2026-04-27 18:30:00
Data reporting by Melissa Lewis
In remote Northeast California, about 10 miles outside the lumber mill town of Chester and a half-hour’s drive from the old hunting cabin I bought and fixed up about a decade ago, I steer my old Toyota Tacoma down a bumpy dirt road to where the Lassen National Forest gives way to private timberland. Lilly rides shotgun.
We’d come to this exact spot seven years ago. Lilly, my sharp-eyed border collie, had jumped out of the truck and chased a rabbit through a meadow of knee-high grass, returning covered in mud and burrs. The landscape was straight out of an L.L.Bean catalog: a flower-dotted meadow buzzing with life. Douglas firs, incense cedars, and some of the tallest sugar pines on the planet sheltered protected species ranging from gray wolves to Pacific fishers and northern goshawks. The Sierra Nevada red fox, one of California’s rarest mammals, was known to live nearby, amid the vast patchwork of private and public lands. The Lassen area is where I come to reset, forage for wild mushrooms, and let stress evaporate.
But today, I’m looking out over a barren, sun-bleached expanse that stretches across the former meadow and up the sides of denuded mountains as far as the eye can see. No birds. No animals. No insects. No big trees. Just some waist-high piles of volcanic rock, a nod to the still-active Lassen Peak nearby. It is eerily quiet—desolate. The Dixie Fire roared through here in July 2021, burning nearly 1 million acres. The Park Fire three years later took out another 430,000 acres nearby. But the fires aren’t directly responsible for what I’m seeing today. People did this.
Just a few minutes down the road, nature has crept back to life. There, I saw vibrant green mountain whitethorn bushes, rabbitbrush, and purple-tinged bull thistles, with energetic bees bopping from flower to flower. The towering trees were gone, but new saplings abounded—cedars, pines, firs, and more—scattered randomly amid the greenery, already a foot or two high. No such verdant revival is visible on the private timberland before me. No bees, no flowers—it’s a virtual dead zone where the only life consists of row upon row of manually planted, tightly packed conifer saplings, all less than a foot tall.
This is because, unbeknownst to most people, logging companies and the US Forest Service have been spraying massive amounts of herbicide in clear-cut and fire-ravaged forests of California—and throughout the nation. And not just any herbicide, but glyphosate, a potent and problematic weed killer best known by the brand name Roundup.
This once-idyllic landscape, spanning tens of thousands of acres, is among California’s most heavily sprayed forest areas. The Pacific Crest Trail—a hiking route immortalized in the Hollywood movie Wild, starring Reese Witherspoon—runs straight through it. Yet thanks to all the chemicals, it remains a moonscape even now, nearly five years after the Dixie Fire.
I keep Lilly in the truck.
My first hint of all this was a single word in a letter the Forest Service sent to me and my neighbors about a year and a half ago. Lassen, it said, was to be part of an ambitious new wildfire recovery project. This was welcome, as the fires had burned perilously close to our properties. Workers would remove selected trees, cull undergrowth, and set prescribed fires, as Native Americans have done for millennia to keep forests healthy and reduce the risk of megafires. The agency also would plant new trees where few had survived.
Then I came to the word “herbicides.” The Forest Service would, starting in spring 2026, spray glyphosate on some 10,000 acres of public land in Lassen to wipe out leafy plants and shrubs that might compete with replanted conifers, whose needles allow them to tolerate the chemical.
Introduced in 1974 by agri-giant Monsanto, glyphosate is among the world’s most controversial herbicides, one the World Health Organization’s cancer agency calls a probable carcinogen. In the late 1990s, widespread spraying on US crops genetically engineered to withstand it helped propel the organics movement and led scientists and activists to decry the chemical’s potential to wreak environmental havoc, from decimating monarch butterfly populations to killing wild frogs.
Bayer, the multinational conglomerate that acquired Monsanto in 2018, has agreed to pay more than $12 billion in legal settlements to thousands of people who say Roundup gave them cancer or other ailments. (Bayer says its herbicide is safe when used as directed.) But the company, which has hired lobbyists with deep ties to the Trump administration, may have notched a win in February, when President Donald Trump issued an executive order deeming glyphosate critical to national security. He even invoked the Defense Production Act to bolster domestic production of the herbicide and extend some immunity from lawsuits to its manufacturers.
The Forest Service and private loggers say they use glyphosate because it helps commercially attractive conifers like pine and Douglas fir rebound faster after fires and timber harvests. It does so by killing deciduous trees, native shrubs, flowering plants, and anything else that might compete for water, nutrients, and sunlight. In short, a key rationale for spraying a disputed chemical in natural settings boils down to executives and regulators treating forests, including our national forests, as tree farms.
To learn more about how widely glyphosate was being used and the risks of using it in places where people camp, forage, hike, hunt, and swim, I began by requesting all California spraying reports going back to 1990. My colleague Melissa Lewis and I analyzed more than 5 million records, and what we found was eye opening: Forest spraying, which practically nobody knows about, is happening at record levels. The amount applied annually in state forests—266,000 pounds of pure glyphosate in 2023, the latest year for which data was available—is nearly five times what it was two decades ago. And though far more glyphosate is sprayed on state croplands overall, forest uses have become the herbicide’s fastest-growing market in California.
My Lassen neighbors had a mixture of reactions to the Forest Service letter. Some of them are reflexively averse to environmental concerns. They remember back before the timber wars of the 1990s, when logging boomed and so did good jobs. Classrooms were packed. Families fished, hunted, and called these forests home. Their prosperity was upended by a “tree-hugger” movement to save what remained of California’s old-growth forests. Logging communities were hit hard, and locals paid an economic and emotional price they haven’t forgotten.
Others, upset about the proposed spraying, wrote to the agency to register their opposition. They knew of the health concerns—studies suggesting glyphosate might contribute to ailments ranging from non-Hodgkin lymphoma to brain inflammation and metabolic and liver problems in children. There’s a growing body of evidence, too, suggesting it disrupts the gut microbiome, with implications for chronic disease. (Bayer disputes these findings and says glyphosate safety is “supported by one of the most extensive bodies of research.”)
How, I wondered, given the myriad health and environmental concerns, had regulators come to approve so much forest use of glyphosate—especially at a time when bad press around the chemical had left many a farmer and landscaper searching for alternatives? At least part of the answer lies within the thousands of pages of additional public records, court filings, and internal Monsanto emails I obtained.
The collected documents detail a secret campaign the company hatched in the late 1990s—not unlike the ones used by Big Tobacco decades earlier—to counter public health concerns and convince government agencies to keep approving its multibillion-dollar product. They show how Monsanto orchestrated, financed, and even ghostwrote studies that were published in peer-reviewed scientific journals under the names of supposedly independent researchers—papers that state and federal agencies have relied upon to justify copious spraying of Roundup.
As my reporting proceeded, the questions kept piling up: Is glyphosate as safe for humans as Bayer insists? Does it really help forests bounce back after fires or, conversely, might it leave them more susceptible? And finally, what would come of the Trump administration setting two key parts of its coalition—Big Agriculture, which embraces glyphosate, and the Make America Healthy Again crowd, which loathes it—on a collision course?
Back in the burn zone, a sudden movement catches my eye; not a rabbit this time but a dust devil forming. It swirls and dances over the sunbaked terrain, taking on the color of the rust-colored dirt. The vortex grows ever larger, now towering hundreds of feet in the air, where an overhead wind, like an unseen paintbrush, streaks the reddish dirt off into the distance, a miles-long trail of impressionistic art.
This can’t be good. That topsoil was drenched with chemicals not so long ago. Now it’s airborne and presumably traveling well beyond the intended spraying boundaries. Joe Van Meter, owner of the Mill Creek Resort about 15 miles away, mentions the dust devils when I visit him. He’s seen them, too, on his drive to Chester.
Van Meter is a charming and earthy fortysomething who in 2017 bought the nearly century-old, 12-acre resort with his wife, Jillian. They are raising their three young daughters here, having revitalized the old cabins, RV sites, and campground, adding retro trailers and glamping tents to attract the hip Bay Area crowd. “As you see, we’ve got a little slice of heaven,” he tells me.
The resort, as its name suggests, sits alongside Mill Creek, which originates in nearby Lassen Volcanic National Park and meanders through the area. The fast-flowing mountain creek has long been hallowed ground for Native Americans and anglers because it remains undammed and is a spawning ground for some of the state’s last remaining spring-run Chinook salmon. Recent studies have found that glyphosate-based herbicides caused “deleterious effects” on fish development and reproduction, which is one reason Van Meter has helped lead local pushback to the Forest Service’s plan. Having perused the science—and lawsuits—he also fears that spraying Roundup on local hillsides, whose feeder streams empty into the creek, could taint his community’s primary water source.
He gets the need for fire mitigation. The 2024 Park Fire burned right up to the edge of his property and sent him fleeing for his life on highways lapped by flames. “We came to a couple points where we had to stop because of how intense it was ahead of us,” he recalls. But the family got out and the resort was spared. The earlier Dixie Fire had also come close, forcing him and Jillian to shut down at the peak of the busy summer season. As such, he’s on board with the thinning and replanting and supports logging in the area, but Van Meter and others oppose the use of Roundup and related herbicides. “We need work to be done, and so I want to see that work done,” he says. “But I want it done without the use of toxic chemicals.”
Roundup has been on the market for half a century, but sales exploded in the late 1990s after Monsanto introduced “Roundup-ready” GMO soybeans and corn, crops genetically modified to withstand a direct hit with glyphosate. This allowed farmers to kill everything else in their fields, increasing crop yields and giving struggling growers hope that they might eke out more money. Monsanto cashed in doubly by selling them both Roundup and the seeds that could survive it.
