As citrus acreage expands in Georgia, the Southeast Regional Fruit & Vegetable Conference has added the fruit to its educational seminar lineup in recent years. This year’s conference, held in Savannah in early January, featured various citrus topics, including pest and disease management, new varieties and economics of citrus production in the state.
Greg Fonsah and Guy Hancock, ag economists at the University of Georgia (UGA), presented an enterprise budgeting spreadsheet developed for satsuma production in the state. Increases in production costs and market price swings for the fruit have altered the budgeting landscape for the variety. The spreadsheet can be downloaded here.
The economists demonstrated the spreadsheet during their presentation and encouraged growers to give it a look and provide feedback on ways to improve the budgeting tool. Individual fields in the spreadsheet can be filled in by growers to reflect their true expenses and prices received for fruit.
“We’ve made the budget interactive, so growers can add their real-world data into the spreadsheet to get a better estimate of what their costs and returns might be,” Fonsah said.
A roundtable discussion led by UGA researchers furthered the discussion on economic issues citrus growers in Georgia face. Among those is the reliance on satsuma as the dominant variety in the state.
With satsuma’s tendency toward alternate bearing, Mary Sutton, UGA citrus Extension specialist, reported that some groves didn’t even flower this season, and overall yield in the state was way off. In addition, the cull rate on satsuma is about 30%, and the fruit doesn’t hold well on trees. This presents a marketing challenge because all the fruit comes at the same time and floods the market.
UGA researchers are trialing many varieties to find fits for Georgia, so growers can diversify away from overreliance on satsuma.
“This year, we were able to evaluate about 30 different cultivars across the state,” Sutton said. “We hope to expand that in the future.”
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