Why Gannan Navel Oranges, Once a Path to Prosperity for Farmers, Are Harder to Grow Than Before

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Last year, Foodthink published an article 《Taking an Internet Celebrity Home to Sell Navel Oranges: Only Then Did We Realise How Tough Life Is for Fruit Farmers》. In it, Fengche, who works in Guangzhou, shares her story of returning to her hometown to help sell oranges for her family, which also brings to light the various issues currently plaguing the navel orange sector, from production to sales.

This past May, I was fortunate enough to visit this mountain village and explore the famed growing region for Gannan navel oranges. Following in-depth conversations with local growers, I discovered that the very crop that once paved the way to prosperity for farmers has grown increasingly difficult to cultivate and yield a profit.

● In early May, the orange blossoms have nearly all fallen, and tiny fruits are beginning to take their place.

I. Thirty Years of Ups and Downs with Navel Oranges

Although bearing the ‘Gannan’ geographical indication, navel oranges are not an indigenous specialty of the region. This fruit, known botanically as ‘Newhall’, is a hybrid variety first bred in the United States. It only took root in Xinfeng County, Jiangxi, during the 1970s, gradually spreading to surrounding counties and cities. The history of navel orange cultivation in Windmill’s village is even shorter. Around 1990, her uncle brought back the first batch of saplings from a neighbouring county, becoming the first in the village to take the plunge. Later, continuing the family trade, the eldest brother took over the orchard.

It was another four or five years before other villagers saw the profits navel oranges could bring and began to follow suit. When land was allocated to households under the responsibility system, families received patches of forest land. Without excavators or other heavy machinery, villagers had to rely on their bare hands and rudimentary tools to hack away the existing trees, clearing and preparing the land inch by inch to plant oranges.

In the early stages of navel orange promotion, the primary sales channel was indeed exports, meaning prices were naturally far higher than in the domestic market. As early as the 1990s, navel oranges could sell for more than two yuan a *jin*. At that time, households also grew other fruit trees, such as honey peaches, Sanhua plums, and Nai plums. However, navel oranges offered large yields, were robust in storage and transport, and enjoyed better market access, ultimately leading to a situation where they came to dominate the landscape.

● Navel oranges store well, so even in the sweltering heat of May, you can still eat fruit saved from winter.
As orange cultivation expanded, virtually every household in the village willing to plant them struck it rich. For that generation of growers, building a new home solely from orange sales remains a vivid memory. However, as the navel orange market gradually shifted to domestic consumption, yields steadily increased, and the fruit faced relentless competition from a constant stream of new varieties and emerging growing regions, it has been relegated to the status of an ordinary market fruit, its trading prices never again reaching former heights. Last year, the farm-gate purchase price hovered around 2.5 yuan. In other words, thirty years on, while the price of navel oranges has remained unchanged, growers’ income expectations and cultivation costs bear absolutely no comparison to those of the 1990s.

II. Huanglongbing and Citrus Decline Disease

In fact, over recent years, navel orange prices have even dipped below those of the 1990s and early 2000s. Yet given the sheer volume of production, if prices remain stable, they still amount to a substantial income for growers. The yields from mature navel orange trees are truly striking; some large trees planted in the 1990s can still produce up to 1,000 jin (500 kg) of fruit. “If yields can stay that high, you can still turn a profit even selling oranges at just one yuan each,” Feng Che’s older brother says.

At its peak, this small village of just over thirty households could harvest more than two million jin (one thousand tonnes) of navel oranges; today, production has fallen to just over a million jin. The primary driver behind this decline is the emergence of Huanglongbing around 2010.

Huanglongbing is a tree disease caused by a phloem-living bacterium vectored by the citrus psyllid. Infected trees develop yellowing leaves, from which the disease derives its name. Although fruit quality deteriorates, infected trees do not perish immediately. Instead, they gradually wither over several years, while the pathogen spreads to neighbouring orchards alongside the psyllids. Moreover, because commercially available pesticides cannot eradicate the disease, it is widely dubbed “the cancer of citrus”.

Given its infectious nature and the fact that the entire growing region was planted in large, contiguous blocks of a single crop, the disease spread rapidly. Taking the Feng Che family’s orchard as an example: most of their trees are located along the roadside, bordering adjacent groves, and roughly a third of them were successively infected. Conversely, a smaller plot set deeper into the forest—though requiring a long walk and making harvesting inconvenient—was spared by its isolation. It has never seen a diseased tree and has consistently delivered good harvests.

● Some orchards plant Chinese firs around the perimeter, said to act as a natural barrier.

Unfortunately, most orchards do not enjoy such a natural physical barrier. Some growers choose to drape a fine-mesh insect net over their trees to stop psyllids from reaching and infecting them. But as the owner of one such net points out, the expense is no small matter: covering more than 10,000 square metres of orchard required a one-off outlay of over 100,000 yuan. As a result, while this method has been introduced elsewhere in Gannan, the majority of local growers are still reluctant to put up the nets.