But after a series of studies in the late 1990s indicated glyphosate might be harmful to people, Monsanto executives and scientists concocted a plan to convince regulators otherwise. Internal emails obtained through discovery in various lawsuits against the company show how Monsanto personnel sought out researchers who would “get up and shout Glyphosate is non-toxic,” as William Heydens, one of the company’s scientists, told colleagues in a May 1999 email. Their testimonials, he wrote, could “be referenced and used to counter-balance the negative stuff.”
In the emails, Heydens, who helped spearhead the strategy, and whom we tried to contact without success, emphasized that his team would work with “outside scientific experts who are influential at driving science, regulators, public opinion, etc.” They turned first to a British scientist, James Parry, a globally recognized expert on genetic mutations. But Parry’s internal report to Monsanto concluded that glyphosate potentially caused clastogenicity—chromosome damage—which can lead to cancer. He recommended more tests.
Monsanto executives were not thrilled. Heydens informed his crew that the company had no intention of doing “the studies Parry suggests”—the goal, rather, was to identify scientists willing to declare Roundup safe. “Let’s step back and look at what we are really trying to achieve here. We want to find/develop someone who is comfortable with the genetox profile”—an assessment of cancer risk—“of glyphosate/Roundup and who can be influential with regulators,” he wrote. “My read is that Parry is not currently such a person.”
The team turned instead to Dr. Gary Williams, a physician who taught at the New York Medical College. Williams and two co-authors then published an April 2000 review article in the peer-reviewed journal Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology. Unlike the Parry report, which included independent research in its analysis, the Williams paper relied entirely on Monsanto’s internal lab tests to evaluate whether glyphosate causes cancer. Its conclusions were unequivocal: “There is no potential for Roundup herbicide to pose a health risk to humans.” (Williams could not be reached for comment.)
In another email, this one from a trove of trial records dubbed the Monsanto Papers, Heydens reminded his team they’d ghostwritten the Williams paper, a claim he would later deny under oath. “Apparently I didn’t have good recollection, because that’s not what happened,” he said in a 2017 deposition. But the emails make clear that ghostwriting was widely discussed at Monsanto. Michael Koch, an executive who oversaw teams responsible for Roundup and glyphosate’s safety and regulatory approval, emailed subordinates at one point to ask them to orchestrate a study with a “manuscript to be initiated by MON ghostwriters” and published by one of their go-to scientists—Williams and four others were listed as options. Heydens, one of the recipients, noted in a separate message that “we would be keeping the cost down by us doing the writing and [the outside scientists] would just edit and sign their names, so to speak.” Their imprimatur would make the articles more credible to regulators and the public, he added.
Monsanto would orchestrate several influential studies over the years. In 2016, Williams was the lead author on another paper secretly overseen by the company and published at a crucial moment. WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer had made headlines the year before by concluding that glyphosate probably causes cancer. Monsanto responded with a PR onslaught that included a ghostwritten Forbes op-ed under the byline of former FDA official Henry Miller, a Stanford Hoover Institution fellow and regular contributor to the magazine. “The reality is that glyphosate is not a human health risk,” it concluded. (When Forbes editors learned Monsanto had ghostwritten the piece, they cut ties with Miller, who did not respond to requests for comment.)
Heydens and other insiders, meanwhile, were busy preparing a series of five new papers involving Williams and 15 named co-authors. The package ran in the September 2016 issue of Critical Reviews in Toxicology, with a title suggesting it was written by “four independent expert panels.” Critical Reviews, like most academic journals, requires authors to disclose any ethical conflicts in a declaration of interest section, in which Williams et al. wrote: “Neither any Monsanto company employees nor any attorneys reviewed any of the Expert Panel’s manuscripts prior to submission to the journal.”
That was a lie.
The declaration also said the authors “were not directly contacted by the Monsanto Company,” which wasn’t true, either. Monsanto employees had exchanged emails with at least some of them, provided comments and edits on drafts, and in some cases agreed to pay authors tens of thousands of dollars. Heydens himself contributed to the 2016 package: “Here is my 1st shot at starting the Manuscript for the Panel report,” he wrote in an email to colleagues more than a year before it was published. Entire paragraphs from his draft ran verbatim, or nearly so, in the published version, such as: “A molecule with these characteristics would be expected to exhibit, if any, only a low order of toxicity. The results from toxicity studies and regulatory risk assessments have been consistent with that expectation.” Emails and court records show that at least some of the authors were aware of Monsanto’s involvement in editing the package, which, like Williams’ earlier article, was cited in the glyphosate safety assessments of regulators worldwide. “Plaintiff lawyers have cherry-picked isolated emails out of millions of pages of documents,” Bayer said in a statement, and Monsanto’s involvement “did not rise to the level of authorship.”
“We’re not claiming that this paper being retracted proves that glyphosate is scary dangerous. We’re saying it proves that Monsanto poisoned the well of public understanding of science.”
The Forest Service’s 2011 risk assessment, which broadly depicts glyphosate as posing no significant threat to people and the environment, references Williams’ 2000 article 27 times—more than any other peer-reviewed paper, often to refute studies that raised health concerns. In fact, five of the seven most-cited journal articles in the report were either directly orchestrated by Monsanto or written by authors with financial ties to the company.
The only potential human risk acknowledged in the Forest Service’s assessment has to do with people unknowingly ingesting glyphosate after foraging for mushrooms and plants in recently sprayed areas. That’s a problem not just for foragers like me, but for anyone who has ever eaten a chanterelle, morel, or porcini mushroom, none of which can be farmed. Stores and restaurants purchase them from permitted commercial foragers who collect them in wild places, including the Lassen National Forest.
One warm day last August, I drive out to Chester to meet biologist Russell Nickerson, the district ranger in charge of the Lassen spraying. Bespectacled, mustachioed, and clad in the light tan uniform of the Forest Service, he ambles into the district office’s visitor center to greet me. We’re surrounded by taxidermied forest critters, including falcons and owls, a river otter, and a mountain lion set to pounce. Nickerson helped create the October 2024 fire recovery plan, and so, after shaking hands, we head to a little outbuilding to discuss it. The Forest Service has a complex portfolio. On one hand, it manages recreation and conservation in the nation’s woodlands. But as a division of the Department of Agriculture, it also oversees timber production on public land. In the wake of a March 2025 Trump executive order calling for more logging, the agency is more focused than ever on the commercial side of its mission.
That includes reviving areas recently logged or damaged in wildfires so as to regrow the trees as profitably as possible. In Lassen, the agency will deploy workers with portable backpack sprayers to hike through the massive burn zone and apply up to 8 pounds of glyphosate per acre—enough to kill every leafy plant. A first round of spraying is tentatively planned for spring or early summer 2026, followed by another round in the fall. Once new baby conifers are planted, workers will reapply glyphosate one or more times to terminate anything growing too close to them.
Nickerson concedes that the Forest Service still relies on its 15-year-old risk assessment—the one that cites Williams 27 times. When I ask him point-blank whether Roundup is safe, he fidgets in his chair and laughs uncomfortably. “It’s probably our Washington office that you would talk to on that,” he says. The chemical is approved, so he uses it.
I show him what I’ve learned about Monsanto’s efforts to sway agencies like his. He shrugs. “Something you’d have to talk about with our national office.”
I then show him a 2020 EPA report that concluded glyphosate harms 93 percent of endangered species and 96 percent of the critical habitat they rely on—creatures including the Sierra Nevada red fox, gray wolf, and spotted owl, all protected in Lassen. Nickerson says he’s never seen the report. Fair enough, but do its findings make him think twice about using Roundup? “Still gotta talk to our national office on that one, sorry,” he says.
As I’m getting ready to leave, he makes a casual comment that sticks with me: It’s his understanding that the agency’s risk assessment says glyphosate is so safe “you could bathe in it.” I looked, and it doesn’t say that exactly. It does say that if you were fully immersed in undiluted glyphosate, there would be no cancer risk. One of the sources it cites for skin contact being safe? Williams et al., 2000. Nickerson later disputes using that language. His point, he says, was that given the quantities of glyphosate used by the Forest Service, it “did not rise to a level of concern.”
In December, four months after we spoke in person, Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology announced it was retracting the 2000 Williams article. The journal had “lost confidence in the results and conclusions,” Co-Editor-in-Chief Martin van den Berg wrote, after learning that the paper’s named authors, Williams, Robert Kroes, and Ian Munro, “were not solely responsible for writing its content” and had relied entirely on Monsanto data, disregarding other evidence.
The retraction was prompted by a critical analysis shared with the editors by scientists Naomi Oreskes and Alexander Kaurov. Oreskes is co-author of Merchants of Doubt, a 2010 book showing how corporations deliberately distort science to influence policy. “We’re not claiming that this paper being retracted proves that glyphosate is scary dangerous,” Oreskes tells me. “We’re saying it proves that Monsanto poisoned the well of public understanding of science.”
It also nullifies the Forest Service’s most-cited journal article in support of glyphosate safety. The agency, which had previously declined me an interview with its chief, Tom Schultz, provided a statement noting that the USDA supports the EPA’s “use of gold-standard science to assess pesticide safety.”
Oreskes doesn’t fault the regulators. They “are making a good-faith assumption that because this paper was published in a respectable, peer-reviewed journal that it was a legitimate paper and that its findings were valid,” she says. But “what we’ve shown is that it was not a legitimate paper.” Rather, it was a ploy by Monsanto “to manipulate the scientific conversation and thereby the regulatory conversation, and to persuade people of the safety of a product [when], in fact, there is significant scientific evidence to raise concern.”
