Response to the 1989 Freeze

Oral histories can provide insight into how citrus grows felt about the freezes and their impacts. John Jackson’s groves survived the 1980s freezes, but it did take a toll on his crops. He went from 117 thousand acres in the early 1980s to 12 thousand after the 1989 Christmas freezes. A unique perspective that John provides is that he used his voicemail as a weather forecast for the local citrus growers. People could call his phone and be told exactly what they need to know. John recounted that for the 1989 freeze the forecast was “four or five degrees high.” Four and five degrees is a significant difference when comes to weather a citrus tree lives or dies. John’s history reflects what a lot of secondary sources and newspapers state. In the 1989 freezes, they only had a limited amount options to try and protect the trees, but John stated that “the price of fuel was so high that very few people could afford to run grove heaters.” This is a factor that is not talked about in any source documenting the freezes. Further research should be done to examine the full impact of the cost of fuel on the citrus industry. While John Jackson feels that there was some measure people could take to protect from the freeze, Frank M. Hunt believed there was nothing that could have been done. 

Frank M. Hunt works for the Hunt Brother Company which has been in the family for generations. In his interview, he recalls vivid memories of the wind. His daughter was born on the 21, a day before the impeding freeze was announced. At the time, he remembered “taking her home and the wind was blowing pretty strong and it was cold.” For the Hunt Brother every freeze prior to 1989 they had actually profited off the freezes. They were adequately warned about the freeze, but they had survived the previous four freezes, so there wasn’t any fear going into the 1989 freeze. For the Hunt Brothers, they lost 70% of their trees in the Lake Wales area as well as they went from producing a million boxes of fruit to only producing about 300,000 boxes. This was a devastating lost and helped encourage the Hunt Brother to continue to move their groves south. In terms of protection for the freeze, the hunt brothers did not have microjet irrigation yet, so Frank felt that “there wasn’t a great deal that we could have done.” There is a lack of knowledge on how to protect citrus crops from the cold during this time, and that resulted in countless farmers just waiting to calculate the damage. 

Out of the three oral histories in the collection, Brantley Schirard has the saddest tale. His memory of the 1989 Christmas freezes is of losing his dad;s operation in Clermont. The 1989 freeze hit the entire industry. Not just the north, but the entire industry. Schirard had groves in central Florida. Schirard does not mention much about the events of the freeze, but he does talk about the fallout. Schirard states that “recovery never occurred in Orlando, Clermont, that’s why there’s housed up in there instead of citrus groves.” There are several place throughout Florida which used to be acres of groves. Brantley talks about some of the problems the industry is currently facing. In regards to the root of today’s problems, Brantley cited 1989  as that start.