● You only truly appreciate it once you step inside the insect-proof net: rather than a mere net, it functions more like a greenhouse, with internal temperatures often two or three degrees higher than outside. The orchard owner explained that the nets degrade over time, reducing light transmission, and typically need replacing every five years.

Insect-proof nets are merely a preventative measure. Once a tree is infected, the only reliable course of action is to fell it promptly to stop the pathogen from spreading. Around 2015, Huanglongbing (citrus greening disease) had become rampant in the village. Because infected trees still yield some fruit in the early stages, growers are often reluctant to cut them down. In response, the local authorities issued repeated directives, mandating the immediate felling of any tree showing signs of the disease. At one point, the government even mobilised civil servants to travel to the countryside and assist farmers with the culling.

Official documents note that since 2012, the county has invested considerable resources in containing the disease. To date, the outbreak can only be described as ‘under control’ rather than eradicated. While infected trees are rarely visible in individual orchards today, conversations with growers reveal that Huanglongbing has by no means disappeared.

Of the more than 800 trees planted by the farmer, over 300 have been cut down and replanted, with this year marking the fifth planting cycle.

● Fengche’s mother in the orchard; most of the young saplings planted before her were replanted after previous trees were felled due to Huanglongbing.

However, the newly planted saplings have brought their own set of complications.

The farmer recalled that initially, the quality of saplings on the market was highly inconsistent, and growers often bought and sold them among themselves at local fairs. Yields only began to rise steadily after the government started introducing superior stock. Yet following the Huanglongbing outbreak, since virtually all local nursery stock carried the pathogen, authorities were forced to import new saplings from other regions. Unfortunately, these outsider trees carried a host of other viruses, meaning that before one disease was fully dealt with, another took its place. Around 2017, a severe outbreak of decline disease hit the area.

Decline disease is also contagious. Infected trees struggle to grow tall and are locally known as ‘little old trees’. Some growers initially blamed poor sapling quality before realising it was a disease. The virus disrupts nutrient transport, leaving branches brittle and prone to snapping; even the main trunk becomes as fragile as a twig. Even when these trees do bear fruit, the harvest tends to be small and misshapen. A 2011 survey by Gannan Normal University found that the infection rate of decline disease among Gannan navel oranges reached as high as 44.9 per cent.

● Two trees planted in the same year: the one on the left is infected with decline disease, showing markedly stunted growth compared to the healthy tree on the right.
It has become clear that even government-approved nurseries cannot guarantee the health of the saplings. At present, the large commercial nurseries in the vicinity have all been found to carry seedlings infected with decline disease, and they have lost all credibility in the nursery stock market. The more resourceful local growers rely on personal networks, contacting nurseries they trust directly.

III. Orchards Set Back by Decline Disease

On our second day in the village, we visited Fengche’s maternal uncle. Unlike the older brother, who has been growing oranges for over thirty years, the uncle is part of a newer generation of fruit farmers. He worked away from home in his youth and did not return to the village to plant navel oranges until 2017. He struck us as highly capable right from the start, having previously risen to the rank of senior technician at a ceramics factory in Chaozhou. The orchard is now run entirely by him and his wife. They work from dawn till dusk, barely taking a break. To save time, they do not return home for lunch; instead, they simply cook a quick meal in an old building nearby.

● The uncle stands in front of the old house.

“Folk round here know the value of hard work. Even a light drizzle won’t keep us from the orchards; only a heavy downpour earns us a day off,” Fengche remarked.

The orchards run on a relentless, year-round schedule. From spring through to the November harvest, the endless cycle of fertilising, spraying, and tending the trees leaves growers with barely a moment to spare. Once the picking season begins, they’re straight into harvesting, selling, pruning, and clearing the grounds. And just like that, amidst the non-stop labour, it’s already time for the Lunar New Year.

Yet for all this diligence, these same growers have lost hundreds of thousands of yuan on their navel orange crops.

My uncle led us up to the orchard-covered slopes. The view was striking: the contrast between the newly developed plots and the older orchards was stark. Several hilltops had been graded into terraces by heavy machinery. The young trees had only been planted recently, leaving the characteristic red soil completely exposed at their bases.

“Back then, our village received a quota for land reclamation, and these hills were all converted into orchards. Our village party secretary planted over a thousand trees himself and brought in more than half a million yuan in a single year. Seeing his success, he urged us to return and lease plots,” my uncle recalled. The opportunity was too good to pass up. He and his wife sat down, decided to invest every penny they’d saved from years of migrant work, and planted over 1,700 navel orange saplings in one go.

As it turned out, the secretary’s success wasn’t easily replicable. He returned home right as citrus decline disease was breaking out. With no prior experience in selecting saplings, every single one of those initial 1,700-plus trees came infected. The symptoms aren’t obvious in the first year, but by the second and third, he gradually realised the extent of the problem. Trees that wouldn’t grow past a certain size were of no use, so they had to be felled and replanted.

