Ernst: Terra Ceia citrus grower is final piece of Old Florida

Published: Thursday, June 28, 2012 at 2:48 p.m.

Last Modified: Thursday, June 28, 2012 at 2:48 p.m.

The Citrus Place has been going out of business for years. Or so the stories go. They're not hard to believe.

Old Florida has been disappearing. And the Citrus Place in Terra Ceia at the foot of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge is as Old Florida as it gets. The roadside business on U.S. 19 has been selling home-grown and home-squeezed citrus for 37 years.

Its owner, Ben Tillett, 81, was born in the house behind the store and lived there most of his life.

He thought he was getting out of the business in 2005. As the real estate market hummed, land around him was going for $100,000 an acre. Tillet was ready to cash in. He had a serious buyer. Someone was going to open a storage complex for boats and motor homes. That deal fell through, although he has sold his childhood home, and he and his wife, Vera, have moved to a newer house nearby.

This week, as howling winds closed the Skyway bridge, the store was open as usual. Well, maybe not quite as usual. This is the first year it's stayed open past May. The Tilletts are trying something different, selling frozen juice they've stored in six freezers.

"You'd be surprised how business drops off when the tourists leave. It's getting hard to show a profit," Ben says. "What we're attempting to do now is something to stay alive."

Although his father farmed, Tillett never really intended to get into citrus. He served in the Navy during the Korean War, got a business degree from Florida State in 1958, worked for an oil company in Miami for a year, then returned home and got a job teaching English at Manatee County High School.

He was a tough teacher, big on grammar and spelling. He quit in 1979, partly because he felt the administration cared more about athletics than academics.

And, the U-pick grapefruit sideline business he had started a few years earlier had also picked up. People seemed to like the local oranges and grapefruits, which, Tillett claims, have higher sugar content and thinner skins than fruit from Florida's interior.

Tillett was more than a retailer. He also managed a number of citrus groves in the area in addition to his own. He'd handle the fertilizing, watering and the spraying for insects and weeds, then split the profits with the owners. The six or seven groves under his care each year comprised 50 to 400 trees.

The arrangement kept alive Terra Ceia's agricultural tradition, which has now all but vanished as land prices have favored residential use. Tillett still oversees two groves, but they're in Parrish and Ruskin.

The uncertainty of supply has undercut what used to be a profitable shipping business. At one time, Tillett sent out as many as 4,000 boxes of fruit a season through an association in Orlando. "We had to give up gift fruit shipping," he says. "We had to know what we were going to have. I was going 100 miles, trying to find fruit."

It's hard to pin down cause and effect for the decline of citrus in Florida. Rising land prices, diseases such as canker and greening, government regulations to combat canker and greening, permit fees, the cost of testing, the unavailability of labor and a change in consumer habits have all played a role.

And it's the little guys who get hurt the worst. They don't have the depth and breadth of business to absorb the skyrocketing overhead.

The Tillets, joined by their son, Sid, are trying. Over the years they've added ice cream, specialty cheeses from Ohio and pecans from Georgia to their inventory. They sell arts and crafts, including some of Vera's knitting. This year, they introduced homemade soups and sandwiches.

In December, they started selling clams, raised from seeds germinated in a laboratory on Terra Ceia. "I was very skeptical at first," Tillett says. "They're small, but they're tender, and they're selling like you wouldn't believe."

The times change, surely enough. Terra Ceia's truck farms and citrus groves and tomato packing houses and gladiolus growers are gone. But it's nice, every once in a while, to get a glimpse of how things used to be and to cheer for folks like the Tilletts, who bridge the gap.

Eric Ernst's column runs Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Contact him at eric.ernst@heraldtribune.com or (941) 486-3073.

Source: http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20120628/columnist/120629572

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