The economics of Oranges and juice are fascinating. In Florida, we had a major outbreak of citrus canker that made most of the oranges grown here unsuitable for sale by USDA standards (still safe for consumption). So, off to the juice factory to be stored in those massive vats.
When not on season, I buy oranges from South Africa or wherever, but I can't stomach the bottled juice. I don't know what flavor pack they use here but it doesn't taste even remotely like the real thing, I'd rather make juice from the worst oranges in the supermarket than drink bottled.
When you talk about a Valencia orange in Florida now is often the clone SPB-1-14-19, sligtly hardier than the original tree from California and different also than the Hughes clone if I'm not wrong.
Producer on the other hand is not the same as hybridizer. The original tree was developed in California but is cultured in all suitable areas of the planet. Their patent has expired long time ago
> William Wolfskill .. migrating to California .. hybridized the Valencia orange, a sweet orange, naming it for Valencia, Spain, which had a reputation for its sweet orange trees. .. The success of this crop in Southern California led to the naming of Valencia, California.
> ... In the mid 20th century, Florida botanist Lena B. Smithers Hughes introduced major improvements to the Valencia orange .. the Hughes Valencia bud line [make] up some 60 percent of all Valencia oranges propagated for cultivation in Florida
Your comment would have been much more pleasant and no less informative to read without that first sentence. The only "one-upmanship" I detected was yours.
I live two thousand miles away from the nearest orange tree, so I'm not sure how I'm competing with them.
... which leads to my question: what happened with all the citrus greening disease in Florida? i heard it had destroyed a lot of trees. have they found a good way to combat that?
Citrus needs a lot of fertilizer. I finally did the calculations one year and I was astounded at how much nitrogen I needed to apply. Once I did, I got amazing yields. Micronutrients are important too, but man, that nitrogen. In socal, stick to an acidifying source like ammonium sulfate or cottonseed hulls.
Grapefruits suffer even more with cold than oranges
Oranges are a type of fruit created twice, so can be split in two big groups: Sweet oranges, the fruit that we eat normally, and sour oranges, often used in landscaping and bitter (being bitter they do not attract vandalism). Sweet oranges include several subgroups also. Some are more tart than other.
People picking oranges carelessly lead easily to crashed stems, ugly patches of dry foliage and damaged trunks. Fruit in the streets works great for some locations, not so for other ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Globalisation happened. People basically does not care about it, but new plant diseases are a big problem for the economy of a country.