down what residents refer to as “black snow” that coats their houses and cars and the lungs of the unlucky.

Four years ago, the Florida Legislature passed a bill — with support from both parties — that makes it much harder for anyone harmed by all this soot to sue the sugar industry.

Gov. Ron DeSantis, when he was a congressman, repeatedly voted against federal price supports for the sugar industry. When he moved into the governor’s mansion in 2019, he called for all the members of the South Florida Water Management District board to resign for being too pro-sugar.

But when the Legislature handed DeSantis its bill to protect the sugar industry against suits over its burning practices, he signed it into law without a word of protest.

Or take water pollution. Twenty years ago, the industry deployed 40 lobbyists — picture an army marching in bespoke suits and Italian loafers — to persuade lawmakers to extend the deadline for cleaning up Everglades pollution from 2006 to 2026.

The bill sailed through, and then-Gov. Jeb “Punctuation Marks Are Cool!” Bush — a self-described Everglades advocate — signed it behind closed doors.

The industry controls these politicians so utterly that if sugar executives demanded they line up and start dancing to the old Archies hit “Sugar Sugar,” they’d say, “Sweet!”

Money makes the world go ’round

The main reason Big Sugar always gets what it wants is that it’s ready to spend Big Bucks to get it. As the song from “Cabaret” put it so well, “Money makes the world go around!”

According to the Dirty Money Project database created by the folks at the Vote Water environmental group, between 2018 and 2024 Florida’s sugar industry spent $36 million on Florida political contributions.

Alfonso Fanjul and Jose Francisco “Pepe” Fanjul via the Florida Agricultural Hall of Fame)

In the past year alone, Big Sugar gave more than $5.2 million to Florida politicians, including $3.1 million donated by U.S. Sugar, $2.1 million donated by Florida Crystals, and just over $43,000 by the Sugar Co-op.

Acting like an always-available ATM has its advantages. Access, for example.

On Presidents’ Day in 1996, Bill Clinton was busy breaking up with Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office when the phone rang. The caller: Sugar magnate Alfonso Fanjul Jr., of Florida Crystals.

Clinton spent 20 minutes on the phone with him, listening to Fanjul complaining. The sugar baron was upset about Vice President Al Gore’s proposal of a penny-a-pound tax on Florida sugar growers to pay for cleaning up the Everglades. After that phone call, Clinton shelved the plan.

Incidentally, the Dirty Money website shows that the company Fanjul runs with his brother Pepe, Florida Crystals, donated $1 million last year to the super-PAC known as Make America Great Again Inc. You can probably guess which grotesque presidential candidate it supported.

The industry has already seen a benefit, Patrick Ferguson of the Sierra Club told me. Three years ago, former President Joe Biden banned imports from a sugar company based in the Dominican Republic named Central Romana over evidence the company used forced labor, i.e. slaves.

Central Romana is run by the Fanjuls, and in March the current administration quietly removed the Biden ban. Maybe they count “being concerned about slavery” as being in favor of DEI. Can’t have that!

It’s not just politicians who reap the benefits of sugar’s bucks. In the 1960s, the sugar industry paid Harvard scientists to produce research that played down the connection between sugar and heart disease. Instead, they shifted the blame to saturated fat.

One of the scientists paid by the sugar industry went on to become head of nutrition at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He helped draft the forerunner to the federal government’s dietary guidelines.

That’s why environmental advocates weren’t at all surprised to see Big Sugar included in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

“Big Sugar is once again getting gifts they really don’t deserve,” Ferguson said.

Up goes the price

Sugar has been getting special treatment from the federal government since the days when Alexander Hamilton was a real guy and not a smash Broadway show.

In 1789, Congress imposed a tariff on imported sugar to raise revenue for the struggling young nation. It was the first substantive legislation passed by the young nation, and it was signed into law by the first president, George Washington.

Despite that connection to our Founding Fathers, you know who’s been the most critical of federal policy on propping up Big Sugar? Right-wing think tanks like the Cato Institute. Eight years ago, Cato published a paper titled, “Candy-Coasted Cartel: Time to Kill the U.S. Sugar Program.”

