Florida's Citrus Slaughter

MANY SOUTH FLORIDA residents remember with grief a day in the early ’00s when the government came for their citrus trees.

- Alyssa Martinez

“They didn’t ask politely, ‘Can we please come in and take your trees?’ No, they said, we’re taking the trees,” one Orange County resident recalled.

Armed with chainsaws and woodchippers, contractors hired by the Florida Department of Agriculture were tasked with destroying any citrus trees—healthy grapefruit, lime, lemon, orange, or tangerine trees—that were within 1,900 feet of a citrus tree infected with canker. Among the casualties of the canker war were my grandmother’s lime and sour orange trees in Miami.