ORLANDO, Fla. – Florida’s citrus industry is gearing up for another dismal year, NPR reports. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) expects the state’s orange crop to be close to 10% less than the year before, the second year in a row of such decreases.

The reduction is attributed to the citrus greening disease that has decimated Florida’s grapefruits and oranges, and the disease is now attacking citrus crops in California and Texas. The change has many long-term growers concerned about the future of the industry.

“You could go up and see thousands and thousands acres of trees,” said Benny McLean, a citrus grower, of the boom times in the 1950s and 1960s. “And you could buy fresh-squeezed orange juice, or you could buy a bag of navels. So it was a big deal back then.”

Then the 1980s brought freezes in Central Florida that killed hundreds of thousands of acres of trees. While growers started again by planting groves down south in the state, citrus greening has no solution.

“I can’t imagine Florida without commercial citrus,” said Harold Browning, who directs the Citrus Research and Development Foundation. His group has only one focus: finding a way to stop citrus greening, which is spread by the teeny psyllid insect. Greening arrived in Florida in 2005.

“Within three to four years, it had spread pretty much through all the producing counties in the state,” said Browning. “And then with time and with the transmission by psyllids, it's filling in the gaps.”

Growers are combating the disease by spraying trees with pesticides, which works for the short term. Researchers are scrambling to find a long-term solution to the disease before it completely devastates the citrus industry.