The revitalization of Florida’s citrus industry won’t happen overnight, but a variety of sweet orange developed by biotechnology company Soilcea is showing impressive resistance to the devastating effects of Huanglongbing (HLB or citrus greening disease) in a current trial.
Soilcea leveraged CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeat) technology to improve the sweet orange’s natural defense mechanisms, allowing new varieties to better ward off the proliferation of disease-causing pathogens.
The company’s first trial began in May 2023 and includes 400 trees. In the trials, control trees and disease-resistant trees have been exposed to the Asian citrus psyllid, which carries HLB. According to Yianni Lagos, co-founder and CEO of Soilcea, the disease-resistant trees are seeing as much as a 17,000 times reduction in HLB-causing Candidatus Liberibacter asiaticus bacteria compared to control trees. While that’s not total immunity, the impact is significant and clearly visible in the health of the trees.
After a 2023 determination from the USDA that enabled wider distribution of Soilcea’s plants, the company will begin sending more trees to nurseries and growers statewide this spring, and another batch will go out in fall. Soilcea partners with citrus nurseries in Florida and is also interested in working directly with growers on more trials.
“We are starting to exponentially scale our trees to have more numbers, and so really where we’re at now is field trial scale, but by the fall of next year or the spring of 2027 we’re going to have full-scale production where we can start putting hundreds of thousands of trees in the ground each year,” Lagos shares. “It’s definitely a sequential process. We’re scaling up production while growers are getting experience with these trees, so hopefully then in two years they’re going to be really ready to replant the industry.”
The need for an effective tool in the fight against citrus greening and canker could not be more evident than in the USDA’s February forecast of citrus production numbers in Florida. The agency updated its all orange forecast to just 11.5 million boxes—500,000 less than the January number and a 36 percent decrease from the 2023-2024 season. By contrast, the total orange production in the 1996-1997 season was 244 million boxes.
“What growers need is a disease-resistant tree,” Lagos affirms. “They know how to grow citrus; they know how to handle Florida and freezes and everything else. They’re really the experts there. We’ve been talking with growers and they want to really start planting again and they want to revitalize this industry. They’re just waiting for the tool — which is going to be our tree — in order to do that.”