While we don’t know the status of the orange crop in Florida yet, prior to the storm making landfall speculators were concerned about a significant hit to the citrus crop from the storm, according to this article in Bloomberg (may be paywalled). Growers are already under stress due to citrus greening, and some were not able to recover from earlier hurricane seasons. Both wind and heavy rain were considered to be threats to the crop, so it will be interesting to see how they fared from the storm once assessments are completed. The potential loss of a significant part of the crop was enough to send orange futures skyrocketing due to the potential for limited supply this year after Ian.

Damage to citrus groves at the UF/IFAS Southwest Florida Research and Education Center at Immokalee. Photo by Monica Ozores-Hampton.