When I talked to him this week, the author of that Cato paper, Colin Grabow, pointed out something about the OBBBA’s nickel-per-pound boost for Big Sugar that hadn’t occurred to me:

“This is basically raising the cost of sugar in the United States,” he said. “We just had an election where people were complaining about the cost of things.”

Yeah, I told him, I recall a lot of people fussing over the price of eggs before going to the polls in November.

“Now, instead of reforming the system,” Grabow said, “we’re just going to hand them more money and make sugar more expensive.”

I heard similar points from Vincent Smith of the equally right-wing American Enterprise Institute. The boost called for by the bill is “a pretty dramatic increase,” he said.

That will make all the goods that contain sugar — soft drinks, cookies, cake, applesauce, cereal, you name it — cost more as well. As an avid consumer of Publix sweet tea, hearing this made me do a classic spit-take.

Smith joked that making sugar and its related products so much more expensive may be good news for dentists but not for family pocketbooks.

Grabow pointed out, “You can bet that the language related to sugar in the bill is directly due to lobbyists.’

What do the senators say?

I tried contacting officials from the sugar companies about all this, but I just couldn’t sweet-talk them into speaking with me.

The closest I got to a quote was this statement from Ryan Duffy, senior director of corporate communications for U.S. Sugar, who told me via email, “We typically don’t comment on pending legislation.”

Of course, the more important folks to talk to would be our two senators. Everyone wants to find out where they stand on the Big Bad Wolf — er, I mean, One Big Beautiful Bill. But they didn’t respond to my requests for comment either.

Our senior senator, Rick Scott, has a long history of being tucked in Big Sugar’s hip pocket. Last year, when he was running for re-election, the sugar companies made big donations to his campaign’s super-PAC.

In his story on those donations, my colleague Mitch Perry pointed out the hypocrisy of Scott’s pro-sugar stance. When he first ran for governor 15 years ago, he blasted his GOP primary opponent, Bill McCollum, for accepting contributions from Big Sugar.

“He’s owned by U.S. Sugar,” the Orlando Sentinel quoted Scott saying of McCollum. “They’ve given him nearly a million dollars for his campaign. And it’s disgusting.”

Scott apparently thought it was a lot less disgusting when Big Sugar’s big payouts were going into his coffers, not McCollum’s. He hasn’t turned down a dime from them since.

In fact, as governor, Scott was one of quite a few Republican officials who accepted hunting trips to Texas from a sugar company, then declined to answer reporters’ questions about it.

Yet Scott says he has serious qualms about the One Big Beautiful Etc. He doesn’t believe it cuts enough federal fat, so he says he’s inclined to reject it.

“I think there’s plenty of us would not vote for it in the Senate,” he said, according to CBS News.

Then we come to Florida’s newest senator, the recently appointed Ashley Moody. When she was Florida’s elected attorney general, the former Plant City Strawberry Festival queen was no friend to the environment. She also fought several absurd legal battles on the behalf of Mr. Grotesque. So far, she hasn’t indicated whether she’s in the same position as Scott or not.

If you’re inclined to bang your head against the wall, I’d encourage you to call or email these two and demand they stop this giveaway to a polluting industry. But bear in mind, they may not listen to you.

After all, the more money the sugar companies rake in, the more they can give away to our elected officials. That’s right — by boosting their profits, we’re enabling the sugar companies to continue to spend so freely on buying the favors of our politicians.

But I do have suggestion. If Scott and Moody say, “The heck with my constituents!” and vote to pass this bill for Big Sugar, I think every single one of us should send them our grocery bills, demanding a refund.

A tsunami of grocery store receipts inundating the senators’ offices would be, I think, a beautiful thing to behold.

Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Michael Moline for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com.

TALLAHASSSEE — If you’re one of the 900 new people who move to Florida every day, you may not know this crucial secret of Florida government. I’m a Florida native, so let me clue you in. Lean in close and I’ll whisper it in your ear. Are you ready?

