BARTOW, Fla. — Citrus greening and a few powerful storms are partially to blame for Florida’s shrinking orange population.

Right now, the state is seeing some of the lowest production levels in more than 70 years.

Christian Spinosa is a fifth-generation citrus grower in Polk County and his farms produce valencia oranges exclusively for Florida’s Natural, a juice company based out of Lake Wales.

Across the state, Spinosa says, growers have seen the number of oranges their crops produce decline over the last 10 years. Citrus greening remains one of the top causes.

“We’re trying to baby these trees a little bit to fight the symptoms and stress of greening,” he said while walking through one of his groves.

Spinosa says greening has caused some of his trees to lose their color and the fruit to drop prematurely. Put simply, he says greening is a virus that impacts the trees and restricts the amount of nutrients they can absorb, essentially suffocating the fruit. There’s no known cure for citrus greening.

“That’s what makes it so hard with greening, it’s hard to get these trees kind of stress free,” he said. “So after Hurricane Irma, we were bringing the trees back, then you have Hurricane Ian on top of that.

The number of oranges that have been produced from Florida trees has declined since 2016. Spinosa says before Hurricane Irma, they were picking 70 million boxes of oranges each season. Two years ago, before Hurricane Ian, the season left them with 32 million boxes. Last season, the harvest left them with 16 million boxes.

“We’re still fighting to keep up with the demand of orange juice for sure,” he said

One of the biggest losses from Hurricane Ian, Spinosa says, was the funding and resources they had put into a state-funded research project. His team had received funding from the Citrus Research and Field Trial (CRAFT) Foundation and were in the middle of a test that Spinosa says was going well when the hurricane wiped much of the fruit off his trees.

They never got to see the results.