The Bright, Sweet Things at Land's End
In Plaquemines Parish, the legacy of Louisiana's citrus industry clings to memory, to community, and to annual prayers for a harvest unbattered
At the delicate, lacy toe of Louisiana, the holidays are ushered in by globes of orange as much as sparkling tinsel; by bulging grocery bags as much as wrapping papered-boxes; by orange wine as much as eggnog, and the zesty aromas of satsuma as much as pine.
The citrus that emerges this time of year in Plaquemines Parish has long held claim to being the country’s sweetest. Cradled by the warmer microclimate of this stretch of land extending into the Gulf, and nurtured by soils collected by the Great River from Minnesota through each curve of the Delta, piled high here at the bottom—“the richest soil in the world,” they say—the fruits weigh down their branches fat with juice, bright in color, and thin in rind.
The assessment is beyond mere advertisement, or even opinion: it’s scientifically proven. In 1939, two scientists working in LSU’s Agricultural Experiment Station published a study comparing the quality of Louisiana navel and sweet oranges to those in Florida and California. After three years of chemical and physical analyses, compounded by blind taste tests, their conclusion was that: “Louisiana oranges, by test, surpass all others in the flavor of the juice or its taste appeal. With very few exceptions, they have the thinnest rind, and in most cases, they will have as high percentages of juice, solids, and total sugars as oranges from any other section.”
When the French first claimed the place now called Plaquemines, the vision of an orange-dappled utopia was already there—though the bountiful trees they encountered were not citrus at all, but native persimmons. This is where Plaquemines gets its name, derived from the Atakapa word for the brightly-colored, plum-like fruit: piakimin.
“When I was a kid, you would drive down to Venice, and it was just orange grove after orange grove after orange grove. And now, I mean, there are literally less than a handful.”
—Ben Becnel, the third-generation owner of Becnel Farms, a major citrus grower in the area since 1890
Likely encouraged by the way those fruits thrived here at the end of the world, the Europeans brought the citrus at the beginning of the 18th century. Though, according to the journals of Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville, those first seeds—planted in what is now Phoenix, Louisiana by the Jesuit priest Father Paul du Ru in 1700—did not take root.
Other Jesuit missionaries had more success. Using seeds from the West Indies, they established successful groves closer to New Orleans by the early 1730s. And within seventy years, many colonists living there along the bottom of the Mississippi had family orchards near their homes. Though the fruits were certainly enjoyed on their own, they were mostly grown for their juices—which were used to flavor drinking water and to create a sweet, strong wine, still passed around in glass bottles and sipped during cold fronts on back porches in Plaquemines Parish.
During the first half of the 19th century, a few industrious farmers developed small-scale citrus operations that primarily sold to the markets in New Orleans. The time frame from planting the seeds to harvesting a commercially-viable crop could take anywhere from seven to ten years, while requiring significant investments in fertilizer, water, pesticides, and time—not to mention the ever-present threat of ruin by weather or disease. This made citrus a far less lucrative business than other regional ventures like sugar, cotton, or rice. In 1838, the price of oranges was $15 (equivalent to about $500 today) per 1,000 oranges.
It wasn’t until after the Civil War that major citrus enterprises emerged on Louisiana plantation sites, whose owners may have foreseen some benefit to diversifying and rededicating acreage to the less labor-intensive crop should the war result, as it of course did, in them being made to free or pay their enslaved labor force.
“I think as long as people want Louisiana oranges, there’s going to be a future. As long as there’s land that can grow it, there’ll be a future. What I would encourage people, strongly, is to realize that we’re losing the Delta little by little, and we’re losing citrus farms little by little. If people really want to understand the Delta, and they want to understand citrus farming, if they want to see it, they want to taste it, don’t wait. Because we just don’t know how many years it will be before the next big freeze, or the next Katrina.”
