On either side of a sandy dirt road, Valencia orange trees tower overhead with flecks of orange and yellow peeking through leafy green branches.
Morgan McKenna Porter, 32, has spent her whole life in citrus groves.
"The Florida citrus industry was originally started with the guy that just wanted to have five acres, 10 acres, 100 acres, and be a Florida citrus grower. That model is why there's an orange and orange blossoms on every license plate,” McKenna Porter said. “We're the flagship industry, and it was part of the Florida dream. It was the white picket fence of Florida to own a grove."
She's the operations manager at her family business McKenna Brothers in Lake Wales. It's owned by her father and uncle. They not only manage their own groves but also caretake for others.
"At its prime, and really up until about two or three years ago, we were just over 5,000 acres. Now we're closer to that 1,500 area ... we were harvesting and hauling over 2 million boxes, and now we get excited when we hit 500,000," she said.
That decline is thanks to citrus greening disease.
The Asian citrus psyllid — a tiny brown winged insect — infects these trees with bacteria that essentially strangles the root system. They have devastated Florida's iconic citrus industry, slicing production by 90% since the early 2000s.
"This yellowing in the leaves, instead of seeing that nice, really vibrant, dark green is typically a sign of greening," McKenna Porter said holding an orange tree branch.
McKenna Porter said it's standard to assume that every tree has been infected, but researchers at the University of Florida's Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences have been working with growers like McKenna Porter to workshop solutions over the years.
At a lab in Lake Alfred, Lukasz Stelinski, an entomology researcher and professor for UF/IFAS, presents the latest in greening science: a genetically modified citrus tree.
"Looks like any normal citrus seedling that you might see growing up in a citrus nursery prior to planting," said Stelinski.
Behind some zipped-up netting is an unassuming plant with lots of green leaves sprouting about two feet up from a black pot.
But this is no ordinary seedling. This one is a killer.
It's been genetically altered to create a protein that forms holes in the gut of a psyllid.
"When we started seeing dead psyllids ... those are the days you live for because science is very slow, and it takes months and months — sometimes years — to see your result, and most of the time the results are negative. So, when you have something that works, it's a reason to celebrate," said Stelinski.
While the initial adult psyllids can feed on a citrus tree, none of its offspring are able to survive into the next generation. So, the trees do get damaged, but they survive.
"It serves essentially as a population sink," Stelinski said.
Stelinski believes genetically modified trees would be part of a host of solutions that are needed to combat greening.
His team’s research, led by eminent scholar and entomology professor Bryony Bonning, has been peer-reviewed and successful in the lab. But the real test will come if the trees survive the next three years in citrus groves.
And even if it works, it will take more time for a grower's genetically edited trees to bear fruit.
"What we're talking about here could be a decade, 15 years away before you start seeing those changes. So, in the meantime, people are going out of business and that's the heartbreaking part," Stelinski said.
It takes so long because it’s not something they can just inject into a mature tree. They all have to be grown from seeds.
In the meantime, growers like McKenna Porter continue to fight to keep the trees that they have alive.
"We'll have additional band-aid type therapies to keep us essentially on life support until there is that tree that's available,” she said.
McKenna Porter hopes that down the line this new technology will not just benefit growers in California, Arizona, Brazil, or Mexico -- that there’s an industry in Florida to save.
