Vero Heritage: Stories from the Groves

My name is Dan Ritchie, and I am the President and CEO of Riverfront Packing Company. The packing industry revolves around having volume, and as volumes diminished, certain packing houses were struggling. All of us were, and we've collaborated with Mike Vigaravalia and the Rogers family, Rusty and Sid Banak, and come together for packing all three of our company's fruit under the roof of Riverfront Packing in a very collaborative way.

We had the advent of citrus canker, and part of the citrus canker protocol to survive was to burn trees that were infected. They determined trees were infected by finding a pencil point dot of a citrus canker lesion on one leaf. We took a 1900 foot radius from that one dot or one canker lesion on a leaf and burned every tree within that 1900 foot radius. That was the only way that was determined that we could eradicate citrus canker. So, in that eradication effort, we burned thousands of acres of grove to the point that we were actually eliminating the industry.

Along with eliminating citrus canker, the hurricanes of 2004 and 2005 caused citrus canker to spread beyond ever being able to eradicate it. So, it became endemic, and at that point, we just decided to stop the eradication program. The hurricanes also imposed upon us a loss of fruit and a loss of trees. There was some death, primarily everything along the river when we had the salt water come up from the river, it killed those trees.

Then, we had urban encroachment. Riverfront Packing is sitting on the corner of US-1 and 49th Street for a reason. The family owned everything from here to the river, and this is Riverfront Groves. Originally Scrant Harbor was all citrus; it was all groves. Orchid Island and Windsor were all groves. With the Leer in the Michael family over there now, there is not a grove, a viable commercial grove east of I-95 where there used to be plenty of groves east of I-95. They're just not here anymore.

And then we had citrus greening, which is the real issue. We're really struggling with that. When I was chairman of the citrus commission in the late 90s, we had 60 million boxes of grapefruit grown in the state of Florida. A box is 85 pounds, to give you a sense of size. Today we have four and a half million. So, clearly, the infrastructure that was built for 60 million boxes has collapsed, and there are only a few of us surviving to pack this volume of fruit that we have.

Greening is detrimental to grapefruit primarily because grapefruit is most susceptible to the disease. This is a bacterial disease that in essence, to keep it simple, it is a clogging of the main artery of the tree. What happens is the bacteria gets into what we call the phloem, which is the area where you have photosynthesis and the roots and the exchange of the nutrients. It chokes it off, so the roots start to die back first, and then you see the Asian citrus psyllid symptoms in the tree that are indicative of the disease. That is another disease that is clearly endemic. It is spread by an Asian citrus psyllid, a small insect. It carries the bacteria; it feeds on the leaf, flies to the next leaf on the next tree, and feeds on that leaf. There are a bazillion Asian citrus psyllids; we cannot control them, so they're all infected; they all have the bacteria. Every tree, arguably every grove in the state of Florida, is infected with greening. It's just a matter of time, arguably, that the tree will eventually die. We are doing all we can in therapeutic means to try to sustain this fraternity of trees while we look at some new combinations of rootstocks and varieties that seem to be resistant to the disease. Lemons, certain types of oranges, certain types of mandarin oranges, grapefruit, we don't really have an answer. There is one variety within the grapefruit scheme of things, Star Rubies, that seem to be resistant to the disease. We have no idea why. There's no explanation for it, but we're working with those to replant and to try to continue to have a viable industry, and we will. We will survive. This industry is never going to be what it was in my lifetime, but it will still be here; it'll just be different, not unlike a lot of things in the world. This industry was one of the major stools here. When you think about the economy of Indian River County, and you think about the year that Piper was on strike, baseball was on strike, and we had a freeze, that spring was pretty quiet around here. And you think about the icons in this community that were related to the citrus industry, starting from the north, the Kennedy family, the Rile family, the Graves family, the Green family, Smith family, the Barnes family, the Sextons, the Richardson family, the list goes on and on and on. I probably miss somebody of very high importance, but those families were some of the most giving families in this community when there was no other industry here. The United Way was still, is supported by those of us that are still in the industry, the education foundation. Dan Richardson, I think, was one of the starters of that. So, you look back at the history of this community and the not my generation, the generation before me that really gave back to this community, and the firm leg on the stool of our economy was citrus. It was really centered around citrus. That's not the case anymore. We've got diversity. We've got a lot of home building. We've got tourism. We've got different things going on that have stepped in to fill that void, but those of us that are still here feel very much a sincere desire to continue our role as contributors to the community in any way that we can.

I am Elizabeth Graves Bass. I grew up here and was born in Vero Beach. Even though every time I tell one of the visitors from the northern parts of the country that I was born here, they're very surprised. I assure them that people were indeed born here. They did birth babies back then, and my family has always been in agriculture in one form or another. Eventually, in the years of my life, we were in citrus, and my father was Rip Graves. He was very prominent in the citrus industry. He's in the citrus Hall of Fame, and he's also in the agriculture Hall of Fame, which is a little bit bigger deal in this County.

We're the longest-running citrus company that is still in the same families. This started with my grandfather and his brother, and then there was my father, and then there was my brother and me. I always said I was the other Graves brother. The two brothers went into business together as young men. Then they eventually moved to Indian River County, and that would be in the early 20s that they moved here, and they started out growing vegetables. My mother came down from Virginia, and she was a teacher, and daddy always said that the teachers didn't get paid till Graves Brothers paid their taxes because this was depression time. I think it was true. It's probably true. They had to sell some land. They owned a tremendous amount of property. They owned two townships.

The best grapefruit is that which is produced under the Orchid label. That's what Japan always bought. They were the country willing to pay a premium for their fruit, and so a lot of our fruit went to Japan. And there actually is a Japanese man. I can't tell you his name, but he owns the Orchid label. He bought it when Deerfield gave it up. He was quick, and he bought it, but we owned Graves Brothers' exclusive right to use it in this country.

Daddy had just an incredible memory, and I nagged him until he started writing them down. And the result of that was two books. This is one of them, The Graves Brothers. It's the history of the company for the first hundred years.

There's an old story, but history credits Abraham Lincoln with the story of an old farmer plowing his field with a mule, and a bystander who was watching the farmer and the mule go back and forth, he noticed a big horsefly that was stinging the poor old mule. So when the mule passed by within the man's reach, he reached out and swatted the fly. The angry farmer turned to him and said, "Why in the world did you have to go and do that for? That's the only thing that was making him go." So, I think that maybe I was that fly. I was the only thing that was encouraging or maybe nagging my dad until he started writing down these wonderful memories, and so we have this book.