—Rod Lincoln, Plaquemines Parish historian
The largest of these orchards was a collaboration between two of Louisiana’s wealthiest plantation owners of the time—Bradish Johnson, who owned Woodland Plantation, and Effingham Lawrence, who served in the Louisiana House of Representatives from 1871–1875 and owned Magnolia a few miles away. Together, they established an operation they called “Orange Farm” between Home Place and Nairn, which was said to be the largest citrus grove in the country, and perhaps even the world, at the time—consisting of over 100,000 trees. A journalist from the Times Picayune described the scene from the vantage of a boat passing nearby on the Mississippi River in the summer of 1872: “The magnificent orange groves, which beautify the banks of the river along the Lower Coast, are heavily loaded with young oranges and promise a lavish yield. When autumn comes to touch them with its wand of gold, truly will they be gardens of Hesperian fruit.” The farm was such a novelty in Louisiana, and in the country as a whole, that it was included as an attraction at the New Orleans World’s Fair in 1884.
Orange Farm’s success, yielding at its peak up to $20,000 of profit per year (the equivalent of about $505,000), lit the spark of Plaquemines’ citrus industry—encouraging farmers across the “Lower Coast” to get in while they could. This momentum was propelled, also, by the introduction of propagation as a planting method by growers George Schoenberger and W.S. Reddick in the 1870s, significantly cutting the waiting period until harvest. Now a profitable venture in itself, citrus farming was also an attractive alternative to other industries in the area, such as fishing—which required harder labor and more time away from one’s family.
By 1900, there were over one hundred citrus farms in Plaquemines Parish, which had earned the title “the orange belt”. In 1916, many of the farmers came together to rededicate low-lying land previously used to grow rice—a less-economical venture without the exploitation of enslaved labor—into land suitable for orange groves. To do this, they built an elaborate drainage system in Buras that expanded the geographical footprint of the local citrus industry by 80%.
By the 1930s and 1940s, the historical height of citrus production in Louisiana, the cottage industry was significantly smaller than those of Florida or California—but considered higher in quality, more specialized and regional. In 1946, the most prosperous year for Plaquemines Parish’s citrus industry, almost 5,000 acres in Louisiana, mostly in Plaquemines Parish, were being utilized to grow citrus, with an output of 410,000 ninety-pound boxes of fruit. The next year, the community rallied around local growers and celebrated their efforts, and the culture they fostered, at the first annual Plaquemines Orange Festival.
[Read this: "The Histories of Plaquemines Parish's Civil War Forts"]
“When I was a kid, you would drive down to Venice,” said Ben Becnel, the third-generation owner of Becnel Farms, a major citrus grower in the area since 1890, “and it was just orange grove after orange grove after orange grove.
“And now, I mean, there are literally less than a handful.”
The first time the orange trees came down in droves, it was intentional; an eradication. The highly-contagious citrus canker was spreading across the country, and in the early 1910s had thoroughly infected Louisiana’s groves, causing the fruits to bloom with unsightly wart-like lesions and the trees to drop their leaves. There was no cure, and to prevent further spread, almost all of the trees—many of them over a century old—had to be destroyed.
Since then, the story of growing citrus in Plaquemines Parish has been of cycles spent bracing against disaster, felling, and replanting again.
In January 1951, just five years after the largest citrus crop in the history of Louisiana’s industry, one of the United States’ most destructive winter storms of all time, called “The Great Southern Glaze Storm of 1951” coated much of the Southeast in ice. The citrus crop in Plaquemines Parish was totally decimated. The groves had almost recovered a decade later, when in 1962 and 1963 temperatures dropped to some of their lowest points in Louisiana history. Once again, farmers replanted—staying afloat with the support of government replacement programs. Then came Hurricane Betsy in 1965, followed by Camille in 1969. Then, freezes in 1982, ‘83, and ‘89; Hurricane Andrew in 1992. Plans for a juicing factory were shelved indefinitely.
In 2005, the looming threat of the salty Gulf waters’ intrusion into the soil was made manifest overnight by Katrina and her twenty-foot floodwaters—annihilating 80% of production that year and killing about half the citrus trees in Plaquemines. Rod Lincoln, a Plaquemines Parish historian whose ancestors worked on Johnson and Lawrence’s seminal Orange Farm in the mid 1800s, said that Katrina marked the beginning of the end of the industry as it was remembered. Before the historic storm, there were six hundred citrus farmers in Plaquemines Parish—a number that has continued to decline as the effects of coastal erosion increase, major hurricanes become more frequent, industrial and residential developments take over farmland, and it becomes less and less sustainable for most farmers to continue starting over after each new disaster. In addition, in 2013 the canker came back, followed soon after by a new, worse disease called citrus greening—neither of which has been totally eradicated as of yet.