The Florida Legislature contains more cuckoos than a Swiss clock factory.

Now that you’re aware of this fact, how are you holding up? How’s your blood pressure? Can you handle the truth?

You want some evidence? Just last year, a legislator claimed his new anti-bear bill was necessary because there were bears on crack invading people’s houses. This was, of course, a complete fantasy. Yet his colleagues didn’t question his sanity or call the paramedics. They just passed the bill. It’s the law now!

This year there’s one that’s even kookier. I am referring to the so-called “chemtrails” bill.

In case you’re unfamiliar with that debunked conspiracy theory, the folks who believe in “chemtrails” are convinced the government (or maybe it’s the Illuminati) is dispatching planes to fly over us unsuspecting Americans and spray chemicals on us.

Why? The chemtrails can change the weather, say the diehards. Or maybe they can control people’s minds. Or maybe they’re just going to poison everybody they don’t like. Who knows? After all, it’s a secret, like the 1947 UFO crash landing in New Mexico.

Anyway, there’s a bill in the Legislature to track and attack chemtrails. Instead of being laughed out of the Capitol building, as it deserves, the bill was just passed by the full Senate, because that’s what our state’s elected leaders are like right now. I wish I could tell you the “Looney Tunes” theme song played while they voted.

“The measure (SB 56), sponsored by Miami Republican Ileana Garcia, would prohibit the injection, release, or dispersion of any means of a chemical, chemical compound, substance, or apparatus into the atmosphere for the purpose of affecting the climate,” my colleague Mitch Perry reported in the Phoenix last week. “Any person or corporation who conducts such geoengineering or weather modification activity would be subject to a third-degree felony charge, with fines up to $100,000.”

The bill would require the Florida Department of Environmental Protection to set up a hotline so anyone concerned about streaks in the sky can call and report them. I’m sure the DEP will jump right on those reports, just the way the agency has jumped on reports of rampant water pollution that fuels toxic algae blooms, kills seagrass, and leaves manatees to starve.

I tried calling Sen. Garcia to ask her some questions about her bill. While I waited to talk to her, I was struck by a subversive thought:

What if the chemtrails bill becomes law and we folks who still live in the real world use it to flip the script? What if we employ its provisions to go after the people who really ARE changing the weather — with their greenhouse gas emissions?

A healthy skepticism

The most shocking thing about this chemtrails bill is not that it was filed — filed, I should add, by a senator who won her seat by just 32 votes, thanks to an illegal ghost candidate scheme backed by Florida Power & Light.

Nor is the most shocking thing that it passed one house of our Legislature by a vote of 28-9 and now is headed for the other.

No, what’s shocking is that it was endorsed by Senate President Ben Albritton and Gov. Ron DeSantis, two allegedly well-educated people. At this rate, they’ll next endorse a taxpayer-funded expedition to explore how we ended up living inside a Hollow Earth.

Actually, DeSantis’ endorsement isn’t that much of a surprise. He’s happy to appease the Tinfoil Hat Brigade if it gets him a mention on Fox News or its imitators.

Remember, DeSantis is the guy who appointed as his surgeon general the world’s biggest vaccine skeptic and now lets him run around the state trying to convince everyone to stop preventing children’s tooth decay. I sometimes wonder if he and RFK Jr. share a brain worm.

But Albritton’s comments threw me. He’s a longtime citrus man who’s familiar with the need for accurate weather forecasts. Yet he actually called this lunacy “a great piece of legislation” that would address “real concerns from our constituents.”

If some of those constituents also think their elected politicians are all lizard people, presumably he’d be fine with legislation requiring a reptilian DNA test before administering the oath of office.

“I have heard the conspiracy theories out there,” Albritton said about Garcia’s bill, “but the fact is we should not be shutting down legitimate concerns. Healthy skepticism is important. There’s a lot we don’t know in this field of science and people are rightfully concerned.”

