A wooden citrus ladder is a sturdy, purposeful thing, just like laddermaker Robert Abbott, who isn't yielding a rung in the face of a changing citrus industry.
By JEFF KLINKENBERG
Published November 29, 2004
[Times photo: Bob Croslin]
Robert Abbott owns Abbott Citrus Ladders in Fort Green.
FORT GREEN - Robert Abbott's cell phone never stops ringing. "Go ahead," is how he greets the latest caller. No "Hello" or "How you doing?" or other small talk. The citrus business is like that, especially now, with so much fruit on the ground after three Florida hurricanes and an urgency to get back to making a living.
Except for the cell phone, the 42-year-old Abbott, dressed in jeans, T-shirt and a camouflage ball cap, is an old-fashioned man. In fact, in some ways he's a dinosaur. When he isn't growing oranges and tangerines, he is building the ladders that a decreasing number of pickers throughout Florida are using to harvest citrus. Once, every orange in the state was harvested by a man atop a wooden ladder. Now the old-timey ladders are going the way of the manual typewriter.
"Aluminum," Abbott drawls. "More and more growers seem to want aluminum ladders." A few rich growers are even trying to eliminate aluminum ladders, human pickers and insurance liability by using expensive machines that shake citrus from trees.
But folks with the last name of Abbott in Central Florida's Hardee County don't change their ways willy-nilly. His family has been building the rough-hewn cypress-and-oak citrus ladders for 90 years. As long as there's a demand, even a small one, he plans to keep on doing so.
A ladder with a specialty
His 5,000-square-foot open-air shed on State Road 62 smells of cypress sawdust and sweat. Every once in a while he has to stop talking as an electric saw roars to life. An employee wields a nail gun like an Uzi. A guy driving a front loader stacks ladders into neat piles.
Abbott builds 80 ladders a day and nearly 5,000 a year - about 20 miles worth of ladders if you lined them up. They range in size from 16 feet to 24, though years ago he built a few 38-footers. They were propped up against ancient skyscraping trees that for the most part have been displaced by development or killed in freezes.
"A lot of ladders have gone through these hands," Abbott ruminates. "You know what I'm saying?"
He builds fewer every year. Business has fallen nearly 35 percent since 2000 for reasons that include modernity and the desire of many growers to cut costs. Ladder builders once were common throughout Florida's citrus belt, but now Abbott can name only one other. Abbott supplies 80 percent of the market.
A citrus ladder is nothing like what a suburbanite might find at Home Depot. A wooden citrus ladder is extraordinarily wide at the bottom and very narrow at the top. The wide base provides stability in a grove's soft sand while the narrow top, leaned against the foliage, gives a picker room to get at the fruit. To the inexperienced eye, rungs seem unnaturally far apart. But 17.5 inches, generations of Abbotts discovered, is just right, allowing an athletic picker to climb quickly with an empty canvas bag and descend quickly when the bag is full. Pickers, after all, are typically paid by the pound.
An aluminum ladder is light, lasts forever, but usually costs $200 or more. A wooden citrus ladder is heavier, cruder and cheaper. Abbott charges about $70 for his. They last a season or three in the grove, as Florida's climate and rough handling take their toll. Finished picking citrus from the tallest trees, workers sometimes saw a ladder in half before attacking shorter trees. Occasionally a wooden ladder is added to a campfire on a winter night.
"It's a tough business," Robert Abbott says.
The challenges of change
He was born in Fort Green, a speck on the road just west of Wauchula, the county seat, like his daddy, Jerald, and his grandfather, Edgar, before him. They were orange men, too. His kin have always grown them, but got into the ladder business about the time America went to war against Germany - the first time.
Nobody got rich, though nobody went hungry either. Abbotts and their kin ate what they grew and what they shot. Abbott still likes to venture into the woods with his gun and look for deer.
Hardee was, and continues to be, among the state's poorest counties. Even now, about 30 percent of children live in poverty (compared to 12 percent in Pinellas). Agriculture and phosphate mining are Hardee's most important industries, though a new prison just down the road offers employment opportunities.
The series of hurricanes that hit Hardee hard made poverty worse. Trailers and rickety homes throughout the county are still in disrepair. Blue tarps will protect tortured roofs for the near future.
"Charley was the worst of them," Abbott says in a orange-blossom drawl. The storm was pointed at Tampa Bay when an unexpected turn at Punta Gorda brought it north along U.S. 17 toward him and his groves and his ladder shed. "Big dog," he remembers telling a friend before the telephone went dead, "this is one bad son of a gun."
His house survived, but thousands of Hamlin and Valencia oranges and Murcott tangerines ended up on the ground within the 300 acres of the family groves. Many of his finest trees - he is proud of his well-tended groves - were snapped in half or uprooted.
"Yet I was one of the lucky ones."
Some citrus neighbors lost 35 percent of their crop. Unlike him, they have no other work to fall back on. At least he can sell ladders. He also is partner in a business that gives haircuts to citrus trees. "We don't let trees grow too tall anymore. Makes them easier to harvest." He buys old school buses and sells them to groves that need transportation for their workers.
"In this business, with the profit margin so low, you need to diversify," he says. "Otherwise something bad happens and you're gone. I really don't know what's going to happen to the citrus business in Florida."
Competing against the Cadillacs
Abbott works in his shed, beneath the oak trees, at daybreak. If he isn't in the shed he is out in the swamps with a chain saw felling trees or driving a truck full of logs to a mill in Dade City or driving the truck, now full of lumber, back to the shed.
In the shed, lumber is shaved by a primitive, homemade machine his kin built 60 years ago. Another old machine cuts and saws. Years ago, rungs were whittled by hand. Now they are whittled by another ancient machine.
Workers chat in Spanish and listen to conjunto or norteno music on portable radios. A citrus truck, roaring down the highway toward the juice plant in Bradenton, is music to Abbott's ears. He sells almost all his crop to the juice industry.
Fans paddle the still air. Boots kick through sawdust and dirt. Phone rings. A grower in Winter Haven needs ladders. Phone rings. Wrong number. Abbott hates wrong numbers. He folds up his cell phone.
"We're trying to be modern," he says, "But we're die-hard citrus people. And everything is changing."
At one time citrus was almost always a family business in Florida, passed down through generations. Abbott and his brothers hope their children will keep up the tradition, but they don't know for sure. These days juice is traded on the stock market and many growers carry laptop computers to keep up. "Used to be a grower knew every inch of his property," Abbott says. "Now that would be impossible for a lot of growers. There are some 50,000-acre groves in Florida now! Cadillac farming, I call it."
Abbott is not a Cadillac farmer. He's a Chevy pickup kind of orange man.
His ladders, stubbornly wooden, belong to the Model-T generation.
- Jeff Klinkenberg can be reached at 727 893-8727 or klink@sptimes.com
