Colin Risdahl

So the interesting sort of political economy story underneath this is that the Florida citrus industry, because it's lost so much money has lost a lot of political power.

And the developers have gained a ton of political power as Florida has grown and become more of a real estate state.

And you sort of see that playing out in real time in the state.

I alluded to this as I was setting up this interview, but give us a scale, a sense of scale, would you, of the collapse?

Because it is, I mean, it's mind boggling.

Yeah, dramatic.

It's right.

So I think the best way to put this is in 2003, 2004, the Florida orange industry produced 242 million boxes of fruit.

Those are 90 pound boxes.

This year, they're on pace to produce fewer than 12 million boxes.

That's a collapse of more than 95 percent.

A hundred percent of the trees are now infected with citrus greening, which means they're either in the process of dying or dead.

And, you know, at every metric, it's like this.

There was a representative from Minute Maid who I spoke to, which is owned by Coca-Cola.

said that three, four years ago, 80% of their juice was from oranges from Florida.

This year, 80% of the juice is from oranges from Brazil.

Like three or four years this happened.

And so, you know, it's a total collapse.

I mean, it's hard to overstate how dramatic it is.

This is I mean, it's a lot of things, right, as we've talked about.