Because I grew up in Florida, I have a healthy skepticism toward anything Florida politicians say. Albritton’s statement suggests that I’m right to be skeptical because there’s a lot that’s wrong with his comments.

We actually know quite a lot about the weather modification attempts. We know they don’t work and have mostly been discontinued.

Florida law currently requires anyone who wants to modify the weather to get a permit first. A Senate bill analysis of SB 56 points out, “There have been no applications for weather modification licenses in the past 10 years.”

Four years ago, eight Western states tried cloud seeding to produce rains to end a lengthy drought. However, Scientific American reported, “there is little evidence to show that the process is increasing precipitation.”

Yet “weather modification” is what our Legislature chooses to tackle instead of lowering property insurance rates, boosting educational test scores, or any one of a dozen more important issues. Maybe they’re under some bizarre mind control method that requires them to be ineffective at good governing.

Legitimate concerns

Albritton’s statement about people being “rightfully concerned” about chemtrails sounds like he’s endorsing the bogus claims that spread last year that the government steered two hurricanes to clobber specific communities ahead of the election.

Those rumors were, of course, lies spread by the unscrupulous to fool the gullible. They became so pervasive that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had to put out a press release denying it.

“NOAA does not modify the weather, nor does it fund, participate in or oversee cloud seeding or any other weather modification activities,” it said.

Given how Elon Musk is rapidly dismantling the agency now, I doubt they can control the thermostat in their office buildings, much less the weather.

I wish Albritton were as supportive of the “legitimate concerns” many of us Floridians feel about climate change.

We’re on the front lines of it, with our rising sea levels, more intense hurricanes, higher storm surges, and increased temperatures even at night. It’s hurting everything from our seafood industry to our sea turtle nesting. Heck, it’s even hurting Albritton’s own industry, agriculture.

Hard-headed property insurance companies recognize the dangers and disruptions of climate change. Why can’t our state officials?

“If lawmakers want to protect Floridians by addressing substances affecting the temperature, weather, and climate, they should hold power companies and the oil and gas industry accountable,” said longtime Florida climate activist Susan Glickman of the CLEO Institute, a non-profit dedicated to climate education and advocacy. “The pollution they release is warming the climate in increasingly extreme and deadly ways.”

But last year the Legislature voted to delete most references to climate change from state law under the well-known scientific theory of “If We Don’t Talk About It, Surely It Will Go Away.” Given how we were all beaten up by intense hurricanes and big storm surges last year, I don’t think it went away.

Fortunately, I see a way to take this “chemtrails” bill and turn it into a “let’s fight climate change” bill. Let me explain.

Contrail confusion

I have a confession to make: Every time I read someone’s rants about chemtrails, I always crack up. That’s because I always picture Cary Grant fleeing the evil crop-duster in the movie “North by Northwest,” which is the silliest and most inefficient murder method ever attempted.

Was the pilot supposed to crash into Cary and kill himself too? Cut Cary’s head off with the propeller, which would make the plane stop flying? Or maybe force him to cough up a lung because of all the pesticide he was inhaling? None of these options seem practical.

Similarly, the whole chemtrails theory falls apart on practical questions. How often and how much do you need to spray those chemicals in the sky to affect everyone? There are 23 million people in Florida alone. That’s a lot of folks to spritz with your mind-control concoction.

Seems to me you’d need WAAAAAY more chemical spraying than what we’re seeing if you plan to coat every single one of us with the goop. You’d need to dump it out in quantities like the helicopter pilots dropping the contents of an entire pond on a wildfire.

Nope, what we’re seeing up in the sky are simple contrails — droplets of water vapor clinging to particles of soot that were emitted by an airplane’s engine.

So imagine my surprise when Rafe Pomerance of Rethink Energy Florida told me, “Water vapor is a greenhouse gas.”

“Say what now?” I replied, displaying my usual incisive intellect.

