“We still have maybe four to six weeks of the season to run and all packhouses in the area are still packing,” Doug Bournique of the Indian River Citrus League told freshinfo. “There is still about 20 per cent of the crop on the trees and we had a multi-million dollar rainfall of 0.5 to two inches over a week ago that was just perfect timing for us. The weather is cool and we have great harvesting conditions. We should be able to continue packing into mid-May and some growers are saying they might be able to stretch into June.”

Bournique said growers in his region, the principal grapefruit-growing area in the state, are back to an almost normal harvest. And the National Agricultural Statistics Service of the US department of agriculture has revised the grapefruit forecast for this entire state this month upwards by two million field boxes on February’s figure to 28 million boxes - 10m of white and 18m of pigmented fruit.

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