“As a person who studies scientific integrity, that profoundly offends me,” Oreskes says. “But also, it’s crucial because it means we can’t trust what they say.”
The Forest Service intends to keep using Roundup, and far more heavily than in years past, per our analysis of California pesticide reports, which include herbicides. It approved a plan that could spray more glyphosate on those 10,000 Lassen acres than it sprayed in an average year two decades ago across its entire portfolio of 193 million acres. It also plans to spray up to 75,000 acres affected by the 2021 Caldor Fire, including spots near Lake Tahoe’s famed ski resorts—such as the base and parking lot at Sierra-at-Tahoe and in forests close to Kirkwood and Heavenly. The plan includes spraying in campgrounds, around trailheads, and close to homes in Meyers. These applications alone will amount to more spraying in California’s woodlands than happened in all of 2023.
It is difficult to say whether the Golden State is an outlier, because most states, unlike California, don’t have a mandatory and comprehensive reporting system for commercial pesticide and herbicide users. But a 2020 EPA study largely based on private industry data suggests that glyphosate use may be even more prevalent elsewhere: Sixteen Southern states accounted for about 90 percent of the nation’s overall forest spraying in 2016, the authors estimated.
The Forest Service acknowledges it can get similar timber yields by reforesting without chemicals, using workers and machines, but at triple the cost—expense is a “major factor” in the decision to spray, according to a 2024 agency report. The same report cites a 40-year-old study that claims injuries are more likely when vegetation is culled by hand, but it doesn’t address potential health risks for crews hired to spray the chemical.
Oversight of spraying is lax, even here in California. When I asked state regulators for records of all site inspections for forest spraying from 2020 through 2022, they returned only 11 reports, despite more than 8,000 reported sprayings covering a quarter-million acres during those three years. In one report, from El Dorado County, an inspector witnessed contract workers handling Roundup with their gloves off. They’d been hired to spray on Forest Service land but had neither the protective equipment nor the safety training mandated by the state. The inspector snapped a photo in which one of the workers’ hands is bright purple—covered in Roundup.
Skin exposure was central to the first-ever glyphosate cancer lawsuit against Monsanto. In 2018, a jury awarded $289 million to Bay Area groundskeeper Dewayne Johnson, concluding that occupational exposure to Roundup caused his non-Hodgkin lymphoma. The 1st District Court of Appeal reduced the award to $20.5 million but ruled that the jurors were entitled to declare Roundup dangerous based on WHO’s review, expert witnesses, and evidence that Monsanto had behaved unethically to sway regulators and research findings. “Even if the evidence did not require an inference that Monsanto was more concerned about defending and promoting its product than public health, it supported such an inference,” the presiding judge wrote.
Craig Thomas, a fire reduction expert who in 2021 served on a congressional wildfire recovery commission with then–Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, raised similar concerns with the Forest Service, he says, and was told the agency wasn’t aware of anyone harmed by spraying Roundup on the job. “And I’m like, ‘No, they die of non-Hodgkin lymphoma 15 years later,’” Thomas tells me when we meet up not far from my cabin to survey land where the agency plans to spray.
I show him some of what I’ve found. “Oh god, that’s totally corrupt,” he says. “Do we care about human beings or our natural landscapes? Doesn’t sound like it.”
Forest Service mascot Smokey Bear, he declares, has become a glyphosate junkie. “It’s a chemical addiction that’s been fostered inside the agency with the help of Bayer and Monsanto,” he says. “The system operated for thousands of years without it.”
Consider that Quebec, the largest timber-producing region in North America, has eliminated glyphosate and other herbicides in 90 percent of its forests. Back in 1994, the province put in place a “forest protection strategy” designed to balance jobs and profits with healthy forests. Glyphosate, once widely used, was banned in 2001, and logging companies switched to manual and mechanical methods to stifle plant competition with minimal effects on yields, according to a 2010 government study. Now, instead of enriching a German chemical company, the money goes to pay local workers.
Quebec’s experience has gone unheeded by California officials, who aim to expand glyphosate spraying in state-run forests as part of their own fire prevention strategy. Gov. Gavin Newsom even signed an emergency executive order last year allowing the state Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) and other agencies to bypass normal safety procedures when spraying the herbicide.
The state’s plans rely on Cal Fire’s 2015 glyphosate safety report, which also leaned on Monsanto’s ghostwritten studies. The report’s author, contractor Bill Williams, who is unrelated to the physician Monsanto recruited as the lead author for its papers, has a long history working for the chemical industry. He once, for instance, argued that dioxin, a highly toxic chemical known to cause cancer and other health problems, doesn’t hurt bald eagles. (It does.) At a 2003 chemical industry event, he gave a presentation titled “A Little Pesticide Is Good For You,” arguing that the EPA should loosen regulations around pesticide exposure. (Williams did not respond to my outreach attempts.)
While working on the Cal Fire report, according to his own résumé, Williams was also working for a consulting company, Cardno, that helps firms like Monsanto recruit scientists to conduct and write studies for them. That same year, court records show, a Cardno scientist pitched Monsanto executives, offering to help manage Roundup’s PR problem in the wake of WHO’s carcinogenicity declaration.
California already sprays glyphosate in state parks, such as Jackson Demonstration State Forest, where it issues permits for people to forage for mushrooms and where the Mycological Society of San Francisco hosts an annual gathering. Last year’s attendees were unaware of the spraying, several members told me. And that’s problematic, because many foragers and chefs recommend not rinsing wild mushrooms in order to maintain their flavor. But eating unwashed food recently sprayed with glyphosate is a problem—even the Forest Service’s outdated risk assessment says so.
High on the list of California’s biggest overall glyphosate users is the state Department of Transportation, which sprays along roads and highways to keep flammable grasses and brush in check. Caltrans also sprays in counties, including Los Angeles, that won’t let their own workers use the herbicide. The spraying isn’t just in rural areas. Records show Caltrans has been applying herbicides in downtown Hollywood, right along Santa Monica Boulevard.
The state’s No. 1 forest sprayer in 2023, records show, was Sierra Pacific Industries, a timber company owned by billionaire Trump supporter Archie Aldis “Red” Emmerson. Sierra Pacific is the largest landowner in the state and the second-largest in the country, controlling more acreage than Ted Turner and Bill Gates put together. It was responsible for 70 percent of reported glyphosate spraying in California’s wooded areas that year, including the lands near my cabin. The company did not respond to multiple requests for comment—ditto the timber company Collins, another major user.
The irony of firms and government agencies spraying replanted burn zones is that they may be setting us up for more trouble down the road. Deciduous hardwoods such as oak, aspen, and birch can slow a fire’s progression, studies show, whereas resin-filled conifers are more flammable than other trees. A densely packed commercial conifer forest like the one I saw taking shape near Chester is, according to a growing scientific consensus, a megafire waiting to happen.
Given everything we’ve learned, it’s worth asking: Just how bad is glyphosate for human health?
The science on cancer is mixed. Even successful lawsuits like Johnson’s found it to be only a weak or modest carcinogen. But that’s not the only worry. Brenda Eskenazi, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, has studied glyphosate for decades. For a 2023 article, she followed 480 mothers and their children in California’s Salinas Valley for more than 18 years, testing their urine periodically. She found statistically significant increases in the prevalence of liver inflammation (14 percent) and metabolic syndrome (55 percent)—which can result in liver cancer, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease later in life—among young adults exposed to glyphosate in the womb or during early childhood. “Everyone was focused on cancer, and they weren’t looking elsewhere,” Eskenazi tells me. “There are other health effects that have long-term impacts.”
Given the heated rhetoric around glyphosate, Eskenazi speaks with restraint. “We need more research,” she says. Yet much of her funding has been in limbo since the Trump administration hit the brakes on grants from the National Institutes of Health. Without those funds, her lab may have to shut down and destroy some 400,000 biological samples. But she is unwilling as yet to pass final judgment on the safety of the world’s most widely used herbicide. “There are a lot of little pieces that make us concerned,” she says, but “I’m not one of these people who say we shouldn’t use pesticides at all. I think we should use it discretionarily and carefully. That means when nothing else works.”
Bayer asserts in its statement that “regulators, including the EPA, EU, and others around the world, have repeatedly concluded that glyphosate-based products—which are the most widely used and extensively studied products of their kind—can be used safely according to the product label directions.” The EPA’s glyphosate assessment relied heavily on a 2018 analysis based on the Agricultural Health Study. The researchers asked 57,310 people who had applied for pesticide licenses in North Carolina or Iowa whether they used glyphosate and then followed up with a series of health-related questions. The study, published in the peer-reviewed Journal of the National Cancer Institute, found no statistically significant correlation between glyphosate exposure and cancers such as non-Hodgkin lymphoma. But the paper had its critics. Lianne Sheppard, a professor of biostatistics at the University of Washington who served on the EPA’s scientific advisory panel on glyphosate, published a critique in the same journal arguing that the authors’ approach was likely to underestimate cancer risk. The authors responded, explaining why they believed their results were valid.
And so it goes. “I have friends who are good scientists and think it causes non-Hodgkin lymphoma,” David Eastmond, a professor of toxicology at UC Riverside, tells me. “And I have others who think it doesn’t.”
