Dylan Farr said a disease is ravaging his family’s orange grove.
“Thanks to greening, you lose your trees in three to four years. There is no cure, there is nothing stopping it, so it’s ravaging the orange trees,” said Farr, a 22-year-old UF food and resource economics senior, said.
The Matheson History Museum opened an exhibit Monday to remind visitors about one of Florida’s vital resources, said Rebecca Fitzsimmons, a curator and archivist for the museum.
The orange is Florida’s No. 1 agricultural crop, Fitzsimmons said, but few residents consider its importance the to Florida’s past and future.
However, the orange is still a popular image in depictions of a tropical paradise, Fitzsimmons said.
“It’s become part of this mythology of what Florida is, and you have this sort of ‘fruit of the gods’ that it gets referred to,” she said.
She said the exhibit chronicles the orange plant’s humble beginning in St. Augustine, where Spanish travelers grew the continent’s first orange orchards.
The exhibit also features an exposé on what Fitzsimmons called the “dark side” of the citrus industry — the period during which farmers used slave labor during 1950s.
Asian psyllid bugs are now infecting orange plants and “mummifying” trees, but more education and research may lead to a solution, Fitzsimmons said.
“There are certain root stalks that can still be infected with citrus greening, but they can fight it off,” she said. “Even though they have the disease, they still bear fruit.”