So how many healthy saplings had actually survived from that first year?

“Hardly any at all.”

This is now his sixth year back farming oranges, and he has only just finished swapping out the infected stock. On top of that, the new trees won’t bear fruit for at least another three years. In short, he hasn’t managed to sell a single orange over the past few years. Despite the hardships, he still carries himself with a quiet optimism.

“We didn’t invest that much. We only lost around half a million yuan. I knew a deputy factory director who put in over two million.”

As he spoke, he fetched a few navel oranges he’d been storing over the winter to share with us.

“These came from the infected trees. I saved them for our own eating.” The fruit tasted fine, but the oranges were undersized and wouldn’t fetch a decent market price.

IV. Soaring Costs of Agricultural Inputs

To outsiders, my uncle seems to have a knack for business. In front of their old family home, the couple keep quite a few free-range chickens. He figured he could turn this open patch of land into a side line, selling the produce through WeChat contacts to earn a bit of extra pocket money. When it comes to navel oranges, my uncle’s approach to cultivation is simply to ‘spare no expense’. At the agri-supply shop, he buys nothing but the top-tier pesticides and fertilisers. Fertiliser alone sets him back around 15,000 yuan a year, let alone the labour costs for spraying. For winter fertilisation, he applies seven or eight jin per tree; his priciest fertiliser costs over three yuan a jin, making it more expensive than the oranges themselves.

● Back at the old house, my uncle showed us the receipts from his recent purchases at the agri-supply shop (above). Between February and May, he bought 22 different products in total for 2,315 yuan, including 10 insecticides and 7 fungicides. Because he often mixes several chemicals for a single spray, the shop owner helpfully labelled the bottle caps with the correct mixing order.
● A brand of fertiliser my uncle uses claims in its marketing to neutralise soil pH, introduce beneficial microbes and organic matter, and supplement medium and micro nutrients. Eager to learn, he is exactly the kind of consumer these new-generation organic fertilisers target — the more he learns, the broader his knowledge becomes, and the more inputs he buys.
My uncle believes that to grow the finest oranges, you simply have to be willing to spend. He runs the numbers like this: once the saplings mature, each tree yields 100 jin of fruit, selling for 250 yuan. After deducting 150 yuan in costs, he pockets a 100 yuan profit. But to Fengche, the reality is far from so rosy; trying to make money by throwing money at the problem, as my uncle does, rarely works. Even if every sapling grows up healthy, any fluctuation in market prices or yield drops due to weather would drastically increase the risk. In fact, it’s not just my uncle’s household; orchardists in the surrounding area are all feeling the pinch of rising costs. Chemical fertiliser prices have climbed year after year, and pesticide use has multiplied. Fengche’s older brother noted that over-reliance on chemicals has led to worsening pesticide resistance, rendering so-called miracle drugs increasingly ineffective. Today, farm inputs account for the lion’s share of navel orange production costs. On average, it takes around 1 yuan to produce a single jin of oranges — nearly double what it used to be. Meanwhile, the selling price of the fruit has dropped from over three yuan to just over two yuan.

Therefore, Fengche believes that helping farmers cut back on chemical pesticides and fertilisers could be mutually beneficial. Fengche’s younger brother already makes his own liquid fertiliser at home and uses cow manure for composting. This allows him to replace some chemical and foliar fertilisers, shaving down fertilisation costs.

V. Epilogue

These days, navel oranges are no longer the most popular fruit on the market, having been left behind by a host of newer, pricier citrus varieties. Yet most of the orchardists we met remain optimistic. They feel no envy towards these expensive, trendy new breeds; they simply want to cultivate navel oranges steadily in their own orchards and, as they have for decades, earn a quiet, reliable living from them. The story of the navel orange is far from over. In a few days’ time, I will return to the mountain village to visit the local farmers once more. For my part, I want to find out: why are farmers so keen to learn every new technique on offer? What is the nature of their relationship with fruit buyers? And, most importantly, how can we better support them?

Fengche, meanwhile, is already in motion. The Shengeng Social Work Service Centre, where she works, has decided to pilot a project in the area and will soon be hosting a local seminar on navel orange cultivation techniques. For Fengche and her colleagues, this marks a modest first step in supporting the orchardists. For an ageing production region that has weathered many storms, it may well be time to breathe some fresh vitality into it.

References:

Tao Zhenzhen, Yi Long, Lu Zhanjun, et al. Investigation on the Incidence of Citrus Decline Disease in the Main Production Areas of Gannan Navel Oranges [J]. Chinese Agricultural Science Bulletin, 2011, 27(16): 297-300.

Foodthink Contributor
Wang Hao
Editor at Foodthink. Often collects firsthand stories from the fields and secondhand agricultural insights while travelling for work.

 

 

 

 

All images in this article are courtesy of the author

Editor: Tianle

Published by Foodthink