ALTON — Two or three times a week, Brandon Thompson wakes up early to walk one of his orchards.

Introverted and reserved by nature, Thompson favors an orchard a few miles north of Alton Memorial Jr. High.

It’s one of the biggest patches of the 300-odd acres of citrus Thompson farms, a mix of older orange and grapefruit trees.

It’s quiet and peaceful there, even though it’s practically in town.

“I do love the fields,” Thompson says. “I find beauty in it.”

Nominally, Thompson will keep an eye out for signs of pests or trespassers while he walks, but really he walks to think some — and especially to pray. 

Thompson prays, he says, because he has a lot to be grateful for. His farm is doing well: it’s better positioned than some of his colleagues in the Rio Grande Valley’s citrus industry and he’s even planting fresh acreage with new trees.

But Thompson also prays because he has a lot to worry about.

“I’m doing OK. I’m doing pretty good. But it’s just kind of collapsing around me,” he said. “It’s just a weird thing — I haven’t got my mind wrapped around it. You know, I’m not on the verge of collapse, but the industry might be.”

Brandon Thompson isn’t wrong to be praying. 

A third-generation grower who’s the proprietor of a stable, almost 100-year-old family citrus farm that’s turning a profit and has access to water, Thompson is an increasingly endangered species in a brutal Rio Grande Valley citrus ecosystem that’s tightening a noose around the industry.

Beset on all sides

Most Valley citrus growers — regardless of whether or not they in particular have access to it — will tell you that the biggest threat to the industry is water.

Water may be the immediate threat, but it’s hardly the only one.

There are pests. There are thieves. There are labor shortages.

And there’s an unrelenting tide of homebuilders eager to bulldoze the Valley’s century-old citrus groves — or at least surround the survivors with subdivisions.

If Thompson wants to reflect in his large orchard, he has to first drive from his office past pads for two new subdivisions.

The new trees he’s planting in a different field won’t grow up alone. The other half of that farmland is already destined to be homes.

New homes bring new headaches for citrus farmers.

Homeowners aren’t always keen on farmers spraying pesticides around them. They also don’t maintain their own backyard citrus trees the same way farmers do, potentially introducing citrus contagions — which can be fatal. 

A few of Thompson’s hopeful new saplings lay broken and knocked over in his field this August.

“Deviants,” he says. Someone knocked them down for fun.

Thompson is 45. He and other growers say the average age of their colleagues is higher, probably between 60 and 70.

Developers come with lucrative buyouts for orchard owners. Buyouts that can be incredibly tempting for growers who’ve had a run of bad luck on top of everything else.

Valley growers have had a run of bad luck.

Dale Murden, the president of Texas Citrus Mutual and the de facto spokesperson for the Valley’s citrus industry, has a list of 16 weather events that have impacted growers over the past year.

Winter Storm Uri in 2021, which cost Valley citrus growers an estimated initial $230 million loss, looms large on that list.

There’s also a hurricane, freezes, frosts, hail, near-miss tropical storms, and torrential rain. 

Reading the list out loud makes Murden pause.

“And that’s just a five year period,” he says. “It makes it tough.”

He pauses again.

“But we’re still here.”

Compounding challenges

For a professional promoter of the Rio Grande Valley’s agricultural future, Dale Murden decorates his office in a way that makes you awfully sad about the Rio Grande Valley’s agricultural past.

In Murden’s lobby are tomato crates that are relics of a Valley tomato industry that few even remember. Some of the last sugar produced by Harlingen’s recently shuttered sugar mill sits in a decanter on his desk. He keeps one of his organization’s red-rimmed no trespassing signs, which many Valley farmers have felt compelled to install, by one wall.

Murden acknowledges the contradiction.

“You can’t look back, man, you gotta look forward,” he says. 

Forward is complicated.

On Murden’s walls are oil paintings from Donna artist Gabriel Salazar that depict verdant Valley orchards spreading to the horizon.

Those aren’t accurate depictions of lots of the Valley’s current orchards. If they were, they’d include convenience stores and cookie-cutter homes among the grapefruit trees.

Murden says he saw that change happen. He saw groves he’d been scouting in the 1980s become banks and hospitals and subdivisions.

“You ain’t never gonna see a grove on that again. Never,” he said.

The acreage of Valley citrus orchards is down from about 30,000 a decade ago to about 20,000 now, he says. Last year’s total crop yield was about five-and-a-half million cartons, down significantly from the 20-year average of about 13.5 million.

The Valley saw drastic orchard die-offs in the 1980s and rebounds. The difference now is there’s less room for rebounds and less opportunity to make one happen.

Murden says, with audible frustration, that he owns land he’d like to replant in citrus but can’t because of water shortages.

“We’re gonna keep putting some of — sadly — the best soil in the world in concrete, which you’ll never see back,” he said.

The industry’s changed in other ways, too.

According to Murden, there were once thousands of growers. Now he puts that number at over 400.

