Why Have Gannan Navel Oranges, Once a Road to Prosperity for Farmers, Become Harder to Grow?

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At the end of last year, Foodthink published the article Bringing an Influencer Home to Sell Navel Oranges: How Hard Fruit Farming Really Is. Windmill, who works in Guangzhou, recounts in the article how she returned to her hometown to help her family sell oranges, and in doing so brought to light a host of problems facing the navel orange industry, from production to sales.

This past May, I had the good fortune to visit this mountain village to explore the origin of the renowned “Gannan navel orange”. After in-depth conversations with local fruit farmers, I discovered that the very navel oranges that once led farmers down the road to prosperity have become ever harder to grow and ever harder to profit from.

● By early May, the orange blossoms have nearly all fallen, with tiny fruit taking their place.

I. Thirty Years of Ups and Downs with Navel Oranges

Although Gannan navel oranges carry the “Gannan” geographical indication, they are far from a native produce of the area. The variety, known as Newhall, was first developed in the United States as a hybrid cultivar, only taking root in Xinfeng County, Jiangxi Province, after the 1970s before gradually spreading to neighbouring counties and towns. The village where Windmill grew up has an even shorter history with navel oranges. Around 1990, her eldest paternal uncle brought back the village’s first batch of navel orange saplings from a neighbouring county, becoming the first in the village to take the plunge. Later, in the tradition of a son inheriting his father’s trade, it was her eldest cousin who took over the orchard.

It was only four or five years after that that other villagers, seeing the returns from navel oranges, began following suit in earnest. Under the household responsibility system, each family had been allotted some woodland, but there were no excavators or other large construction equipment to be had. To grow oranges, villagers had no choice but to rely on their own hands and the humblest of tools, felling the existing trees bit by bit to clear and level the land.

In truth, in the early days of expanding navel orange cultivation, the main sales channel was still export, and prices were naturally far higher than on the domestic market. As early as the 1990s, navel oranges could fetch over two yuan per jin. Families had also been growing other fruit trees—Honey peaches, Sanhua plums, Nali plums, and more—but navel oranges yielded more, stored and shipped well, and sold briskly, so in the end it was the navel orange that came to reign supreme.

● Navel oranges store well—even in the sweltering heat of May, one can still enjoy navel oranges kept from the previous winter.
As navel oranges multiplied, every family in the village willing to grow them made a fortune. Being able to build a new house just from selling oranges is a memory shared by that generation of fruit growers. Yet as the navel orange market gradually turned domestic and output expanded, with an endless stream of new varieties and new growing regions entering the fray, the navel orange has “fallen” from its former glory to just another ordinary fruit on the market—prices are nowhere near what they once were. Last year, the buying price at the orchard gate hovered around 2.5 yuan per jin. In other words, thirty years on, the price of navel oranges has barely changed, but the expectations around income and the level of production inputs bear no comparison with the 1990s.

II. Huanglongbing and Citrus Tristeza

In fact, in recent years the price of navel oranges has even fallen below levels seen in the 1990s and early 2000s. But navel orange yields are high, and if prices could hold steady, it would still mean a respectable income for fruit growers. Mature navel orange trees are astonishingly productive—some large trees planted back in the 1990s can yield as much as 1,000 jin of oranges. “If yields were that high, you’d make a profit even selling oranges at one yuan a jin,” said Windmill’s eldest cousin.

At its peak, this small village of just over thirty households could turn out more than two million jin of navel oranges a year. Now output has dropped to barely over one million jin. The single biggest reason is huanglongbing, which emerged around 2010.

Huanglongbing, or HLB, is a disease of citrus trees caused by a phloem-limited bacterium carried by psyllids. The name comes from the yellowing of an infected tree’s leaves. Although fruit quality suffers, trees infected by this pathogen do not die immediately—they wither slowly over several years, while psyllids carry the bacterium on to neighbouring trees. No pesticide on the market can cure HLB at its root, which is why it is called “the cancer of citrus”.

Because it is contagious, and because the entire growing region cultivates the same crop in contiguous plots, HLB spread rapidly. Take Windmill’s family orchard, for instance: most of the trees sit along the roadside, sharing borders with neighbouring orchards, and roughly a third of them were gradually infected with HLB over the years. The one small patch tucked deep in the hillside, though a long trek on foot and a nuisance for harvesting, has turned out to be a blessing in disguise—it has never had a single diseased tree and has consistently produced good harvests.

● Some orchards plant a border of Chinese fir around their trees, which is said to serve as a natural isolation barrier.

Unfortunately, most orchards lack this kind of natural physical barrier. Some fruit growers choose to drape fine insect-proof netting over their trees to keep psyllids away. But according to one orchard owner who uses the netting, the cost is by no means low: to cover his orchard of over ten thousand square metres, he sank over a hundred thousand yuan in a single outlay. Although the practice has already spread to other parts of the Gannan region, most local fruit growers are still reluctant to put up netting.

