Citrus, Cattle, and the Inland Economy

Drive across the center of Florida and you pass through a landscape that two industries made. The flatwoods and prairies of Polk, Highlands, and Okeechobee counties carry traces of both, the fenced pastures of the cattle industry, the remnant groves of the citrus belt, and the phosphate mines that feed both the orange trees and the global fertilizer market. Florida oranges first reached Northern markets in significant quantities in the eighteen seventies, when Harriet Beecher Stowe, who had retired to a grove property at Mandarin on the Saint Johns River, wrote about the pleasures of a Florida winter and the sweetness of the fruit in a series of essays for Northern newspapers.

Stowe's dispatches helped create a cultural appetite for Florida winters that the railroads would soon convert into tourism. The citrus industry grew quickly after the railroads arrived, concentrating in a belt running down the central ridge. Then came the freeze of eighteen ninety-five.

Two killing freezes, one in December of eighteen ninety-four and a harder one in February of eighteen ninety-five, wiped out most of the orange groves in North and Central Florida, and output collapsed from about six million boxes a year to roughly one hundred thousand. Grove owners who replanted farther south discovered that the lower peninsula had a warmer microclimate. The center of the Florida citrus industry shifted permanently southward, toward the ridge counties of Lake, Polk, and Highlands, where it stayed for most of the twentieth century.

The cattle industry operated in parallel, largely invisible to the tourists and retirees who concentrated on the coasts. Florida consistently ranked among the top ten beef-cattle states in the nation through most of the twentieth century. The Florida Cracker cattle, the original Spanish stock, were gradually replaced by Brahman crosses better suited to the heat and the internal parasites of the subtropical climate.

The industry still operates today, though citrus has contracted dramatically since the early two thousands due to a bacterial disease called citrus greening, carried by an Asian psyllid insect that arrived in Florida around two thousand and five and has killed or damaged a significant portion of the remaining groves.