Today is the twentieth anniversary of the big Christmas freeze of 1989. It was also the last time we had an ice storm here in Gainesville. The official high for my area that day was 16 degrees, but my front porch thermometer said 11.

http://www.theledger.com/article/20091225/NEWS/912259950/1178?Title=1989-Christmas-Freeze-Florida-s-Citrus-Industry-Was-Changed-Forever#

1989 Christmas Freeze: Florida's Citrus Industry Was Changed Forever

By Kevin Bouffard

Published: Friday, December 25, 2009 at 4:49 a.m.
Last Modified: Friday, December 25, 2009 at 4:49 a.m.


PIERRE DUCHARME | THE LEDGER
ALTURAS CITRUS GROWER Scott Young surveyed the damages to part of his 400 grove acres following Florida's worst citrus


HAINES CITY | The ghosts of Christmases past evoke mixed feelings among Florida citrus growers in their 40s and older.

This year brings particularly bad memories for the 20th anniversary of the Christmas freeze of 1989, considered to be one of the worst citrus freezes in the state's history. It began Dec. 23 and lasted until Christmas Day.

'Everybody who is still in the citrus industry is aware of it (the 20th anniversary),' said Scott Young, an Alturas grower who had 400 acres then as well as today.

'There were a lot of growers in the industry on Christmas Eve and out of it the next morning.'

As devastating as it was, the 1989 freeze also capped a decade of citrus freezes that ruined many businesses, including packinghouses and small juice processors in addition to growers.

'I remember it meant another job change for me,' said Dennis Broadaway, the chief executive at the Haines City Citrus Growers Association, which runs one of the state's five largest fresh fruit packinghouses.

Broadaway was working at the former B.G. Harmon Fruit Co., which ran a packinghouse near Clermont until the 1989 freeze, when it shut down and never re-opened.

'There wasn't anything left to pack,' he recalled.

It was the second time that decade a freeze had put him out of business, Broadaway said.

He previously worked on his family's farm, which had more than 600 acres of citrus groves in Lake and Orange counties. The first major freeze of the decade from Dec. 24 to Dec. 26, 1983, left them with just seven acres of tangelos and they couldn't afford to replant.

A 'major citrus freeze' is one that causes significant fruit or tree damage. It takes a temperature below 28 degrees for at least four hours to begin causing damage.

In addition to the 1983 and 1989 freezes, the decade saw another major freeze Jan. 20 to 22, 1985, and minor freezes in 1981, 1982, 1986 and Feb. 25, 1989.

In more than a century of growing commercial citrus in Florida, the 1980s were widely regarded as having the greatest impact on the industry ó that is, until this decade.

Florida citrus started in 2000 with a statewide canker outbreak that would eventually destroy nearly 100,000 acres in an unsuccessful attempt to eradicate the bacterial disease. The three 2004 hurricanes destroyed an estimated one-third of that season's crop as well as ñ with an assist from Hurricane Wilma in October 2005 ñ spreading canker so widely in Florida it became impossible to eliminate it.

Most ominously, citrus greening, a bacterial disease fatal to trees, was discovered in fall 2005, generating an unprecedented scientific research effort to find a cure. That research will determine whether this decade outstrips the 1980s for notoriety.

Twenty years later, it's clear the 1989 freeze accelerated two long-term impacts on Florida citrus that began earlier that decade.

The first was the nearly total destruction of commercial citrus growing north of Interstate 4, the area hardest hit by freezing weather.

Almost all freeze-related replantings happened south of that line, and new groves opened up much farther south, particularly in Hendry and Collier counties, with the regularity of condos in other parts of Florida.

In 1980, Lake County had 122,700 commercial grove acres compared to 6,706 acres in Collier and 30,086 in Hendry, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The 2009 USDA census shows 12,884 grove acres in Lake while Hendry has grown to 66,821 acres and Collier to 31,247 acres.

Polk has remained the biggest citrus-producing county over that time with 132,124 acres in 1980 but just 82,629 this year.

Much of Polk's lost acreage happened along U.S. 27 north of I-4, now housing and shopping malls.

'The movement down south never got anywhere as big until the ë89 freeze,' said John Attaway, author of 'A History of Florida Citrus Freezes,' the definitive 1997 book on the subject. 'So many people who had good groves gave up and sold.'

Most of those groves measured less than 100 acres, contributing to the second long-term impact ó the diminishing number of small and medium-sized growers to the large grower with 1,000 or more grove acres.

The large growers with more financial resources led the way south, Attaway, Young and Broadaway agreed.

'It's very similar to what happened to wheat or corn in the Midwest,' said Norman Todd, a LaBelle citrus consultant.

[ Kevin Bouffard can be reached at kevin.bouffard@theledger.com or at 863-422-6800. ]