“You warm up the earth, and one of the effects is an increase of water vapor in the atmosphere,” he explained. Then the vapor traps heat in our atmosphere just like carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases do. The heat that created the vapor gets amplified by the vapor.

When I expressed that old healthy skepticism, he referred me to a scientist named Adam Boies of Stanford University. He’s an expert on contrails. He confirmed that chemtrails are bogus and also confirmed what Pomerance told me.

Some of the contrails disappear in minutes after the plane that created them leaves the area, Boies said. But some, say about 20%, linger longer. Those are the dangerous ones that can trap heat in the atmosphere.

Airplane engine manufacturers are worried about this so they are working on engine designs that will stop producing contrails, he said.

“The airlines are so concerned about this that they’re willing to try new fuels or rerouting flight patterns to try to avoid them,” Boies told me.

Thus, for once, the Legislature might do the right thing for the wrong reason — asking people to report something that actually is a cause of climate change. That’s why I think we should embrace this silly chemtrails bill and join DeSantis and Albritton in pushing it forward.

Then, once the bill passes, I say we all start contacting that DEP hotline to report, say, Florida Power & Light and its fellow utilities for burning fossil fuels to produce electricity. They’re building a lot of solar farms now, but they ought to replace their older plants too.

The same goes for all the municipal incinerators across the state, too, and the Big Sugar companies burning their fields and sending billows of thick smoke into the communities south of Lake Okeechobee. I say we report every one of these folks messing up our state.

“Hello, DEP,” we can say, “there’s a chemical plant in Pensacola that’s altering the weather with its nitrous oxide emissions. The clouds of pollutants are going up in the atmosphere and trapping heat here! You should do something about that, pronto.”

Or how about, “Hello, is this the DEP? I want to report someone for altering the weather. It’s the Florida DOT. They’re building a lot of roads for heavily polluting cars and trucks and doing nothing for mass transit. No electric vehicle charging stations, either. Can you get after them for that?”

By the way, I never did reach the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Garcia. It’s too bad. I was ready to congratulate her for doing more to combat climate change than either DeSantis or his predecessor, Rick Scott. Of course, to hear me speak, she’d first have to unwrap all that tinfoil from around her head.

Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Michael Moline for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com.

This weekend I was driving through Central Florida on U.S. 301, so I just HAD to stop at the Orange Shop in Citra. It was as if my car was pulled into their parking lot by one of those giant magnets that Wile E. Coyote always used for his harebrained schemes.

The Orange Shop has been selling citrus in Citra since 1936, aided by a series of pun-filled billboards that say things like “Make Us Your Main Squeeze.” It used to have a lot more competition for us drive-by customers but most of those other citrus stands have disappeared, along with the groves that supplied them.

While the clerk was ringing up my bag of fruit, I told her I sympathized with her over the latest bit of bad news. President Convicted Felon had announced he was proceeding with his latest harebrained scheme of imposing stiff tariffs on our allies, Canada and Mexico. Canada was talking about hitting back with its own tariffs on, among other things, Florida orange juice.

The clerk didn’t miss a beat. “Means more for us!” she chirped, still upbeat about making a sale.

Then she told me that my bag of tangerines was a BOGO so I could get another bag. In other words, they were literally giving them away.

These are tough times for Florida’s citrus industry. They’ve been battered by hurricanes, disease and developers eager to convert their grove land to sprawl. Where we used to savor the sweet scent of orange blossoms, we now can smell only the raw stink of bulldozers at work.

“Of the 950,000 acres zoned for citrus in 2012, Florida lost more than half by 2023,” the Tampa Bay Times reported last month. “Last year, a major labor group representing growers shut down due to financial constraints.”

Now they’re facing a new foe: that Florida club owner in the White House. You’d think he’d be more sympathetic to the citrus industry, given how his facial coloration resembles their main product.

Yet Trump has launched a ridiculous trade war with our politest ally, which is sure to hurt the demand for Florida citrus in the Great White North. He’s also started one with Mexico that will hurt citrus processors (more on that in a minute).

