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(TALLAHASSEE, Fla. ) — Florida’s agricultural fields — including the state’s iconic orange groves and berry farms — are routinely damaged by strong storms that roll through the state.

Some of the Sunshine State’s most important farms are now recovering from two of the 2024 season’s most powerful hurricanes, which struck one after the other.

On Sept. 27, Hurricane Helene became the strongest hurricane to strike Florida’s Big Bend. Less than two weeks later, on Oct. 10, Hurricane Milton made landfall near Siesta Key. After both Category 4 storms brought life-threatening storm surge to the Gulf Coast, they turned toward the heart of the state, destroying farmland with strong winds and heavy rains, experts told ABC News.

While the state is no stranger to hurricanes, its agriculture industry is threatened every time a strong hurricane rolls in, Angela Lindsay, associate professor and disaster specialist at the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (IFAS), told ABC News.

Florida’s groves were heavily impacted by the recent hurricanes, which tore through regions with some of the most productive citrus acreage in the state, Matt Joyner, executive vice president and CEO of Florida Citrus Mutual, the state’s largest citrus trade association, told ABC News.

Hurricane-force winds caused defoliation — or the leaves to fall off — damaged limbs and branches and even downed entire trees, snapping them at the roots, Lindsay said. While oranges are not yet ready for harvest, they are currently near maturity and heavier, making it easier for high winds to pull the fruit from their branches, Joyner said.

“We know that we have a lot of fruit on the ground for this year’s crop,” Joyner said.

At Showcase of Citrus, an orange grove in Clermont, Florida, near Orlando, the gusts from Milton bent some trees at a 45-degree angle, owner John Arnold told ABC News.

Floods often kill the citrus groves, especially young orange trees planted in low-lying areas, Arnold said, adding that several of his young orange trees were lost to flooding.

Mitigation is difficult, the farmers said. Complicating matters even further is the uncertainty of the forecast up until just a few days before landfall, making it difficult to tend to hundreds and thousands of acres in a short amount of time, Michael Hill, co-founder and CEO of H&A Farms in Mount Dora, Florida, told ABC News.

Citrus trees can be staked in order to provide support from the hurricane-force winds, Lindsay said. Some farmers have tried wrapping the trees in tarp-like material, but that technique is not commonly used, Lindsay added.

“I’ve seen storms that tipped over entire groves of mature trees,” Arnold said.

There’s not much that can be done to protect crops in the ground, said Hill, who grows strawberries and blueberries — two of the most vulnerable crops in the state, after citrus, experts say.

A tree fell on Hill’s home in Eustis, Florida, but once the storm passed, all he cared about was the state of his fields.

“That’s the least of my worries,” he said of the downed tree.

About 60% of the plastic mulch the strawberries were planted in on Hill’s farm were torn up by Milton, he said. Hill and his workers are attempting to re-lay the plastic while keeping the plants alive in a cooler.

For the dairy industry, the cows still need to be milked, but the stressed cows likely produce much less, Jeb Smith, president of the Florida Farm Bureau Federation, told ABC News.

“It may be a month before they’re able to get back to where production should be,” Smith said.

Structural damage often includes buildings and fences that require re-building, Smith said. Showcase of Citrus sustained some damage to its screen buildings for growing grapefruit, Arnold said. A barn at H&A Farm was destroyed by Milton’s hurricane-force winds, and the entire facility lost power for days, Hill said.

Once the storm rolls through, farmers try to save whatever fruit fell to the ground and attempt to stake damaged trees in an attempt to support what’s remaining, Lindsay said.

Milton was the fourth named storm to hit many of the farms in Central Florida in 14 months, following Hurricane Irma in September 2023 and Debby in early September 2024, Smith said.

“It leads to more impact, when you have blow after blow,” Smith said.

In 2022, Florida’s agriculture industry generated $182.6 billion in revenue and supported more than 2.5 million jobs, according to the Florida Department of Agriculture & Consumer Services. While citrus is Florida’s signature crop, the state is an important producer of many other agricultural products. Florida is the second-largest producer of all oranges, strawberries, sweet corn and non-Valencia oranges in the country. More than 40 vegetables are grown commercially in the state, which ranks in the top three on production value of tomato, bell pepper, snap bean, squash, cabbage and cucumber, according to the University of Florida.

Sugarcane, timber, cattle and dairy are also major commodities for the state, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Other storms in the recent past have been just as devastating, the experts said.

Farmers were in disbelief over the amount of fruit that had been blown to the ground after Hurricane Irma in 2017 and Hurricane Ian in 2022, Lindsay said. The citrus industry saw a 1,000% loss as a result of Ian, Smith said.

