“Florida is begging for help, but the funds are mostly going to the biggest producers, and everyone else is going out of business, or they're just focused on addressing the greening disease,” he explained. “But small citrus growers are the ones keeping everything afloat, so we decided to create a foundation that would be the middleman for small family-owned citrus farmers. I want to remind people what Florida is about and known for, and they can't depend on help from the state. We need to take care of this issue; we need a coalition made up of different small businesses.” He believes there's a disconnect between Floridians and the state's legacy. —FreshFruitPortal.com

“When I founded the Save Florida Citrus Groves Foundation, Inc., I had one thing on my mind at the time and that was to save the legacy of the Florida orange and the beautiful, fragrant groves they are cultivated in. There is no other nonprofit that served this purpose in terms of advocating with facts for struggling small, family-owned citrus farms, providing economic grants through donations, or organizing volunteers,” shared Adrian Bryce, founder and president of Save Florida Citrus Groves Foundation. “Due to the fact that state organizations are doing the opposite to help the backbone of Florida’s citrus industry, I took it upon myself and did extensive legal research and investigations. I discovered that all of the very organizations (Florida Department of Citrus, Florida Citrus Commission, and Florida Citrus Mutual) that were originally formed and tasked with the very notion of helping small citrus farmers were, in fact, not at all helping small citrus growers. Their main focus has been and continues to be on large producers.” Bryce shared that there are numerous legal complexities surrounding these situations, but the simplest way to explain it is that funds often fail to reach their intended allocations, and a trifecta class action lawsuit would be a fitting course of action. According to legal advisers, if small citrus farmers were to file such a lawsuit, they would have only about a 10% chance of losing, given the strong, documented claims against all three entities involved. This reality points directly to leadership as the root cause of Florida’s citrus industry’s decline. Experts argue that citrus greening, while damaging, is not the primary factor. —Folio Magazine Weekly

“From a citrus grove perspective, they are nostalgic and I don’t think people realize how important they are, especially Floridians,” he says. I believe it’s not being presented to the public in a way to sway public opinion to care more about their state's legacy. As the first and only nonprofit to do so, I believe this can be accomplished with the right push.” —Florida Business Observer