Florida citrus forecast put on hold indefinitely
The USDA usually releases its first citrus forecast in the middle of October, and it influences the negotiations between Florida growers and juice processors on farm prices for their fruit. Processors buy 95 percent of Florida's orange crop and more than 60 percent of the state's grapefruit harvest each season.
Growers are already seeing high drop on their greening-infected trees, said McKenna and Jay Clark, a Wauchula-based grower and Citrus Commission member, but it remains unclear whether drop levels will repeat the 2012-13 rates. "The big thing is the drop and how much of it is built in" to the USDA estimate, Clark said.
USDA officials in September said their forecast model is based on drop rates over the past five to 10 seasons, not including 2004-04 and 2005-06 impacted by hurricane-related drop. Changing the model's drop rates based on a single season's experience would be statistically unsound, they added.
Not all the information needed for the forecast was entered into USDA computers before Oct. 1, said Candi Erick, state administrator at the USDA's Florida Field Office in Maitland, which also shut down. Staff would need "about a week" after the federal government re-opens to finish that job and issue the first forecast, she said.
Source: theledger.com