Meanwhile, his immigration roundup is sure to hinder the industry’s labor supply.

Is it any wonder one of the remaining giants of Florida citrus, Fort Myers-based Alico Inc., announced last month that it’s getting out of the business?

“We determined that it’s not economically viable for us,” the CEO, John Kiernan, told Gulfshore Business. Instead, look for the company, like so many others before it, to turn to a different, less savory crop: houses.

“It’s a rather dismal time for the industry,” said Fritz Roka, director of the Center for Agribusiness at Florida Gulf Coast University. “It’s sad, because they have been such a big part of our culture.”

The most functional sentence

Citrus has been so important to Florida that there are counties named “Citrus” and “Orange.” There are oranges on Florida license plates. Oranges are our official state fruit, orange juice our official state beverage, and the orange blossom our official state flower.

Oranges can pop up in the strangest places. The University of Florida’s stadium is known as “The Swamp,” but it’s named for citrus magnate Ben Hill Griffin Jr. Perhaps UF should call it “The Grove.”

Yet the orange is not a native of Florida. Like two-thirds of the state’s residents (including a certain Palm Beach club owner), oranges came from someplace else — specifically, Spain.

Spanish explorers carried the fruit aboard their ships so their crews could eat them to ward off scurvy. They would plant the seeds in pots on the ship and transplant the saplings wherever they landed, according to Erin Thursby, author of “Florida Oranges: A Colorful History.”

Florida’s earliest groves date to 1565, when Spanish explorer Pedro Menéndez de Avilés founded St. Augustine. The groves the Spanish planted around the city were intended strictly for local consumption.

But by the late 1700s, a slippery St. Augustine businessman named Jesse Fish — described by one historian as a “land dealer, slaver, smuggler, usurer, and cunning crook” — found a way to send Florida oranges elsewhere. He became the first to export oranges out of state and we owe him a huge debt of gratitude (and maybe a pardon).

Harriet Beecher Stowe, who helped start the Civil War with her novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” moved to a cabin in a Florida town called Mandarin after the war. You could trace the origin of both our citrus and tourism industry to her.

She wrote letters to Northern newspapers in which she extolled the state as a paradise, encouraging her readers to visit. She also claimed anyone who moved here could live off the earnings from growing citrus, even without royalties from a bestselling novel.

During World War II, the government launched a fruit-based Manhattan Project here to figure out how to ship orange juice to the troops overseas to combat scurvy. The result of that concentrated science project: frozen concentrated orange juice, which became a hit in the ’50s with families — thanks, in part, to the newfangled freezers sold as part of kitchen refrigerators.

“The most functional sentence in the English language is: Mix with three cans of water and stir,” said historian Gary Mormino, author of “Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida.”

How popular was the new product? “Citrus production in Florida increased from 43 million boxes in 1945 to 72 million in 1952,” the Florida State Archives note. “About half of all fruit became [frozen concentrate] in the 1950s.”

During the glory years of the citrus industry — the 1990s — growers harvested 240 million boxes of fruit a year. By contrast, the 2022 harvest, 41 million boxes, was the lowest since World War II. The USDA’s latest crop forecast — you know, the one so crucial to the plot of the movie “Trading Places” — predicts this season’s orange crop will be a mere 12 million boxes.

That’s a faster decline and fall than the Roman Empire’s.

The view from the tower

Near Orlando, in the town of Clermont, a couple of tourism promoters built a 226-foot spire known as the Citrus Tower. When it opened in 1956, the view it offered of the orange-filled countryside was breathtaking.

“From the top of that tower you could once see 12 to 16 billion citrus trees,” Mormino told me. “Today it’s all gone, unless you spot one growing in someone’s backyard.”

Where did the trees go? Freezes killed a lot of them. Hurricanes knocked them down or drowned them in floods. Then there were the diseases — citrus canker, then citrus greening.

Greening has been particularly destructive over the past 20 years, leaving the fruit nearly inedible and trees weaker, more likely to be toppled by high winds. I had a backyard tangerine tree that was a victim of greening, so I know this firsthand.

