A Hurricane Destroyed My Orange Groves in One Night. The Banker Who Came to Foreclose Ended Up Saving Them

My name is Mateo Alvarez. I’m 47, and I grow oranges on four hundred acres in central Florida, outside Arcadia.

My grandfather came from Cuba in 1961 with eleven dollars and a pocketknife. He picked oranges for other men for twenty years before he bought his first ten acres.

I grew up in these groves. I learned to walk between these trees. When I was a teenager, I hated them. When I was twenty-five, I left for business school in Miami and swore I’d never come back.

When my father got sick, I came back.

That was eighteen years ago. I never left again.

I’m not married. Came close once. She wanted Miami. I wanted the groves. We were both right, just not for each other.

People in town tease me that I’m the most eligible farmer in DeSoto County. The ladies at church keep trying to set me up with their nieces. I always say I’m married to the oranges.

That was true until last September.

Hurricane Delia came ashore at Port Charlotte as a Category 4. By the time it reached Arcadia, the wind was still over a hundred miles an hour.

I stayed in the packing house all night with my crew foreman, Luis, listening to the trees scream.

In the morning, we walked outside.

Sixty percent of my trees were on the ground. Uprooted, snapped, stripped bare. The roof of the packing house was in the next county. The irrigation system was destroyed.

Three generations of work.

One night.