Eastmond is in the latter camp. About 10 years ago, a joint task force assembled by WHO and the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization asked him and other scientists to conduct a new review of glyphosate studies in light of the 2015 probable-carcinogen determination. Whereas that determination had relied exclusively on published research, Eastmond and his colleagues were given full access to Monsanto’s internal glyphosate data as well. “This industry dataset was almost entirely negative for cancer and genotoxicity,” he recalls. With this data in the mix, he and his colleagues concluded glyphosate was unlikely to cause cancer. But his work preceded revelations that Monsanto was tampering with the scientific process—the lies and the ghostwriting. “Yeah, that’s totally dishonest,” Eastmond says. “A lot of this is very sleazy.”
Can Monsanto’s data still be trusted? “I think it’s fair to be skeptical,” he says. “When someone is putting pressure to manipulate things, then I become more skeptical, too.”
While the jury may still be out on the extent of Roundup’s harms, we know for certain that it’s in our bodies and environment. A 2020 study by the US Geological Survey found glyphosate in 74 percent of American streams tested. A study published two years later by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found glyphosate residues in more than 80 percent of the 2,000-plus urine samples it collected from US adults and children.
Such findings concern Ramon Velazquez, a researcher at Arizona State University whose team’s glyphosate study appeared in the Journal of Neuroinflammation in 2024. They fed glyphosate to mice at levels comparable to what the EPA considers safe in human food. The mice developed brain inflammation that persisted for months after the chemical was removed from their diets. The exposure, the authors wrote, also resulted in premature death of the rodents and Alzheimer’s-like damage to their brains. “I am very cautious about how I eat now,” Velazquez tells me. “I eat an organic diet.”
In 2020, after more than a decade of planning and review, the EPA released an updated glyphosate assessment. It said the herbicide is safe to use and does not cause cancer. Oreskes and Kaurov’s analysis points out that, whereas WHO’s cancer agency looked mainly at peer-reviewed studies, 70 percent of which indicated genotoxic effects, the EPA relied largely on industry-funded studies, 99 percent of which found no cancer links.
The EPA’s approval process was not without scandal. In 2013, Marion Copley, a veterinarian recently retired from the agency, wrote to her former colleague Jess Rowland, who was leading the EPA’s glyphosate cancer assessment. In her letter, now part of the Monsanto Papers, Copley, then dying of breast cancer, implored Rowland to follow the science on glyphosate, which she “strongly believed” triggered tumors.
“For once in your life, listen to me and don’t play your political conniving games with the science to favor the registrants. For once do the right thing,” she wrote. “I have cancer and I don’t want these serious issues in [the Health Effects Division] to go unaddressed before I go to my grave.” (She died nine months later.)
Rowland later came under scrutiny for his cozy relationship with Monsanto. While conducting the assessment, he’d spoken regularly with its employees, assuring them he could help, internal emails show. When insiders worried that CDC toxicologists might conduct an independent analysis and conclude that glyphosate was harmful, Rowland said he would try to intervene. One employee quoted him as saying, “If I can kill this I should get a medal.”
Rowland, who could not be reached for comment, left the EPA soon after someone leaked an unauthorized draft of the agency’s preliminary conclusion that glyphosate doesn’t cause cancer, according to court records. Monsanto immediately filed the document in court as evidence to refute claims that Roundup caused cancer.
The EPA inspector general’s office concluded in 2019 that Rowland had done nothing wrong and that there was no evidence the process lacked “scientific rigor.” But the EPA’s official assessment in favor of glyphosate was promptly challenged in court by the Natural Resources Defense Council and Pesticide Action Network North America, which accused the agency of ignoring its own cancer guidelines and glyphosate’s impacts on endangered species. In 2022, the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals agreed. It overturned the assessment, noting that the “EPA did not adequately consider whether glyphosate causes cancer and shirked its duties under the Endangered Species Act.” The ruling pointed to serious “errors in assessing human-health risk” and noted that most of the studies the EPA examined had “indicated that human exposure to glyphosate is associated with an at least somewhat increased risk of developing non-Hodgkin lymphoma.”
A fresh EPA determination is expected this year. During Trump’s first term, according to one internal email, Monsanto executives were assured they “need not fear any additional regulation from this administration.” Last June, Bayer’s CEO met personally with EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin to discuss glyphosate’s “legal/judicial issues,” per an agency memo obtained by the Center for Biological Diversity. Six months later, Trump’s solicitor general asked the Supreme Court to take a case that would help shield Bayer from further Roundup lawsuits. The court agreed, and oral arguments were set for April 27. (Bayer shares soared 14 percent on the news.) North Dakota and Georgia have passed laws that would give Bayer legal immunity, and more such bills are expected at the state and federal level.
Then came Trump’s executive order saying America must ensure, even boost, production of glyphosate and white phosphorus, an incendiary weapon also manufactured by Bayer. “Lack of access to glyphosate-based herbicides would critically jeopardize agricultural productivity, adding pressure to the domestic food system,” it read.
The MAHA contingent saw the order and went ballistic. “There is a level of anger and frustration like I’ve never witnessed before,” a conservative wellness influencer with millions of Instagram followers told the New York Times. “Where is RFK JR?” asked a commenter. MAHA wants crop chemicals reduced, if not banned entirely, but that could prove a tough sell. Mexico’s leaders ran into heavy resistance in 2024 when they tried to ban glyphosate in their agriculture sector. Farmers were hooked on it and the government ultimately concluded that cutting them off might prove as dangerous to a farm operation as quitting heroin or alcohol cold turkey might to an addict. The ban was rescinded. “It is known to be harmful to health,” then-President Andrés Manuel López Obrador explained, “but there is no substitute.”
And now, as the global food industry grapples with glyphosate addiction, America’s forestry sector is headed down the same path—though, in a small concession to my neighbors, the Forest Service has agreed not to apply glyphosate so close to people’s homes or near certain waterways in the Lassen area, a roughly 2 percent reduction in spraying.
To sum up, the US government botched its safety review of glyphosate, thanks in part to Monsanto’s gaming of the system. Concerned researchers say we need additional data to fully understand the chemical’s harms. But the Trump administration has slashed research funding, and politicians are waiving safety reviews and working to ensure that people who say glyphosate made them sick cannot sue its manufacturer. The Forest Service, meanwhile, plans to spray even more of the herbicide, despite knowing that it hurts nearly all endangered species, that nonchemical options are available, and that its own assessment of human safety hinges on an industry-driven review paper, since retracted.
If all of these revelations are spiking your anxiety levels, you also should probably know that that’s one of the symptoms those Arizona State researchers observed in the mice they’d injected with supposedly safe levels of glyphosate.
2026-04-27 00:47:07
On Sunday, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said he would confirm Donald Trump’s nominee for the new Federal Reserve chair after the Department of Justice made “assurances” to him that it would drop its investigation into the current chair, Jerome Powell.
“The U.S. Attorney’s Office criminal investigation into Chair Powell was a serious threat to the Fed’s independence,” Tillis wrote in a Sunday morning statement on X. “I take the Department of Justice at its word: the investigation is closed.”
The dispute started when the Justice Department opened a criminal probe into Chair Jerome Powell over costs in funding renovations to the Federal Reserve’s Washington headquarters. But on Friday, Jeanine Pirro, the US attorney for the District of Columbia, posted on X that her office would close its investigation while the Inspector General for the Federal Reserve looks into central bank’s project costs.
“Note well, however, that I will not hesitate to restart a criminal investigation should the facts warrant doing so,” Pirro wrote at the end of her Friday statement.
While Tillis may take Pirro’s announcement as a win, when has fully trusting the Department of Justice been a good idea?
“It’s not dropped. They’re looking into the whole thing,” President Trump suggested on Saturday regarding Pirro’s statement. “How can a building that I could have done for $25 million cost $4 billion?”
Pressure has ramped up on Trump to boost the economy and relieve the affordability crisis. He has repeatedly called for dropping interest rates—and his new nominee Kevin Warsh is falling in line. But Powell, who was nominated to become Fed chair in 2017 by Trump, has held interest rates steady and reiterated the central bank’s independence from the president.
As I wrote when news broke of the Justice Department’s investigation this past January, many lawmakers said that the move was part of the president’s public efforts to coerce lower interest rates.
The Trump administration was “actively pushing to end the independence of the Federal Reserve,” Tillis said. “It is now the independence and credibility of the Department of Justice that are in question,” he continued, as he vowed to oppose the confirmation of any new Fed chair nominee until the matter was “fully resolved.”
During Kevin Warsh’s confirmation hearing last week, Tillis backed up his January statement, saying that while Warsh had “extraordinary credentials,” he would not support a confirmation unless the Justice Department dropped its investigation.
So much for that now.
2026-04-26 22:48:07
President Donald Trump and many of his supporters are using the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner Saturday night to promote construction plans for the new White House ballroom.
“This event would never have happened with the Militarily Top Secret Ballroom currently under construction at the White House,” Trump posted on Truth Social Sunday morning.
“This is why we have to have all of the attributes of what we’re planning at the White House,” Trump said at his Saturday night press conference following the incident. “It’s actually a larger room, and it’s a much more secure. It’s got—it’s drone proof, it’s bulletproof glass.”
And his supporters have chimed in shortly after news of the shooting broke:
“Unfortunately, the First Lady and I had to be evacuated from the White House correspondents’ dinner alongside the President and the entire cabinet,” Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry posted on X Saturday night, referring to his wife, Sharon Landry. “This event is yet another reason that President @realDonaldTrump’s ballroom should be built!”
“We’d better never again hear a peep from anyone complaining about a White House ballroom,” Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.) wrote on X.
There were similar messages in right-wing media:
“I don’t want to hear one more fucking criticism of Trump’s new ballroom at the White House,” wrote Meghan McCain, a conservative television personality who has criticized the president in the past for disparaging her father, former Senator John McCain, but has since seemed to have offered “the olive branch.”