Now, on top of all that destruction, we’ve got the red-hatted chief MAGA of ’Merica threatening to slap 25% tariffs on Canada, with little thought to the consequences.

That has prompted Canada to threaten to slap its own tariffs on American imports. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau specifically mentioned Florida orange juice. Turns out Canada consumes a LOT of Florida OJ.

“Florida exports tens of millions of dollars’ worth of orange juice to Canada,” WLRN-FM reported this week. “About 60% of American orange juice sent to Canada comes from Florida.”

The Canada tariffs are now on hold for 30 days, but that’s not much breathing room. Meanwhile, the Mexican tariffs are more bad news for Florida’s citrus industry, Roka said. Now that Florida’s orange groves have faltered, our remaining juice processors — Tropicana, Minute Maid and Florida’s Natural — are buying much of the fruit they need from Mexico, he explained. Because tariffs are routinely passed along to the customers, guess who has to pay those higher fees?

Fortunately, that’s on hold for 30 days, too, or until Co-President Elon Musk decides it’s a bad investment.

But what’s not on hold are the widespread raids by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents looking for illegal immigrants to deport.

Florida’s citrus growers have made good use of the H-2A program, which allows people from other countries to come to the U.S. to legally work jobs in the agriculture industry, Roka told me. That means that all their immigrant labor is legal immigrant labor.

But the ICE agents have been scooping people up left and right and shipping them out so quickly, they’ve had little time to check everyone’s paperwork. I’m sure they’ll eventually get it all sorted out at the detention camp at Guantanamo.

So far, it’s been worse than when the Florida Legislature passed an anti-immigration bill in 2023. So many immigrants fled the fields then that three Republican lawmakers, in a secret meeting that leaked out, protested that their bill was just meant to scare people, not actually shut down farm operations.

Free cups of olive oil

I tried repeatedly to reach some folks in the citrus industry who would talk to me about all this. Although a spokesperson for the trade association known as Florida Citrus Mutual insisted there were signs of hope for the future, she couldn’t give details and nobody else wanted to explain.

Some citrus growers are trying to hang on by switching to different crops, such as olives, pomegranates, peaches, avocados, or even hops. Before you rush out and start printing up a bunch of “I Hop for Beer from Florida Hops” bumper stickers, I should tell you that those alternatives have so far not proven to be as successful as OJ.

In other words, don’t hold your breath for the Florida Welcome Center to switch from offering free cups of orange juice to cups of olive oil (and a little piece of bread to dip in it).

The thing of it is, every time a citrus grower even thinks about giving up the fight, a developer’s right there with a big check, ready to take over that high and dry, well-drained property. The next step: Pave it over and send the stormwater cascading onto its rural neighbors.

I called up the folks from the smart growth organization 1000 Friends of Florida to ask what they think we should do about our disappearing citrus industry.

“It’s sad to watch the shift in Florida’s identity,” said Kim Dinkins, the organization’s policy and planning director. “But it’s an opportunity for us to do better.”

Local governments that have citrus groves classified as rural and agricultural areas should stick to those zoning designations, she said. Unless and until the infrastructure — water lines, sewer lines, roads etc. — are put in place to handle any development, there should be no change.

If and when development is allowed to replace another orange grove, she said, it should not be the cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all kind we’ve seen all over the place (and probably called “The Citrus Stand” or “The Fruit Trees”).

Instead, she called for development that’s clustered instead of sprawling, with large conservation areas that are preserved by a permanent easement and low water-use lawns and landscaping required.

I’m sure a lot of developers will object to such common-sense constraints, but here’s hoping that local elected officials heed that sound advice, because it’s important for our quality of life here.

Speaking as someone who routinely enjoys a cup of OJ with my breakfast, I, too, will be sorry to see oranges, orange blossoms, and orange juice fade away into the sepia tones of ancient Florida history.

But hey, it’s not like we can afford to pay for juice AND our super-expensive eggs.

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