In 2003 and 2004, citrus yields were the highest in Florida history, at almost 300 million boxes, more than any other state, including California.

“There was so much fruit they couldn’t sell it all — it was too much,” said Michael Rogers, director and professor at the Citrus Research & Education Center of the University of Florida’s Institute of Food & Agricultural Sciences in Lake Alfred, who arrived as a young field researcher with a Ph.D. the same year.

That was also when the Asian citrus psyllid arrived in the United States, an insect first detected in Asian citrus trees a century earlier. Nobody knew much about it in 2004 and 2005, recalls Rogers, who was 26 years old then, or about the bacteria it spreads that results in Huanglongbing or so-called citrus greening. Greening has devastated the Florida industry in the last two decades.

Now they know a lot more about it, and Rogers is 46. Research is no longer “a shotgun approach trying anything somebody thinks could help,” explains Rogers, “but almost laser-focused on things that show promise.”

Gene editing, for example.

“Genetic improvement of citrus through gene editing means we can identify a gene of interest and turn it off. So you lose those disease response systems — it won’t respond to (the greening) bacteria,” explains Rogers.

“But are there negative effects? What else can’t they respond to? So we have field tests of gene-edited plants, and funding is now spent on things that have a high likelihood of succeeding. And if they do succeed, it will pay off tremendously for the industry. We don’t yet know if it will work.”

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