The bus was transporting 53 farmworkers shortly after 6:30 a.m. when it collided with a pickup truck in Marion County, about 80 miles north of Orlando, the Florida Highway Patrol said.Then driver of the pickup was later arrested on driving under the influence-manslaughter charges.

Florida has expanded rules blocking importation of some cattle because of the spread of a type of avian influenza in dairy herds in other states. Florida Agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson on Monday issued an emergency rule that requires most dairy cattle being imported into Florida to meet federal testing and movement requirements for Bovine Associated Influenza A Syndrome.

Bruises continue to be inflicted on Florida’s citrus industry, as the forecast for the nearly concluded growing season dropped further Friday.The U.S. Department of Agriculture issued an updated production forecast that was 5.6 percent below projections released in April. Meanwhile, a decades-old citrus association shut its doors this week, and a major grower told investors its groves might need at least one more season to recover from 2022’s Hurricane Ian.

Ever since Florida farmers have been growing tomatoes, they’ve picked them by hand or hired laborers. It’s painstaking work that might be made easier soon with machine-harvestable tomatoes developed by University of Florida scientists. Now that the varieties are available, growers in Florida’s $400 million-a-year industry hope they can use mechanized harvesting, but doubts remain. Large-scale trials this spring – using the new varieties -- will tell growers and scientists a lot more. The new varieties were decades in the making, said Jessica Chitwood-Brown, the tomato breeder at the University of Florida Gulf Coast Research and Education Center (GCREC).

Florida’s citrus industry got some bitter news Thursday as it enters the final months of the 2023-2024 growing season.The U.S. Department of Agriculture released a report that reduced estimates of orange and grapefruit production. Overall, the new numbers indicated the industry will slightly outpace the 2022-2023 season, which was devastated by Hurricane Ian and had the lowest output in 93 years.

They're huge, sometimes bedecked with dark green and bright yellow-orange coloration and almost always looking like something out of a Hollywood apocalypse flick."They" are the eastern lubber grasshopper. These grasshoppers seemingly on steroids are out in force throughout the Southeast, including some parts of Florida. They’re munching away on landscape plants, citrus and vegetable crops, while gardeners and growers are trying to minimize the damage.

The University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS) Extension is offering online workshops to teach the basics of planning, implementing and building a farm operation for newcomers venturing into agriculture. Instructors will deliver the workshops in English and Spanish.

Florida is home to over 315 species of native wild bees, which thrive on flowers for survival. But some bees are in critical decline. While the public is increasingly interested in conserving pollinators and in pollinator-friendly gardening, a 2020 University of Florida survey showed a knowledge gap in consumers’ ability to identify a range of bee pollinators -- the plants to which they’re attracted.

As it hopes for a warm winter, Florida’s struggling citrus industry could be showing signs of recovery from the devastation of Hurricane Ian and progress in the decades-long fight against citrus greening disease.

Lyrianne Gonzalez in New York is looking for Florida descendants of the federal program that brought foreign workers to farms here. The guest worker program dates back decades, and usually brought foreigners to American farms for set periods of time, and then the workers went back home. But some guest workers chose to pursue legal U.S. citizenship, and then settled in Florida and other farm states.