“THIS IS WHY WE NEED TRUMP’S BALLROOM,” Chaya Raichik, who runs the anti-LGBTQ+ and far-right social media account Libs of TikTok posted on X.
The president’s ballroom has been stalled in legal disputes for months, with a federal ruling asserting last month that Trump doesn’t have the authority to continue his $400 million passion project without congressional approval. But earlier this month, a federal appeals court stayed the March ruling until this coming June, permitting construction to continue until then.
While Trump has repeatedly insisted that his new ballroom will not cost taxpayers any money, his administration reportedly may have revised tariffs to help out a foreign private firm who provided steel for the White House renovation and, according to a Saturday report from the New York Times, the company building the ballroom was secretly handed a no-bid contract for another Washington project at an inflated cost.
2026-04-26 20:00:00
This story was originally published by Slate and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Quiet fell over the room, which was neither full nor very loud to begin with, and the 2026 Florida Citrus Show began.
“It should be a great day,” began the event’s first speaker. “Rain should hold off today, even though we definitely need more rain.” No one laughed.
There was no need to say that things were bad. Everyone knew it. The mood wasn’t sour—citrus farmers could handle sour. It was something else. Postapocalyptic. Florida is in the midst of its worst drought in 25 years, but the dry spell actually ranked far down on the list of challenges these bedraggled growers were facing.
You are today more likely to see the oranges printed on Florida’s 18 million license plates than a box of actual fruit.
In 2003, the mighty Florida orange industry produced 242 million boxes of fruit, with 90 pounds of oranges per box, most of which went on to become orange juice. Now, not even 25 years later, the United States Department of Agriculture was forecasting a pitiful 12 million boxes of oranges, the least in more than 100 years, the worst year since last. A decline of more than 95 percent.
And everyone knew, more or less, that even that figure was not happening. “Twelve million? I would doubt it,” Matt Joyner, CEO of Florida Citrus Mutual, the state’s largest trade group, told me. There was chatter that even 11 million might be out of reach. Could the total end up being less than that, just seven figures? In Florida, the citrus capital of the world, you are today more likely to see the oranges printed on the state’s 18 million license plates than a box of actual fruit.
Rick Dantzler, chief operating officer of the Citrus Research and Development Foundation, took the podium. He was blunt. “It’s been a dumpster fire of a year,” he said.
On the list of immediate problems: the implementation of tariffs and retaliatory tariffs, then the government shutdown, then a stunning, historic freeze, days long, at the end of January and early February, that besieged the fragile orange trees.
And yet those, too, were just footnotes to the even larger problem. Already, Florida had lost about three-quarters of its citrus growers. The last of them, these spent survivors, these hangers-on, had trudged to the Citrus Show to talk about the real problem, which was the disease.
In 2005, Florida first got signs of a new affliction in its groves called citrus greening disease. It also has a Chinese name, Huanglongbing, or HLB, because it came from China, where oranges also came from in the first place.
Already, Florida had lost about three-quarters of its citrus growers.
Citrus greening disease is caused by a bacterial infection that is delivered by the gnawing of the Asian citrus psyllid. (It’s now believed the psyllid first turned up near the Port of Miami in 1998.) The flea-sized psyllid bites the leaves and transmits the disease, which slowly chokes out the tree’s vascular system from the inside, taking years to finally show itself. By the time a tree is displaying symptoms—three to five years, in most cases—it’s too late.
Floridian farmers are no strangers to disease. When HLB first began to spread, there was no indication it would be any worse than any other bug that had appeared over the years. The farmers did what they always did: They sprayed and sprayed, chemicals and pesticides, stuff so powerful that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the US Food and Drug Administration freaked out about potential risks to human health.
But greening spread anyway. Industry groups and the state poured money, millions, into finding a cure, and every time they thought they’d figured it out, it didn’t work, and the greening accelerated. Hurricanes turned out to be a vector for spreading the little winged bug. The wind carried the psyllid all over the state, dropping it off in hundreds of thousands of acres of groves.
Soon enough, trees everywhere were showing blotchy, mottled, yellowed leaves and suffering from twig dieback and sparse foliage. Under duress, the trees would drop all their fruit on the ground prematurely. What rare fruit survived to maturity on these little, addled trees was misshapen, acrid, and stubbornly green on one end; in short, it tasted terrible. Even after being squeezed and processed and pasteurized, the juice was gross.
Now, according to the University of Florida website, the disease is “incurable.” It warns: “There is currently no treatment for citrus greening. Once a tree is infected, it will eventually become unproductive and may even die.”
I asked numerous people—farmers and industry leaders and researchers—to estimate how many trees in Florida now have greening. The answer was resounding: 100 percent. Every single tree.
The Citrus Show was meant to rally those weary troops, to assure them that help was on the way, that this was the bottom. That there was reason to hold on.
And there was: There had been some progress, with oxytetracycline, OTC for short, a powerful antibiotic that is used to treat chlamydia and sometimes syphilis in humans. It wasn’t a cure, exactly, but ceaselessly applied, it was keeping the effects of greening at bay for a few months at a time. Growers were boring holes in the bases of their infected trees and injecting it. It was expensive, and it had only been in use for two or three years, and it would only be a temporary fix at best. But it seemed to be working. There were greener leaves, and oranger fruit, and a palatable juice product.
They had been wrong before, yes—who could forget the tree-steaming solution, which once looked so promising, tenting each tree with a makeshift steam room cranked to 130 degrees, but which ended up failing when it became clear the bacteria were in the roots. But this one seemed, the researchers tried to assure their charges, for real.
A panel of multigeneration growers took the stage to weigh in on their experiences with OTC. It wasn’t altogether triumphant. “Injection just crushes the older trees,” said Tommy Thayer, a fourth-generation grower.
“Most groves are not producing as well post-Ian as pre-Ian,” said Daniel Hunt, of the legendary Hunt Bros. citrus family, referring to the 2022 hurricane. But he had done double injections on some trees, and had seen successes. “Our Valencias were beautiful,” he said. “They had color.”
“Unfortunately, they’re all on the ground right now,” said Thayer, because of the freeze.
Their panel closed with a request that everyone say something positive about their experience in the citrus industry. “The long history,” offered Hunt. “Good for character-building.”
Scientists took the stage, one after another, supplying encouragement. The OTC trials were positive; they were fast at work on a genetically modified tree. “The tree of the future,” they said, again and again. And it was in the lab, and it was on the way. The OTC might tide them over until that GMO creation was ready for widespread planting.
But the timeline, they conceded, was difficult. “We don’t have time because of how the industry is,” said Manjul Dutt, a researcher with the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences. The realistic run from discovery to commercial production of the GMO tree? “Typically, it’s five years before a tree produces flowers and fruit,” so…“10 to 14 years.” A second researcher presented a slightly different timeline: 12 to 18 years.
“Hopefully you can stay in business,” commented a third.
“Someday, there’s gonna be a talk where ‘HLB’ and ‘solved’ are in the title,” said Randy Niedz of the USDA. “This is not that talk.”
The afternoon wore on. At lunch, I spoke to Jillian Rooney of the Crop Disaster Recovery group, which had a tent set up in the parking lot. I told her I was writing about the state of the citrus industry in Florida. “Oh. Sad,” she said.
A sign at another booth seemingly encouraged the growers to try growing anything else. “Why grow passion fruit?” read one, with a list of its potential upsides. “Sugar apple,” suggested another.
After lunch, the bad news kept coming. It wasn’t just greening that had to be worried about. There were root nematodes, launching a subterranean attack. There was citrus canker, a viral infection that had plagued citrus for years prior to the arrival of greening. (It, too, came from China.) Then came a seminar on citrus black spot, another recent arrival.
“It is not known how it arrived,” said Clive Bock of the USDA. “But it could spread to the whole Gulf Coast.”
Things had deteriorated quickly. “Three, four years ago, the juice was 80 percent from Florida,” said Weston Johnson, of the Coca-Cola Company, which owns Minute Maid. “Now we’re 20 percent Florida.” A quintessential crop and national icon of the 20th century in America was dying before our eyes, and outside this room, most of the country—even Florida itself—had barely noticed.
Juice shots were being given out, in tiny 1.5-ounce bottles. “Made with orange-like hybrids with tolerance to HLB. This juice is an innovation that represents the future of citrus,” a sign next to the cooler said. “100 percent American juice,” boasted the label.
I drank it. It didn’t taste very good.
The custom of drinking orange juice with breakfast is not very widespread, taking the world as a whole, and it is thought by many peoples to be a distinctly American habit,” begins writer John McPhee in a famous two-part 1966 essay in the New Yorker that ran to 40,000 words, an indulgence that met the grandeur of the industry.
Maybe attention spans were too long back then. Here’s the condensed version: The Spanish conquistadors rocked up to northern Florida in the 1500s, amid all that marauding, and planted the orange tree, taken from (yes!) China. It was small-time stuff until after the Civil War, when the railroads reached south and the fruit sold north. Historic freezes in 1894 and 1895 nearly eradicated the industry, its first and last real brush with old-world calamity. Instead, it drove things south. Planters started anew in central Florida, in Polk County and its surroundings, what’s known as the Ridge, the highest part of Florida, and the only part that was never below sea level, historically.
The frost problem having been dealt with, the arrow was pointing straight up. Then came the technology that changed it all. It was World War II, and the American military wanted vitamin C to keep its front-line boys in fighting trim. It paid for the research for what would become frozen juice concentrate. As with cigarettes, those boys came home hooked. By 1950, the state was doing more than 100 million boxes a year. The orange blossom had already become the state flower in 1909, and, by 1967, a year after McPhee’s opus, the orange was the state fruit.
