In a Central Florida field, out in the wind and the sun and near a pen holding baby goats, sit two symbols of Florida’s citrus industry. They were school buses in the 1970s and sometime later were converted to do duty as fruit loader trucks.
The seats and sides were moved long ago. Each has a large rectangular flat bed with a crane welded to it. A claw on the end of the crane is designed to lift large wooden crates weighing about 900 pounds and filled with oranges and grapefruit.
But the last time these fruit loader trucks hoisted a crate of Florida citrus was in 2021…