US: citrus disease 'greening' spreads to Broward County

A much-feared citrus disease has spread from Miami-Dade County into Broward County, state officials said Friday, two days after a ban was imposed on shipping some common landscape plants to other citrus-producing states.

Citrus greening, also known as yellow dragon disease, has been discovered on citrus trees in Miramar, 40 miles north of the initial August find in Florida City, said Denise Feiber, a spokeswoman for the Florida Department of Agriculture.

The infected area now includes 36 infected citrus trees on 26 properties in Miami-Dade and Broward counties, she said.

Considered one of the most serious citrus diseases in the world, citrus greening has now spilled over into the state's plant nursery industry, which racks up $1.75 billion in annual sales.

Miami-Dade County, home to more than 1,000 nurseries, is now under a quarantine that prohibits the businesses from moving all plants that can host greening — or the insect that carries it, the citrus psyllid — out of the county.

Richard Gaskalla, director of the state Division of Plant Industry, notified Florida's roughly 7,800 nurseries of the quarantine in a memo dated Wednesday and posted Friday on the state's Web site.

In addition to the Miami-Dade, all other Florida counties also are prohibited from shipping possible host plants to citrus-producing states — Arizona, California, Louisiana and Texas, as well as the commonwealth of Puerto Rico.

"It's going to affect a lot of out-of-state shipping," said Richard Kern, president of Southeast Growers in Wellington, adding that nurseries across Florida get plants from Homestead, including orange jasmine and box thorn — now on the prohibited list.

"Orange jasmine goes out in the spring as a spring and summer patio plant," Kern said. "I talked to one broker in Texas who buys 20,000 each spring. It's a popular-selling plant."

The citrus psyllid was first spotted in Delray Beach in 1998, and since then, state agriculture officials have conducted surveys for the greening disease.

The state's attack on the disease is still in its infancy, Feiber said. Guidelines for controlling the psyllid are still being developed, Gaskalla said.

"Hopefully, there will be treatment protocols to allow a resumption of shipment," said Ben Bolusky, executive vice president of the Florida Nurserymen & Growers Association in Orlando. "With greening, it will be more complex."

Bolusky said it's not known how many nurseries in Miami-Dade grow plants affected by the shipping ban.

State and federal officials are scheduled to meet Monday at the University of Florida's Citrus Research and Education Center at Lake Alfred near Winter Haven to discuss how to deal with greening.

Elise Ryan, owner of Color Garden Farms in Loxahatchee, said she hopes state agriculture officials will stop the greening disease before it reaches Palm Beach County.

"They set up programs to try to nip these things in the bud," Ryan said. "We were concerned about the hibiscus mealybug and that has been pretty well contained."

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