黄龙病毁掉了佛罗里达九成五的橙子，基因编辑能救回来吗？

Do you drink orange juice in the morning?

Lots of Americans like a glass of orange juice in the morning.

A lot of America's orange juice is made from Florida oranges.

More than ninety percent of Florida's oranges go into juice.

But over these twenty years, Florida has had fewer and fewer oranges.

Why?

Twenty years ago, Florida's orange trees caught a disease.

In Chinese this disease is called huanglongbing, "yellow dragon disease."

When a tree gets it, the oranges fall off before they're ripe, and they taste bitter too.

The disease is brought by a tiny insect, so small it looks like pollen.

With one gust of wind, the insects can fly to other trees.

Now Florida has ninety-five percent fewer oranges than twenty years ago.

Last year alone, a lot more orange land stopped being farmed.

Much of the land sits empty; some is used to raise cattle, and some has had houses built on it.

Florida used to have fifty-four orange-juice factories; now it has only four.

Mr. Rucks, who has grown oranges here all his life, said: this used to be a lively little town.

His orange trees got sick, so he had no choice but to grow other things, like blueberries and bamboo.

But now scientists have found new ways.

This year, the American government approved two new technologies.

The first uses gene editing to create new orange trees that aren't afraid of the disease.

An orange tree is really two parts joined together: the lower part grows the roots, and the upper part decides what kind of oranges it bears.

The new technology changes the lower part, so the whole tree isn't afraid of the disease.

A scientist says it's the first crop made with gene editing specifically to fight disease that's already on sale.

The second is to give trees a harmless virus that helps them fight the disease.

Farmers have already ordered hundreds of thousands of new trees to plant next spring.

The Florida government is also putting up money to help farmers buy them.

But the new trees won't have oranges for juice for another two years.

A man in charge of grafting at a nursery said he's seen millions of trees go out from there, and almost every one of them eventually died.

He said: this is the first time in twenty years I've felt hope.

There's another problem: the number of people drinking orange juice has also halved.

Do you think Florida's oranges can come back?