When freezing temperatures swooped through the state in late January, most orange growers braced for the worst. What they didn’t realize was that a therapy they’ve been using to fight greening was quietly stacking the odds in their favor.
Growers and researchers were pleasantly surprised to find that the state’s orange trees weathered the winter cold far better than expected. So much better, in fact, that they are now reporting an overall increase in fruit quality and volume. It’s a change they are attributing to oxytetracycline (OTC) injections.
Growers inject OTC into the trunk to help the trees fight greening. Now, the treated trees appear to be better conditioned to withstand the elements.
“It seems that OTC injections reset the health of the tree,” Dr. Ute Albrecht says.
Albrecht, a UF associate professor of Plant Physiology at the Southwest Florida Research and Education Center in Immokalee, has long been a proponent of trunk injections. Her research has helped pave the way for a new era in the battle against HLB. When the EPA approved OTC delivery via trunk injections in late 2022, her research trials began in earnest.
“One injection per year, which is what the EPA currently allows, can help the tree recover,” she explains.
According to a recent survey, nearly two-thirds of citrus growers have used OTC trunk injections for three consecutive seasons.
The quality of the juice, the size of the fruit and even the color of the peel all seem to improve, according to reports from growers.
“All of our studies this season — some of which included over 4,000 trees — produced good data,” she says. “After three years of injections there seems to be a cumulative effect.”
This year, it seems, that effect was on juice quality.
That “cumulative effect” may also explain how the trees continued to produce despite historically low temperatures this winter.
In early February, Central Florida saw historic low temperatures. The cold snap caused more than $3.1 billion in total losses to the agricultural industry, which makes the resilience of the OTC trees a bright spot.
John Barben, a fourth-generation citrus grower from Avon Park who uses OTC injections on the entirety of his acreage, has seen marked improvement in his groves.
“It doesn’t matter if it’s a large grower or a small grower, we just want to keep the industry growing,” Barben says. “For now, (the OTC injections) are the way to do that.”
For Albrecht, the successes she is seeing with OTC injections are not the end, but another chapter in a long fight for the Florida Citrus Industry.
“I am excited, and the growers have learned a lot, but we know this is a temporary solution,” she says. “Over the next few years with new emerging technologies including CRISPR-edited trees we have coming out; we may be able to stop injecting trees all together.”
This column is sponsored by Rucks Citrus Nursery, and the opinions expressed herein may not reflect those of CFAN or of its advertisers.