Today, according to LSU AgCenter Associate Extension Horticulture Agent Anna Timmerman, there are about thirty-five commercial citrus growers in the parish, and only about one hundred acres devoted to groves. These farmers are presently dealing with the challenges of protecting young, not-yet-producing groves replanted after the devastating effects of Hurricanes Zeta in 2020 and Ida in 2021—which took out 2,000 of Becnel’s trees and 75% of his fruit. Joseph Vanatza of Star Nursery was also devastated by the storms. “They rocked the fruit trees from one direction, then the next year it rocked them back and threw the root systems all amuck,” he said. As the trees recover from the impact of the past few years, farmers now have to fight the effects of a freeze last year and a drought this year. “It’s been a real challenge to stay in business,” said Vanatza, who recently had to dig up 3,000 naval trees infected with canker, and now grows exclusively disease-resistant satsumas.
“This is the first year we’ve really had a crop in three years,” said Becnel, who is now producing half of the size of the crop he was in 2019, and mostly selling to local vendors. “And we had a great crop coming, before we got this drought. So, the fruit we have is kind of small, but it’s a crop, and it’s good.”
“You can grow anything in Plaquemines, and it’s gonna grow up well. So long as the saltwater doesn’t get into it,” said Lincoln. It’s a concept that speaks to the duality of fertility and impending doom that has come to define agriculture on this vulnerable corner of the state, but also life more generally. After five generations of farming citrus in Plaquemines Parish, Lincoln, his family, and “almost everyone I know” have been forced to find home elsewhere. His family’s groves—and their decades-old trees—are still there. But left untended for years after they evacuated for Katrina, the oranges grew sour.
The displacement has been traumatic not only for the trees, but for the growers ripped from their way of life. “My dad, my grandfather—they hardly ever left Plaquemines Parish, or went further than ten miles of the farm,” said Lincoln. “So we’ve got all these generations that lived and worked there, and now most of them have left. It is a huge cultural shock. They felt like strangers in a strange land when they left Plaquemines.”
[Read this: A photo essay of summer days in Plaquemines Parish]
Ironically, this homesickness has only emphasized the impact of events like the annual Orange Festival each December—which gives people who have left a reason to come home during the holidays; to enjoy the Louisiana citrus of their past lives, which becomes harder to find outside of Plaquemines every day. “Any time there’s an opportunity to get together, most of these people come back,” said Lincoln. “You’d think it was a family reunion.”
For the farmers, like Becnel and Vanatza, who have been able to stay, the challenges have not yet outweighed the satisfaction of carrying the sweetness of Louisiana citrus into the future. “So many people here want our oranges in the fall,” said Becnel. “It’s almost like a ritual. And it’s still profitable for us. As long as it is, we’ll keep doing it.” In fact, as of now Becnel Farms stands to survive another generation, with Becnel’s son already running one of the farm's fruit stands. “I’m pretty sure he's going to continue in some fashion."
Timmerman, while acknowledging the hurdles that have contributed to the local industry’s decline, said she has hope for its future. “Three new farms planted groves in the past couple of years, all younger farmers,” she said.
“I think as long as people want Louisiana oranges, there’s going to be a future,” said Lincoln. “As long as there’s land that can grow it, there’ll be a future. What I would encourage people, strongly, is to realize that we’re losing the Delta little by little, and we’re losing citrus farms little by little. If people really want to understand the Delta, and they want to understand citrus farming, if they want to see it, they want to taste it, don’t wait. Because we just don’t know how many years it will be before the next big freeze, or the next Katrina.”
The Plaquemines Parish Orange Festival will take place this year December 1–3 at Historic Fort Jackson in Buras, Louisiana. Details at orangefestival.com.