"As a Ridge Citrus grower in 1990, the description of citrus cultivation as constrained by the lack of deep sandy soils to the east, west, and south seems out of order.  The government has spent millions to improve drainage in wetter areas.  The improved drainage has opened up new citrus areas and increased competition with the citrus industry on the ridge where it should naturally be located.   We can grow citrus up here on the high lands without all of that fancy drainage and we don't have as many fungus problems.  They took perfectly good range land and over drained it in order to create new grove areas.

My family spent many years of hard work clearing the useless scrub off of our land.  Now, the so-called environmentalists complain about the loss of scrub.  If they wanted to protect the scrub so much why didn't they buy it and and put the kind of work into saving it that we put into developing productive groves. We are good environmentalists too.  We only fertilized and sprayed as much as we had to and we always followed the Extension Agent's recommendations.  After all it is our land that we would be damaging and our soil that would be eroding away.

Our hard work has also been damaged by the unusual freezes, by cheap imports, and by NAFTA.  The Ridge was the world's center of citrus production.   Now, cheap juice from foreign oranges from places like South America and cheap oranges from Israel has stolen our markets.  For many years citrus was the biggest industry in Florida.  We produced the jobs and paid the taxes.  Now we are being forced out of business.  We will have to give up and sell our groves to developers so that we can get a fair price for our work.  The developers will put in lots of houses that will need lots of water, use lots of chemicals to keep up their fancy landscaping, and want lots of fancy government services that we didn't need."