● Only when you step inside the insect-proof netting do you appreciate that it is less a net and more a canopy—the temperature within can run two or three degrees higher than outside. The orchard owner told us that the netting ages over time, reducing light transmission, and needs replacing roughly every five years.

Insect-proof netting is merely a preventive measure. Once a tree is truly stricken, the best remedy remains to cut it down as soon as possible to stop the pathogen from spreading further. By around 2015, HLB had become severe in the village. Because a tree can still bear some fruit when first infected, growers are sometimes reluctant to fell it. To put a stop to this, the local government repeatedly issued directives, insisting that any tree showing signs of HLB must be removed without exception. At one point, the authorities even requisitioned staff from government offices to come down to the village and help farmers chop down diseased trees.

Documents issued by the local government note that since 2012, the county had poured considerable manpower and resources into controlling HLB. To date, the situation can only be said to have been “brought under control”—the disease has not vanished entirely. Although very few HLB-infected trees can now be spotted in anyone’s orchard, the disease still lingers in the fruit growers’ conversations.

Of the more than 800 trees her eldest cousin planted, over 300 were felled and replanted—this year is the fifth since.

● Windmill’s mother stands in the orchard. Most of the young saplings in front of her were recently replanted after being cut down because of HLB.

Yet some of the newly planted saplings have brought fresh troubles.

Her eldest cousin recalled that in the early days, saplings on the market varied wildly in quality, and farmers themselves would buy and sell seedlings at local markets. Later, the government began introducing better nursery stock, and yields gradually rose. But after the HLB outbreak, since saplings across the entire region could carry the pathogen, the authorities could only source a batch from elsewhere. As it turned out, the saplings shipped in from other areas carried their own viruses—so before the old affliction had been dealt with, a new one arrived. Around 2017, a major outbreak of citrus tristeza hit the area.

Citrus tristeza, too, is a contagious disease. Infected trees never grow tall; locals call them “little old trees”. Some fruit growers initially assumed it was simply poor-quality stock, only to learn later that it was a disease. The virus impairs the tree’s nutrient transport, leaving branches brittle and snapping at a touch; even the main trunk becomes as fragile as a thin twig. If a stricken tree does bear fruit, the fruit tends to be small and misshapen. A survey conducted by Gannan Normal University in 2011 found that the incidence of citrus tristeza among navel oranges in the Gannan growing region stood at a startling 44.9%.

● Two trees planted in the same year: the one on the left suffers from citrus tristeza and is visibly stunted compared with the healthy tree on the right.
As it turned out, even government-designated nurseries could not guarantee healthy saplings. Today, citrus tristeza has been found at every large nursery nearby, and trust in their stock has collapsed. Local fruit growers who have the know-how rely on personal connections, sourcing independently from nurseries they trust.

III. Orchards Set Back by Citrus Tristeza

The day after arriving in the village, we visited Windmill’s uncle. Unlike her eldest cousin, who has been growing oranges for over thirty years, uncle is a newcomer to the trade—he had left home for factory work in his youth and only returned in 2017 to plant navel oranges. You could tell at a glance that uncle is a capable man; back in the day he had risen to the rank of senior skilled worker at a ceramics factory in Chaozhou. Now the entire orchard is tended by just the two of them—uncle and his wife—leaving early every morning and returning late, with scarcely a day off. To save time, they do not even go home for lunch, just whipping up a simple meal in the old house nearby.

● Uncle stands in front of the old house.

“Everyone around here has a good pair of hands and a willing foot—we’ll still head out to the orchard in a light drizzle; only a proper downpour will keep us off,” Windmill told us.

And indeed, the orchard knows no rest through the year: from the start of spring until the harvest begins in November, the round of fertilising, spraying and tree management leaves fruit growers with barely a day’s respite; once the picking season is on, it is harvesting and selling, then pruning and clearing the orchard—and before they know it, the year is done and it is time for the Spring Festival again.

Yet for all that diligence, this hardworking man has lost hundreds of thousands on navel oranges.

Uncle led us up the hill to the orchard, and as we looked out around, the newly opened grove was a very different sight from the old ones: several hilltops had been levelled by heavy machinery into terraced platforms, the saplings recently planted, laying bare the red earth beneath the trees.

“Back then, our village was given a quota for land clearance, and these hills were all converted into orchards. The village Party secretary himself planted over 1,000 trees and earned more than half a million yuan in a single year. Having done so well himself, he encouraged us all to come back and take on orchard contracts,” Uncle said. He was tempted right then, and after the couple pooled their savings from years of migrant work, they threw their entire nest egg into the orchard in one go, planting over 1,700 navel orange saplings.

Who could have known that the village Party secretary’s success could not be replicated. When Uncle returned to the village, it was precisely the peak of the citrus tristeza outbreak. Having no experience in selecting stock, every one of the 1,700-plus saplings he planted first was infected with the disease. In the first year it was not easy to tell a stricken seedling from a healthy one, but by the second year, then the third, Uncle gradually began to see the trouble with this batch. Trees that refused to grow were no use standing there, so they had to be cut down and replanted.