In 2018, after Hurricane Michael struck the panhandle, researchers and officials couldn’t even get to some of the fields — many of which contain row crops of tomatoes and cotton — to assess the damage because of the damaged roadways, Lindsay said.

“We were using drones to look at them,” she said. “There wasn’t a lot there.”

Hurricane Ian in 2022 led to an estimated $7.9 billion in agricultural losses and impacted nearly 5 million acres, a report by the university found. Hurricane Irma in 2018 caused about $1.3 billion in losses, impacting about 1.9 million acres, according to an IFAS report.

Milton resulted in losses between $1.5 billion and $2.5 billion, in addition to the estimated $1.5 billion in damage caused by Idalia, Debby and Helene in the 13 months prior, according to a preliminary assessment by the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services released Thursday.

Every named storm in recent memory that has passed through central Florida has caused damage to Arnold’s farmland, he said.

“Just as we replant trees and rehabilitate groves and look to recover and move into better seasons, we’re getting hit with these storms,” Joyner said. “It’s really been difficult for growers to kind of regain their footing and move forward.”

In addition to crop insurance, there are several programs in place for farmers, including loan and recovery programs by the USDA’s Farm Service Agency, Lindsay said. The data collected by IFAS is sent to federal officials, who then determine the amount of aid to be distributed to farmers.

Once the damage is assessed, farmers then must make long-term decisions on how to move forward, Smith said.

“Some of these producers will have impacts years down the road,” Smith said, adding that the adverse impacts on the citrus industry can even last for decades.

Hurricanes are just one of the hazards Florida farmers face regularly. The last few years have been tough on the industry, with citrus farmers experiencing widespread greening, a disease that impacts citrus trees, Arnold said.

Combined with freezes, market prices, other diseases, labor challenges and inflation, farmers in the state have left many farms struggling to keep afloat, Hill said.

“When you see Florida strawberries in your stores this year, know that it came from a farmer that chose not to give up,” Hill said.

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(SEATTLE) — Boeing machinists on Wednesday rejected a new contract proposal that would’ve ended a weekslong work stoppage against the embattled aerospace company — and the union said the strike will go on.

Sixty-four percent of workers voted to reject the new contract, according to the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM), the union representing 33,000 Boeing workers in Washington, Oregon and California.

Representatives for Boeing said Wednesday night the company did not have a comment on the vote.

The proposed contract would have delivered a 35% raise over the four-year duration of the contract, upping the 25% cumulative raise provided in a previous offer overwhelmingly rejected by workers in a vote last month. Workers had initially sought a 40% cumulative pay increase.

The proposal also called for hiking Boeing’s contribution to a 401(k) plan, but it declined to fulfill workers’ call for a reinstatement of the company’s defined pension. The contract would have included a $7,000 ratification bonus for each worker, as well as a performance bonus that Boeing had sought to jettison.

But union leaders said the concessions offered in the proposal were not enough to meet the demands of rank-and-file union members.

“This contract struggle began over ten years ago when the company overreached and created a wound that may never heal for many members,” said Jon Holden, president of IAM District 751 in Seattle, in a statement after the vote. “I don’t have to tell you all how challenging it has been for our membership through the pandemic, the crashes, massive inflation, and the need to address the losses stemming from the 2014 contract.”

The union said the strike will continue as they return to the bargaining table with the company.

Hours before workers cast ballots on Wednesday, Boeing released an earnings report showing the company had lost a staggering $6.1 billion over the most recent quarter due primarily to costs associated with the strike.

“We have some really big rocks that we need to get behind us to move the company forward,” Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg said in a letter to investors on Wednesday.

Ortberg singled out the strike as an issue that must be addressed “first and foremost.”

“We have been feverishly working to find a solution that works for the company and meets our employees’ needs,” Ortberg said.

The company and its workers have faced significant financial losses during the nearly six-week strike.

Union members have received $250 per week from a strike fund, beginning in the third week of the work stoppage. That compensation marks a major pay cut for many of the employees.

Mid-ranking workers involved in the strike typically make $20 per hour, which totals $800 per 40-hour work week, while higher-paid members earn salaries upward of $100,000 per year, or nearly $2,000 per week.

“The question is whether the employees and their union determine that they have the power to get more from Boeing,” Henry Harteveldt, a travel industry analyst at Atmosphere Research Group, told ABC News. “It’s whether they think they can extract more from Boeing, or Boeing says, ‘You know what, this is it.'”

The strike was set to cost Boeing $108 million per day in lost revenue, amounting to as much as $5.5 billion in losses should the work stoppage last 50 days, investment bank TD Cowen said in a report reviewed by ABC News at the outset of the dispute. So far, the strike has lasted 40 days.

