Bill Nelson: “in my explanation, I will go into it in detail. It is my hope that the White House promise that this will be taken up in…”

“in my explanation, I will go into it in detail. It is my hope that the White House promise that this will be taken up in November, which is the next tranche of the hurricane money, the disaster assistance. It has been well past a month since Hurricane Irma hit Puerto Rico and 2 months since it hit Florida, and Floridians all across our State are working as hard as ever to recover. One group of individuals who were hit especially hard by this storm is Florida's citrus growers. I will refer again to this photograph. You can see the citrus grove. You can see the branches on the citrus trees. Some of the trees have blown over, but in the meantime, you can see all of the fruit that is on the ground. Toward southwest Florida, at least 75 percent of the crops are on the ground. In more central Florida, it is upward of 50 and 60 percent. Of all the times, this was going to be a bumper crop. Lord knows, with the greening disease--its nickname is ``greening,'' but it is a bacteria-- it will kill the tree in 5 years, and it has been declining the citrus production over the course of the last 10 years. We had suffered enough through all of that, and then here had come this hurricane. When it looked as if there was going to be a good crop to turn around the lessened production that had occurred over each of the last 10 years, this is what happened. If that were not enough--all of the fruit on the ground--take a look at this. This is what has happened to citrus groves.…”