http://www.orlandosentinel.com/business/orl-cover0509jan05,0,6743280.story

Shippers say 2008 was vintage year for grapefruit

Jerry W. Jackson
Sentinel Staff Writer
January 5, 2009

Mesh bags and boxes of plump Indian River grapefruit still sell briskly during the winter holidays at White's Red Hill Groves, a gift-fruit packinghouse in southeast Orlando. Grapefruit has always played a secondary role to the more glamorous Florida orange crop, in all its colorful varieties. But midwinter grapefruit sales are still a staple for many small shippers, and this season's crop is said to be shaping up as one of the higher-quality harvests in years.

"The cold weather we had in November really helped with the color, and the crop is larger than last year's," said Ted White, co-owner of his family-owned business, which has operated at the same location since the 1960s.

Although the vast citrus groves of the past have dwindled in Central Florida, Orlando is still the center of the gift-fruit shipping business in Florida. The industry's big central trucking plant off Kirkman Road on Orlando's west side greets a steady stream of big rigs during the weeks leading up to Christmas, hauling boxes of specially packed citrus to states throughout the country.

The center reopens this week for the smaller second half of the gift-fruit shipping season. But it just so happens that the tart grapefruit is sweeter when harvested after Jan. 1, and the industry is looking for a strong finish to the gift-fruit season, which runs from November through April. Thin-skinned tangerines and tangelos dominate shipments for a time in midwinter, before giving over to the steadier supplies of sturdy navel oranges and grapefruit.

"We'll be slammed mostly with HoneyBells during the first two weeks" of January, said Donna Garren, executive vice president of the Florida Gift Fruit Shippers Association. HoneyBell oranges are a hybrid blend of grapefruit and tangerine stock, with the fruit getting its larger size from the grapefruit genes but its bright-orange color and sweetness from the tinier tangerine.

Shipments are up

Garren said the Orlando-based trade association does not track gift shipments by the types of citrus, but grapefruit makes up a relatively small fraction of the overall total, mostly as part of mixed-fruit boxes.

This season, though, the Orlando center expects to handle 600,000 to 700,000 cartons of all varieties, significantly more than the estimated 400,000 cartons that went through the center a year ago. Each carton averages 20 pounds of fruit, so 12 million to 14 million pounds of fresh Florida citrus is expected to be trucked throughout the country, to FedEx Corp. centers for final delivery by the U.S. Postal Service, by the end of April.

Shipments are up compared with a year ago because more members are turning over their trucking needs to the cooperative, rather than running their own rigs. Still, the projection is well below the peak year of 1987-88, when the Orlando plant handled 32 million pounds of gift fruit -- nearly 1.6 million cartons.

Most of the state's fresh grapefruit, including the White family's fruit from their 70-year-old grove in Mims, comes from the east Central Florida area known as the Indian River region, so named for the narrow Intracoastal waterway that runs parallel to the coast.

Doug Bournique, executive director of the Vero Beach-based Indian River Citrus League, said his group's grower-members are calling this harvest a "vintage crop" partly because of the abundant rainfall from Tropical Storm Fay, which followed a good summer growing season.

Although the storm, which struck in late August, damaged several groves in low-lying areas of east Central Florida, the rain was beneficial to the surviving crop overall, boosting the size of the fruit at a critical time.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's survey of the crop estimated in December that the typical size of grapefruit being harvested this season is "near the maximum of the past eight non-hurricane seasons." The total volume, however, is projected to be less than a year ago, dipping to 23 million boxes from 26.6 million. Each field box of grapefruit is equivalent to 85 pounds of fruit.

Indian River gold standard

Only grapefruit grown in the 200-mile-long Indian River district can legally be labeled and marketed as Indian River citrus, to protect the industry's nearly century-old reputation for high-quality fruit.

The designated growing region runs from Daytona Beach on the north to West Palm Beach on the south, and includes nearly 1,000 growers, 145,000 commercial acres of fruit and 22 packinghouses. About 70 percent of Florida's grapefruit is produced in the Indian River district, and most of the crop from the region is sold as fresh fruit, shipped throughout the nation and to several dozen countries.

Much of the grapefruit grown elsewhere in the state is squeezed for juice.

For lifelong growers such as the White brothers of Red Hill Groves, grapefruit will always be a special fruit, a dependable cash crop for Florida that no other country or state could match in sheer volume. Despite the loss of acreage in recent years to development, hurricanes and diseases such as canker, Florida still produces twice as much as grapefruit as Texas and California combined.

Peak season in 1997

But the Florida grapefruit industry's record days are long gone, as growers no longer expect to recover to anywhere near the peak season of 1997, when 55.8 million boxes were harvested. That's 4.7 billion pounds of the heavy, thin-skinned fruit.

Ted White says his family's grapefruit sales have likely dwindled to about 10 percent or 15 percent of their total citrus sales, down a half or more from years ago.

"It used to be a lot higher," he said, quickly adding, "the [grape]fruit we have right now is some of the best ever."

Florida's grapefruit harvests Harvest Boxes* 2002-03 38.7 million 2003-04 40.0 million 2004-05 12.8 million 2005-06 19.3 million 2006-07 27.2 million 2007-08 26.6 million 2008-09** 23.0 million * 85-pound boxes ** Forecast -- SOURCES: USDA; Florida Agricultural Statistics Service