Florida sold some whole fruit, but the biggest money was in “crushing fruit”: making and selling juice. The citrus families became royal in the Sunshine State. Incredible intergenerational empires were amassed, with land holdings the size of small states. The Jack Berrys, the Bob Pauls, the Hunt brothers, the Lykes brothers, all of them with juniors or thirds or fourths. And the biggest, by far, was Ben Hill Griffin Jr. Even Peter Pulitzer, grandson of publishing tycoon Joseph Pulitzer, amassed a citrus empire.
The orange barons lost breakfast, and lost Florida, too.
Behind them came the corporate class: Tropicana, which ended up with PepsiCo, and Minute Maid, which went to Coca-Cola.
The citrus barons’ names went up on everything in Florida. Street signs and golf courses and the university. The ranks of the Bull Gators—that’s the list of top boosters of the University of Florida’s athletic programs—were overrun with citrus families.
The citrus world got whole stadiums. Ben Hill Griffin still has his name on the University of Florida’s 90,000-person football palace, better known now as the Swamp. Tropicana got the MLB stadium in St. Petersburg, where the Tampa Bay Rays played until Hurricane Milton blew the roof off in 2024.
Griffin even made for himself an industry town called Frostproof—a canny, if defiant, advertising play, named years prior, after the town had survived the mythic 1895 freeze without much issue. Frostproof became a cipher for just how untouchable the industry had become. Citrus baron Latt Maxcy incorporated there, too.
McPhee marveled: “The industry is self-regulating and pays its own way.”
Then came the 1970s, and a new technology arrived: the herbicide glyphosate, created by Monsanto. The citrus industry adopted it early and zealously, taking to it like water, spraying it all over the ground until not one sign of non-citrus life remained. When new complications came, they sprayed more. Acreage grew to 832,000, with record yields, and Florida was king, producing 78 percent of all United States citrus.
Up and up it went, and why not? The process got more mechanized through the back half of the American Century—out with the cover cropping, in with the monocrop, packed tight as can be. One innovation followed the next. Frozen concentrate fell behind the novel idea of “not from concentrate”—no longer did they squeeze it and freeze it. And they were unaware, or unconcerned, that that chemical was wreaking havoc on the soil, weakening the trees’ defenses, leaving them extremely vulnerable to disease.
Why would they be? Times were good. In 2000, the agricultural trade agreement with China opened the Chinese market to fresh Florida citrus. Commissioner Bob Crawford hand-delivered a 10-carton shipment to commemorate the event. They were loving China then.
And then it all came down so fast. There were the fad diets of the 2000s: no sugar, low-carb. The American Academy of Pediatrics began crusading against juice for kids. Orange-industry groups hired medical professionals as spokespeople in public relations, and kicked off an emergency ad campaign addressing what they branded “juice confusion.” That didn’t work. The citrus estates began to get carved up in tawdry divorce settlements, battles of wills that captivated the tabloids. Invasive species came in all guises: foreign pestilence, foreign capital, and the developers. It was the perfect storm. And then, of course, there were the actual perfect storms, the high-caliber hurricanes that, before climate change, didn’t come to the Ridge: Irma, Ian, Milton, massive cells, all direct hits on the groves.
The orange barons lost breakfast, and lost Florida, too. Who killed the Florida orange? Were outside invaders to blame? Or was the culprit right at home?
As with his beloved Florida citrus, Rick Dantzler’s on the way out—age 70, retiring from the Citrus Research and Development Foundation, which, after losing its state funding, was getting absorbed by another group anyway. He met me in Lake Alfred, at the site of its University of Florida satellite campus. I asked him to drive me through the best groves in the heart of citrus country. “It’s gonna be a lot of houses,” he warned me. “It breaks my heart.”
Dantzler is a Florida man through and through. He is third-generation in Winter Haven, in Polk County, and has the locution to prove it. When talkin’ oranges, he pronounces Valencia “Vuh-LEN-chuh.” His wife is fourth-generation. His father at one point had 160 acres of citrus. Now the family has none.
The collapse of Florida’s citrus industry, he told me, took everyone by surprise. “It happened so fast,” he said. “What’s remarkable is how many people here in Florida are not aware of it.”
The first stop on our tour was a brand-new grocery store with a sprawling parking lot out front. “That was a fantastic grove. It’s now turning into a Publix,” he said matter-of-factly. Opposite that was a giant dirt lot, graded flat. “These were fantastic groves on both sides of the road. I remember one time as a kid I saw a great big corn snake crossing the road—when there was not much of a road—and the corn snake climbed up into an orange tree. I acted like I couldn’t quite get to it, I was actually scared—” He cut himself off. “These were just fantastic groves. Not anything left.”
The next stop on our tour was a gas station. “This used to be a really great grove right here where this Circle K is going in,” said Dantzler, on cue.
“You’d drive down here in the spring and it’d smell so good you’d think you were in a perfume shop,” said Dantzler, as we passed through Polk County. It was March, and if you rolled down the window, the only scent was exhaust.
Dantzler knew citrus greening as well as anyone. He’d lived with it every day for years. He was sanguine about the effects of OTC, even though it was temporary, and expensive, and even though the treated trees got reinfected every four months. He was sure there were better days in oranges to come—oranges were growing well beneath pricey protective screens, for instance—so long as there was anyone left to plant them.
We crossed into Dundee. “Now, this was citrus country; this was the heart of the industry. The best groves in Florida were right here. All the varieties in Florida were located right there. It was almost like a seed bank, so if catastrophe happened, the industry could always replant,” said Dantzler.
“Catastrophe’s kinda happened,” he added—but the seed bank grove was no longer there.
He also knew hurricanes. The storms were also part of old Florida culture. But rarely did they make landfall near the oranges. Many of the groves had gone decades without any real hurricane exposure. Then the climate got warmer, and along came Hurricane Irma in 2017, which hammered the Ridge. Its winds, which reached 142 mph, shook the trees violently on their shallow roots. It was the first of many. The trees made it through that year, without evincing the scale of the damage. The next year, or the year after, or three past, when the fruit wasn’t coming, it became clear that the stress of the high winds on already weakened root systems had traumatized the trees, often permanently.
After that, Hurricanes Ian, Idalia, Helene, and Milton all made landfall on the peninsula. “In 2021, we fell off a cliff,” he said. Five major storms went right over grove land.
We drove past more empty lots, more abandoned groves, desiccated trees, signs announcing public hearings for land-use changes. We passed mountains of trunks and branches, piled high. In the local parlance, they’d been “pushed”; soon, they would be burned. We passed a road sign for Tucker Paving as another plot was getting razed. “Mr. Tucker’s father and my father were best friends,” Dantzler said. “I know all these guys, they’re my friends. But look at what’s happening.”
Dantzler told me that he didn’t see 2005, when greening symptoms first became clear, or 2017, even with Irma, as the turning point. He pegged it to 2007, when another invasive species took off, the one that now dominated the landscape on our drive: suburban sprawl.
The stress placed on the groves by wind and water turned out to be little compared to the stress put on them by development. There were the solar farms, which targeted large tracts of land for panels, and those tended to be former groves. There were the data centers, too. In nearby St. Lucie County, a $13.5 billion hyperscale data center was proposed, one of the largest in the world, to be built atop 1,400 acres of old groves. That was on the corner of Orange Avenue and Minute Maid Road.
But the sprawl was really the crux of it.
It was not inevitable. In the mid-1970s, Florida began a period of environmental enlightenment. In the course of three decades, the state passed all sorts of legislation, from wetlands protection to local government growth-management initiatives. The state government established what was called a “concurrency doctrine,” instituting strict requirements for infrastructure development—water, sewer, schooling—that had to be established before construction permits were granted.
Then came the heady days of 2007, when, as you might remember, Florida’s housing developers overbuilt so dramatically, and financed so dubiously, that they helped bring the whole global economy down with them: the Great Recession. The state government, desperate to stimulate the economy and its moribund real-estate sector, began eroding the growth-management plan that had restrained development. The Department of Community Affairs, the state agency that oversaw all the local government growth planning and limited development, was just abolished outright.
From then on, it became a political story. Soon, the developers had bounced back, deep-pocketed and powerful in Tallahassee, and they weren’t done yet. They bet big on the ascendant Florida Republican Party, backing Rick Scott all the way to the governor’s mansion. In 2011, Scott gutted concurrency, a critical regulatory standard that kept developers in check. Then the developers went all in for a Yale man named Ron DeSantis. The citrus industry still had political power, too. But the deregulation they won did little to stanch the bleeding. Reeling from a depressed economy, then an explosive greening problem, then hurricanes, they were soon going to the statehouse, desperate for bailout money. “I think the development community saw an opportunity to get rid of most of those regulations. And they’ve gotten rid of most of it,” Dantzler said.
By certain estimates, Polk County, where we were driving, has been the fastest-growing area in America, and the developers have been cashing in. A citrus grove must be planted in sand, which occurs naturally, by some geological miracle, in central Florida. (The miracle, specifically, was the Appalachian Mountains, which eroded and deposited sand there over millions of years.) The trees won’t take in wetlands, in mucky soils. But that sand itself is also in high demand for cement, for construction, for building shoulders for highways, for filling in wetlands for development. Up here, Dantzler pointed, was a sand mine, which had torn out groves and gotten to mining beneath them. “There’s a crazy market for sand,” he said.