In September, Boeing announced furloughs and pay cuts for some white-collar employees in response to the strike. Last week, Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg announced plans to cut 17,000 jobs, which amounts to about 10% of its global workforce.

“This is really painful for Boeing,” Richard Aboulafia, managing director of aerospace consulting firm AeroDynamic Advisory, told ABC News.

The most recent IAM strike against Boeing in the Pacific Northwest, in 2008, lasted 57 days. Work stoppages undertaken by unionized Boeing employees in the same region have historically lasted an average of 60 days, a Bank of America Global Research analysis found after examining seven previous strikes, the earliest in 1948.

In the days leading up to Wednesday’s vote, the outcome remained unclear, Jake Rosenfeld, a professor of sociology at Washington University in St. Louis, who studies labor, told ABC News.

“What are the workers going to do?” Rosenfeld said. “That’s a really tough question.”

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(NEW YORK) — Jussie Smollett’s attorney said the actor was “harmed substantially” after he was found guilty of lying about a 2019 hate crime in an interview with “GMA3” following the overturning of his conviction.

The Illinois Supreme Court threw out the former “Empire” actor’s conviction in a decision on Thursday after concluding that the state’s prosecution was unfair due to an agreement that initially dropped the charges.

Smollett was first indicted on 16 felony counts of disorderly conduct for filing a false police report, though Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx agreed to drop the charges if he paid $10,000 and did community service. A special prosecutor later charged him again, leading to his trial and conviction.

In its decision on Thursday, the court found that the state could not bring a second prosecution against Smollett after the initial charges were dismissed, and that reneging on the agreement “would be arbitrary, unreasonable, fundamentally unfair, and a violation of the defendant’s due process rights.”

Tina Glandian, Smollett’s attorney, told “GMA3” on Friday that they have been fighting the second prosecution from the start as “completely illegal.”

“It violates numerous constitutional provisions,” she said. “We’ve raised this numerous, numerous times before, various courts. And finally yesterday, the Supreme Court of Illinois agreed with us and said the second prosecution was barred because there was an agreement in place and the state is bound to honor its word.”

The case began after the openly gay actor told police he was attacked by two men while walking on a street near his Chicago apartment early on Jan. 29, 2019. The attackers allegedly shouted racist and homophobic slurs before hitting him, pouring “an unknown chemical substance” on him and wrapping a rope around his neck.

Chicago police said Smollett’s story of being the victim of an attack began to unravel when investigators tracked down two men, brothers Abimbola and Olabinjo Osundairo, who they said were seen in a security video near where Smollett claimed he was assaulted and around the same time it supposedly occurred. The Osundairo brothers told police the actor paid them $3,500 to help him orchestrate and stage the crime.

A jury convicted Smollett in December 2021 on five of six felony counts of disorderly conduct stemming from filing a false police report and lying to police, who spent more than $130,000 investigating his allegations.

Dan Webb, who was appointed by a Cook County judge to continue looking into the case after the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office initially dropped all charges against the actor, said he was “disappointed” in the court’s decision and noted that the ruling “has nothing to do with Mr. Smollett’s innocence.”

“The Illinois Supreme Court did not find any error with the overwhelming evidence presented at trial that Mr. Smollett orchestrated a fake hate crime and reported it to the Chicago Police Department as a real hate crime, or the jury’s unanimous verdict that Mr. Smollett was guilty of five counts of felony disorderly conduct,” he said in a statement.

Glandian said Smollett continues to maintain his innocence and has “vehemently denied” any participation in a hoax.

“We do believe he didn’t get a fair trial, that the jury didn’t hear all the evidence that should have [been] heard, that things were improperly excluded, that the jury panel was not properly put together,” she said. “The Supreme Court yesterday didn’t get to that issue. They said legally this was invalid. It violated his due process and they, based on that, threw out the conviction. But we still maintain that he didn’t receive a fair trial.”

In the wake of the case, she said Smollett has been releasing music and “continued to do what he does best.”

“I think hopefully, obviously this can only help matters because he was harmed substantially after everything that happened, and of course, the convictions and the sentence that was imposed,” she said.

Webb said that despite the Illinois Supreme Court’s decision, the city of Chicago is still able to pursue its pending civil lawsuit against Smollett in order to recoup the investigation costs.

Glandian said she hopes the city “does the right thing” and dismisses that case.

“He’s incurred substantial legal fees. He spent six days in jail, all of which now has been said by the highest court in Illinois was completely unconstitutional,” Glandian said. “So for the city now to further proceed, we’ll see what they do. But hopefully they dismiss that case immediately.” 

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