Twenty or thirty years ago, Murden says, the Valley had at least 10 packing sheds and likely more. 

Now there are just two traditional packing sheds — one owned by Lone Star Citrus and one owned by Wonderful Citrus.

Those companies and a third competitor, Murden says, likely make up a whopping 70-80% of the Valley’s entire citrus industry.

One — California-based industry giant Wonderful — makes up nearly half of it.

Smaller growers rely on those sheds to distribute their product, and those companies have sway in the industry.

Lone Star and Wonderful both had two representatives on Murden’s 12-grower Texas Citrus Mutual Board last year, the only repeat names on the list.

Murden indicated more sheds and more growers would likely be an indication of a healthier industry.

“Competition’s important for anything. You’ve gotta have competition,” he said.

There’s an upside to having large-scale growers in the market. Those growers have the capital to withstand acts of God and market upheaval. They’re better equipped to sell off problematic orchards and plant productive orchards. They, theoretically, have succession plans.

There’s also an implicit danger in so much of the Valley’s citrus industry being consolidated into the hands of one or two companies.

Murden, who readily admits he doesn’t have solutions to most of South Texas’ citrus woes but usually has some thoughts, is more curt about what would happen if one of the large growers lost interest.

“No competition. A limited Texas product. Again, it is what it is. I’m not gonna sit here and try to fabricate a non-existent story to ya,” he said.

As for that 20-30% of the Valley industry, Murden says, is still made up of smaller-scale growers?

The clock’s ticking.

“If we don’t get the water situation resolved, we’re running out of time for these little folks,” Murden said. “It’s easier for them to just sell it. My fear is once it’s sold and in concrete, you never ever get it back.

“I don’t see a way out yet.”

A citrus lining

It’s not all doom and gloom.

If, after hearing all the challenges citrus growers in the Valley face, you turn to Dale Murden and ask him why anybody keeps growing citrus, he’ll turn to you and sort of glower.

“What are you, an idiot? They’re making money,” he’ll growl.

Citrus might be an emotional business for a lot of folks, but it’s still a business. 

Quoting Texas A&M, Murden says the Valley’s citrus industry is still an over $400 million industry. 

He says that’s the way to measure it, rather than acreage, because farmers are doing more with less, and the Valley citrus industry is still an economic driver.

According to Murden, South Texas farmers are irrigating and planting better and can halve their water consumption when they do. 

Diversified farms, he says, are effective farms.

“I think anybody needs to be diversified. If you’ve got all your eggs in one basket, you’re in trouble,” he said.

Sophistication helps too.

Mission-based South Tex Organics doesn’t control a lion’s share of the Valley’s citrus business and falls into that 20-30% of the industry Murden mentioned.

Dennis Holbrook bought his family’s farm and converted it into an organic enterprise, South Tex Organics, in 1984.

“A lot of people said he was crazy for it. A lot of people doubted him and his ability to succeed,” Dennis’ son, Russon Holbrook, says.

Eccentricity turned out to be genius.

South Tex Organics has been able to cater to organic customers in a niche market, working with grocers like H-E-B, Whole Foods Market, and Sprouts.

Being organic also forced it to take lots of its production in-house. There’s two conventional packing sheds in the Valley, but there’s also South Tex Organics organic packing shed.

“Our goal is to get a return on our assets, a return on our investment into those assets,” Russon Holbrook said. “That’s what we’re seeking. Plus, we also have a packing facility. So we have a packing house, a cold storage facility, we do our own direct sales to our customers. So there’s a difference between me and the person who owns 10, 20, even 50 acres.”

Valley citrus reaches consumers in two ways: whole on shelves or juiced.

Juiced fruit usually isn’t profitable for growers. It is for Holbrook, because he has his own infrastructure.

“Because of that, it provides me a little more staying power,” he said. “It provides me an opportunity to work within the industry in a different way than someone who’s just a landowner and owns the grove as an investment.”

Thompson says finding a niche has helped his business, too. He specializes in oranges, sells some fruit locally, and has direct relationships with buyers further north in Texas.

Valley growers will tell you they have one other secret weapon compared to their competitors.

If they can get water and avoid bad weather, they’ll say, and if they can put up with urbanization and pests and theft, and if they avoid the temptation to sell out and put out a harvest that makes its way to a shelf on your local grocery store near you and if — finally — you pick up one of their oranges or one of their grapefruit, they say, go home and bite into one of the finest tasting citrus fruits in the world.

It’s an asset that depends on an awful lot of ifs, but it’s an asset Valley growers are passionate about.

Thompson didn’t intend to be a citrus farmer. He sort of fell into it after his dad died unexpectedly a couple decades ago.

Now he’s fallen in love with it and with agriculture in general. 

Walking through his orchards, Thompson talks passionately about the various aspects of geography and climate that he says, despite all the challenges, make Valley citrus some of the finest in the world.

“We’re just in the sweet spot — literally, I guess,” he said.