Sandy land itself is the easiest property to develop. Wetlands are still often protected from a development standpoint, and so, in addition to infill, require pricey, lengthy permitting. Sandy uplands, hiding beneath every citrus tree, are low-regulation and ready to build on.
So, while the growers were losing money hand over fist, housing developers were coming through with godfather offers to buy them out, convert them to row housing, and sell, sell, sell. Flags of every homebuilding giant flew on vanquished ground: DR Horton, Lennar. At nearly every intersection there were signs for cheap housing—no money down, homes in the low $200,000s, yes, for real, in 2026. Bunting and grand openings and exclusive offers abounded.
We drove past another former grove, which Dantzler again called “phenomenal,” which was now selling 10-acre lots. “This is all post-’07 stuff,” he sighed.
And so real estate was on the march, and even the citrus industry legends had become deserters. After the Gulf Citrus Growers Association shut down in 2024, its president, Wayne Simmons, a fifth-generation citrus grower, became a realtor. He wasn’t the only one.
We drove down new roads graded for housing, named after the citrus families who had once planted there, not a tree in sight. “Cable and Internet Included,” offered one sign.
“My gosh, we’re getting into the Ben Hill Griffin stuff. It’s just phenomenal,” said Dantzler. But there were no trees there anymore. There was just compact sand, a model home, and a barely-there development project. “We offer zero down payment!” the developer pledged. “Enjoy limited-time incentives like paid closing costs and exceptional financing options!”
The sign out front was complete, bearing the development’s name: Citrus Place.
“Citrus Place?!” Dantzler asked, incredulous. “That offends me.”
We drove on, and Dantzler told stories of dove hunts in the grove, of outsize characters of the old citrus elite. He insisted that in the midst of all of this housing, the citrus of the future remained. He put the car into low gear, and we drove into a test grove he had just recently been involved in planting. The trees were shorter than they used to be, with less canopy, packed tighter than ever, but they were showing promise. “In the pre-greening days, you could spot a grove car by all the scratches on both sides,” he told me.
Orange trees used to live 50 to 100 years; these little upstarts might make it 12 to 15. And so we set off down the aisle, and the branches hit the side mirrors and, on occasion, scratched the door.
And there, in the adjacent grove, had sprung up a house. “Now, that house is new,” said Dantzler. “What in the world’s that all about?”
The famed Frostproof, Florida, was once the seat of the Ben Hill Griffin empire. It wouldn’t be fair to call it a ghost town now, exactly. According to census data, 3,000 people call it home. There is a stoplight. But the name does loom over it, haunting what remains.
There are three parts to a citrus operation: groves, packinghouses, and processing facilities, where the juice is made. Griffin—Frostproof—once had it all. The firm operated a major packinghouse in Frostproof, where fresh fruit was boxed for sale for roughly 70 years. It closed for good in April 2017.
The Ben Hill Griffin packinghouse wasn’t the only one. According to Peter Chaires, executive vice president of Florida Citrus Packers, in less than 40 years Florida had gone from 88 packinghouses to, now, just eight. Even one closure could be devastating to a community. Chaires told me that in Haines City, they lost a packinghouse that had been the primary employer since 1909.
Chaires was even more alarmed by the collapse of the processing facilities, which make juice. Florida was a juice state, after all. Building a new packinghouse was light work compared to building new juicing facilities. “It’s extraordinarily important that we try to hold on to our processing capacity that we have now,” he said.
In fact, in 1977, Florida boasted 53 different processing plants for crushing fruit, pasteurizing, or making fresh juice or frozen concentrate. Now, said Robin Bryant, executive director of the Florida Citrus Processors, there are just four: Cutrale (a Brazilian firm supplying Minute Maid), Peace River Citrus, Florida’s Natural, and Paracone, a boutique operation.
At their peak, those processing facilities would run three shifts, billowing steam morning, noon, and night. Now they’d cut back to one shift. Even still, Bryant told me, “all but one of those plants could process everything we produce in Florida on their own.” This year, Tropicana announced that for the first time it would not be processing fruit in Florida at all. Minute Maid killed frozen juice concentrate.
“The orange is gone. It’s dead,” he told me. “All the spots that they’re building houses, they’re the orange groves.”
Griffin once had a processing plant in Frostproof, too. And that, too, was gone.
But it wasn’t greening that had caused this collapse. The decline had taken off in the 1990s, when the industry opened itself up to Wall Street and to foreign capital. According to the Florida Department of Citrus, in 1996, foreign buyers bought two plants in Auburndale, which kicked off a trend: From then on, the “majority of plant acquisitions that followed would have owners headquartered outside of the United States.” In 1998, privately owned Seagram’s sold Tropicana to publicly traded Wall Street darling PepsiCo, and things quickly began to change.
Griffin, meanwhile, had sold off its Frostproof processing facility to Procter & Gamble, which in turn had sold it to Cargill, based in Minnesota. But Google Maps, itself seemingly haunted, insisted that the boxy plant off Highway 17 was Griffin’s. When I drove up, the gate was open, though there were no other cars; from its dull roar, I could tell the plant was not totally idle.
Out came Mike, one of two employees I saw on-site. Mike had grown up in the area, he told me; worked there for years.
“The orange is gone. It’s dead,” he told me. “All the spots that they’re building houses, they’re the orange groves.”
The plant where he worked, he said, was now owned by Peace River. But they weren’t processing anymore. They were simply cold storage. Now orange juice came from Costa Rica, Argentina, and, mostly, Brazil. Grapefruit juice sometimes came from Hungary. It was shipped in tankers to the nearby Port of Manatee and then trucked to facilities like the one behind him, for safekeeping.
“Today, it’s a lost empire,” said Mike; the plant where he worked best described as “a mausoleum.”
In fact, Florida, everywhere, has become a storage locker for juice from Brazil, where the land is cheaper, the regulations are laxer, and the chemicals are cheaper, too. “The labor is pretty much slave labor, I guess,” shrugged one local farmer I spoke with.
At the Citrosuco plant in Polk County—which flew the Brazilian flag alongside the red, white, and blue—and at the Cutrale sites and even at Florida-based Peace River, it was basically Florida in name only. “Seventy-five percent of juice packaged in Florida comes from Mexico or Brazil,” Bryant said. One had to be honest: Florida juice was “just not at the quality it used to be.”
But not all is well in the citrus kingdom of Brazil, either. The greening is “beginning to catch up to them,” Bryant said. In 2025, greening affected a record 47.63 percent of orange trees in the Brazilian Citrus Belt, according to Fundecitrus; 100 million trees, of 209 million, are now infected. Brazil followed Florida’s lead in what researchers now call “excessive glyphosate usage,” and has been, suddenly, reaping similar outcomes. (Citrus greening has been around for 120 years, and exists worldwide, and has, so far, caused an extinction-level event only in Florida.)
Behind the Peace River plant, sprawled out across a massive lawn, and behind a chain-link fence, were the ruins of a processing infrastructure. Giant, stainless-steel mixing tanks and vats, on their sides, tanning in the Florida sun.
And then, finally, came another modern pestilence. In 2021, after years of losing money on Tropicana, PepsiCo decided to get the company off the books. They put their majority share up for auction. In January 2022, they announced the buyer: a French private-equity fund called PAI Partners. (PepsiCo maintains a minority position.)
“European,” noted Tim Hynes, global head of credit research at Debtwire, a leveraged finance consultancy. “It was actually somewhat surprising to me that they had won this asset.”
PAI had a food and consumer portfolio: They owned European Pizza Group, a leader in the frozen-pizza business in Europe. They owned Alphia, a pet-food co-manufacturer in North America.
Maybe they thought that what ailed the Florida citrus could be cured with a little private-equity magic. The firm renamed it Tropicana Brands Group, balling up other beleaguered beverage properties too, and packed it full of debt. And then they raised prices and shrank the packaging. “Everyone does that,” Bryant said. But the move was calamitous. In 2024, Tropicana became the face of the shrinkflation epidemic. People raged online, in Reddit forums, on Facebook.
“That just didn’t go as planned,” Hynes told me. “They have a bunch of debt. They were going to run out of money.” By 2025, PAI was talking about bankruptcy for Tropicana, though a $30 million emergency loan had steadied things for a time. PAI is “not confident any value remains from their initial investment,” Hynes told CNN.
I drove all around Frostproof, at Mike’s encouragement, looking for oranges, which I hadn’t seen many of. “Valencia Acres,” read one housing development. “Price cuts!”
What I saw, primarily, were mobile-home parks, next to Ben Hill Griffin Elementary.
Alico’s Joshua Grove was the largest citrus grove in Florida, likely the largest contiguous grove in the country. Except that in January 2025, Alico—the largest citrus grower in Florida, the largest citrus producer in America—announced in a release that it was done. Their orange era was over. So the Joshua Grove is now actually Florida’s largest citrus graveyard.
In all, Alico began gutting 53,000 citrus acres at the end of the 2025 harvest: 35 percent of Florida’s citrus production, condemned in one press release. Which meant that every tree under Alico management in the Joshua Grove was dead, dying, or already gone.
“For over a century, Alico has been proud to be one of Florida’s leading citrus producers,” Alico’s president and CEO John Kiernan said in the statement. “But we must now reluctantly adapt to changing environmental and economic realities.”
Because of outstanding leases, third-party caretakers were getting one final season to manage 3,500-odd acres, “through 2026,” added Kiernan, in the announcement. The harvest ends in early April now—it used to stretch into June—so the oranges here now would be the very last to ever come off the property.