So how many healthy saplings from the very first planting have survived to this day?

“Essentially none.”

This year marks his sixth year back growing oranges, and the last of the diseased stock has only just been replaced. But new trees need another three years or more before they bear fruit. In other words, in the past few years he has hardly sold a single orange. And yet, even as he said this, he seemed rather optimistic.

“We don’t count as the ones who invested the most—we have only lost just over half a million. There was a deputy factory director who poured in over two million yuan.”

As he spoke, he brought out a few navel oranges he had kept in storage through the winter to offer us.

“These are the fruit from citrus tristeza trees. We kept them for ourselves.” The oranges tasted perfectly good, but their small size meant they fetched no premium price.

IV. The Ever-Rising Cost of Agricultural Inputs

To outsiders, Uncle has quite the head for business. Out front of the old house, the couple keeps a good number of free-range chickens. He reckoned he could use the open space for a side venture and sell some of the produce through friends on WeChat to make a little extra. When it comes to navel oranges, Uncle’s farming philosophy comes down to one thing: “willing to invest.” At the agricultural supply shop he buys nothing but the best pesticides and the best fertiliser—spending around 15,000 yuan on fertiliser alone each year, let alone the labour cost of spraying. When applying winter fertiliser, he puts seven or eight jin on every tree; his most expensive fertiliser costs over three yuan a jin—more than it costs to grow the oranges themselves.

● Back at the old house, Uncle showed us the receipts from his shopping at the agricultural supply shop over the past few months (top). Between February and May, he bought 22 types of products at the shop, totalling 2,315 yuan, including 10 types of pesticide and 7 types of fungicide. Because so many products were mixed in a single spray tank, the shop owner had marked the order of mixing on the bottle caps.
● A brand of fertiliser Uncle uses. The product claims it can neutralise soil pH, add beneficial microorganisms and organic matter, and replenish secondary and trace nutrients. An eager learner, he is exactly the kind of consumer these new-style organic fertilisers target—the more he learns, the more diverse his knowledge grows, and the more inputs he buys.
Uncle believes that to grow the finest oranges you must be willing to spend. His arithmetic goes like this: once the saplings mature, each tree will yield 100 jin of fruit, which sells for 250 yuan; costs run about 150 yuan, leaving him a profit of 100 yuan per tree. But in Windmill’s view, the reality is far less rosy—investing this heavily makes it very difficult to turn a profit. Even if every sapling grows healthy and strong, a price swing or a weather-related drop in yield would only make the risk greater. In truth, it is not just Uncle’s family; fruit growers nearby are all feeling the rising costs. Fertiliser prices have climbed year after year, pesticide use keeps mounting, and Windmill’s eldest cousin says that overuse has bred ever more severe pesticide resistance, rendering the specialist products increasingly useless. By now, agricultural inputs already account for the lion’s share of the cost of growing navel oranges—averaging about 1 yuan per jin of fruit, nearly double the figure of years past—while the orchard-gate price has slipped from just over three yuan to just over two.

Windmill therefore believes that helping growers reduce their use of pesticides and chemical fertiliser could bring real benefits to everyone. Her younger brother makes liquid fertiliser at home; the family also has cattle dung for composting, which can replace some of the chemical fertiliser and foliar fertiliser, trimming the fertiliser bill.

V. Epilogue

Navel oranges are no longer the most fashionable fruit on the market; a host of newer, pricier citrus varieties have left them trailing behind. Yet most of the fruit growers we met remained optimistic. They do not envy the expensive, trendy new cultivars—all they want is to keep growing navel oranges steadily in their own orchards, making a modest, dependable living from them, as they have for decades past. The story of the navel orange is far from over. In a few days I will return to the mountain village to visit the fruit growers once more. What I want to find out is: why do fruit growers so eagerly embrace new techniques of every kind? What is the relationship between growers and fruit merchants? And, above all, how can they be better supported?

Windmill, for her part, has already set things in motion. The Shengeng Social Work Service Centre where she works has decided to pilot a programme in the area, and in the near future they will be hosting a lecture on navel orange cultivation techniques there. For Windmill and her colleagues, it is a small first step towards helping fruit growers. For an old growing region that has weathered so many storms, perhaps it is time to inject a little fresh energy.

References:

Tao Zhenzhen, Yi Long, Lu Zhanjun et al. “Investigation and Study on the Incidence of Citrus Tristeza in the Major Production Areas of Gannan Navel Oranges.” Chinese Agricultural Science Bulletin, 2011, 27(16): 297–300.

Foodthink Author
Wang Hao
Foodthink editor, who collects first-hand field stories and second-hand agricultural knowledge during business trips.

 

 

 

 

All photographs in this article are by the author.

Editor: Tianle

Published by Foodthink