Mitch Hutchcraft, Alico’s executive vice president of real estate, agreed to give me a personal tour of this citrus necropolis. The grove was more remote than anything I’d seen: south of the Ridge, in DeSoto County, without a house in sight. It was also enormous: seven miles on one side, nearly seven miles on the other, all planted in tight rows, stretching beyond the horizon, which, in flat Florida, is really saying something. A gate guard lifted the arm, and we drove in.
To the right, he pointed, was an old grass runway where pesticide planes once landed and took off.
We began to roll past dead and dying trees in various stages of decay. Some were blackened, shriveled, barren of leaves. Others had fruit sitting on the ground beneath, most of it not quite orange, rotting. “They go pretty quickly,” Hutchcraft said.
Alico, as part of its plan to “become a diversified land company,” was turning 25 percent of its land into—what else—commercial and residential development. Already, it was underway with the construction of two “villages.” A year prior, the company unveiled Corkscrew Grove East Village, and Corkscrew Grove West Village, a 9,000-home development. They had similar plans for Bonnet Lake in Highlands County, Saddlebag Grove in Polk County, and Plant World in Hendry County.
The remaining 75 percent, like the Joshua Grove, which remained too remote for housing development, would be put to other agricultural uses. That meant row crops; that meant cattle grazing. The company would also be pursuing mineral extraction and oil. Already, it had tens of thousands of acres of oil production.
Everyone had their theories about what happened to the Florida orange, their longing for citrus nirvana, and their anger at the loss.
Alico had done everything it could, Hutchcraft told me, right up until the end. It had replanted, and injected trees with OTC, and everything else. But it was still losing money, and lots of money, fast.
Soon enough, they would begin to turn this land over. A front-end loader would roll down the seemingly endless aisles and pop the trees out one by one. With their shallow root systems, addled by disease, the trees wouldn’t put up much resistance. Then, they’d push the carcasses into piles and burn them. There weren’t any loaders working yet, though, and the weather wasn’t cooperating for a burn. “You do it when you’re getting rain—April, May. You don’t want it to be really dry, that can get out of control,” he said. “We’ve had cold spells, and it’s windy.” Plus the drought.
We pulled up to a harvest wagon, a large flatbed. It was empty. Picture, said Hutchcraft, laborers going up and down the rows with bags on their shoulders, picking orange fruit and filling them, and then lugging the bags to tubs at the ends of rows. There, they’d empty the bags into the tubs. Then trucks would go up and down the rows picking up the tubs. Finally, the trucks would disgorge their citrus into a harvest wagon, the giant flatbed, which would be driven by semitruck to the processing center. Historically, these groves would throw off 500 boxes per acre. At the end, the company was lucky to get 90. “There would have been harvest crews all up and down. You’d have seen trailers parked, filled with fruit,” he said.
Now the harvest wagon was empty, and there were no trucks, and no tubs, and no shoulder bags, and no guys.
“SLOW—CONGESTED AREA” warned various road signs stationed throughout the rows. But we didn’t see a single other person.
Up until the moment Alico announced it would be producing zero oranges, it had been the single largest provider of oranges for Tropicana. When they informed Tropicana of their decision, Hutchcraft told me, the company didn’t push back.
Down the rows we went. “Hamlin,” read a sign, and for miles in both directions were furrows and beds with only dirt or scrub brush or dead trees. “Valencia,” read another, and the same.
It was hard not to be nostalgic.
But time had run out, and times had changed. Citrus was “the profession that drove the state, was the iconic state industry,” Hutchcraft said. No longer. Now Florida Southern College, the fabled Frank Lloyd Wright–designed campus that citrus money made, didn’t even offer a citrus management program. Orange juice had even lost the battle for shelf space to seltzers and energy drinks and kombucha and more.
“Florida’s always been a boom-and-bust state,” said Hutchcraft. In the distance, a plume of smoke rose, likely dead trees burning, though it was hard to see from so far. We shook hands and parted ways, the tour complete.
I returned to the guard booth, which housed the only other person I’d seen at Joshua Grove. The guard, Jack Gunther, cracked the door. He had false teeth and an American flag baseball cap. The smell of cigarettes billowed from the booth; the walls were stained with nicotine.
Thirteen years was how long Gunther had worked directing traffic at this grove, he told me. He’d lived in the county all his life. Here he was, the last orange man left.
What did he think of all this, I asked him. What happened to the Florida orange?
“I think they killed it themselves, with chemicals. That’s a fact,” Gunther said. In my time in Florida, I’d found a more complicated story, but down here, everyone had their theories, their longing for citrus nirvana, and their anger at the loss.
“They sprayed so much chemicals, the damn grass don’t even grow here anymore—you can quote me,” Gunther said. “I knew it back in 1990. I said, ‘They’re sprayin’ so much chemicals it’s gonna be the end.’ And it’s the end.”
And then he asked: “You wanna come in and watch TV?”
2026-04-26 09:59:40
President Donald Trump and the first lady were rushed from the stage after gunfire erupted at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday night—unleashing a chaotic scene at the annual gathering of journalists at the Washington Hilton in DC.
Wolf Blitzer, the CNN anchor, was outside the main ballroom when he said he heard powerful gunfire ring out, coming from a gunman just a few feet away. “The next thing I knew, was a police officer jumped on me and threw me on the ground and laid on top of me,” he said. “It was a very frightening moment.” Video from inside the event showed armed Secret Service agents racing to the stage to quickly escort the president away as stunned guests ducked under tables.
In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, President Trump posted on Truth Social that “the shooter has been apprehended,” and encouraged the event to “go on.” But soon after, the president was whisked back to the White House for a hastily convened press conference. In that appearance, the president confirmed that “a man charged a security checkpoint armed with multiple weapons,” but was quickly subdued by law enforcement. “The man has been captured,” he said.
Meanwhile, Trump posted an image of a man lying face-down on the carpeted floor of the venue surrounded by agents to Truth Social. Earlier, the New York Times reported that the gunman had been stopped near a security perimeter, though it remained unclear whether the shooter fired shots within or outside that perimeter. Amidst the shooting, a Secret Service agent was shot and hit on a protective vest, and was taken to the hospital, according to multiple news reports. The president later said the officer was “doing great.”
Trump took the opportunity to blame the security at the famed hotel. “This is why we have to have…what we’re planning at the White House,” he said, referring to plans for his controversial new ballroom to be built in place of the East Wing. “We need the ballroom,” he said. “They wanted the ballroom for 150 years.”
The Hilton ballroom was filled with journalists and top Trump administration officials, including the vice president and Cabinet members, for the event that is sometimes dubbed “nerd prom.” The dinner typically celebrates the role of the independent press and gently roasts the president.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
2026-04-26 05:08:00
This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Some Texas oil wells gush hundreds of barrels of oil a day. But many are like the wells on Jackie Chesnutt’s ranch in West Texas that only trickle out a couple barrels a month.
Chesnutt, a retired engineer, claims the five wells operating on her ranch are out of compliance with state rules and should be shut down. The company, CORE Petro, says that it’s struggling to break even, let alone pay to plug the wells. But it says that all its wells are in compliance.
There are thousands of oil and gas wells around Texas like these: low-producing wells leased by companies operating on a shoestring. About two-thirds of the active oil wells in Texas, or 99,000 wells, produce less than 10 barrels of oil a day, according to the state regulator. To remain active, oil wells in Texas must produce at least five barrels for three consecutive months or at least one barrel for 12 consecutive months.
Companies will often maintain a minimal amount of oil production instead of plugging a well, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars. Landowners like Chesnutt argue that this pattern can lead to pollution and burdensome equipment on their land.
Oil industry analysts and environmental advocates say they have heard claims that companies report the bare minimum of oil production to avoid plugging wells. “The wells on the lease are all producing,” said Railroad Commission spokesperson Bryce Dubee.
Advocates of reforming the oil and gas industry say that stricter rules are needed to ensure companies plug wells in a timely manner and assume the costs so that it does not fall to the state.
In a 2022 report on Texas’ orphan well problem, the nonprofit organization Commission Shift wrote companies should not be able to “indefinitely ‘produce’ a teaspoon of crude or a cubic foot of gas simply to avoid paying for decommissioning.”
Texas has more than 159,000 inactive wells. If the operator of an inactive well goes out of business, the unplugged well eventually becomes an orphan. Texas is facing a record-high backlog of more than 11,000 orphan wells.
“We’re not financially able to plug a bunch of oil wells. That’s not why we’re in this business.”
Chesnutt is the rare landowner who is fighting back against this broken system. The 69-year-old and her now-deceased husband bought the 375-acre property outside San Angelo in 1998. After retiring from a career working at a pharmaceutical company in San Angelo, she now tends goats and sheep on the ranch.
Her complaints to the Railroad Commission, which regulates oil and gas, have gone nowhere, she said. She has resorted to shutting off power to CORE Petro’s wells because she says they are out of compliance with state production rules. CORE Petro responds that it’s Chesnutt who is breaking the law by shutting off power and, without electricity, they have no way to produce oil at the wells.
“We’re between a rock and hard place,” said Cassie Ohlhausen, who runs CORE Petro with her husband, Kent. “We’re not financially able to plug a bunch of oil wells. That’s not why we’re in this business. We’re in this business to produce oil wells.”
Chesnutt’s growing frustration has spilled over into confrontations with CORE Petro and commission staff. The Railroad Commission alleges that Chesnutt physically assaulted staff members and endangered them with aggressive driving. The agency has instructed her to put all communications in writing to avoid future incidents. The owners of CORE Petro say she has threatened them with a gun. Chesnutt disputes these claims.
The Railroad Commission declined to answer numerous questions about the oil lease on Chesnutt’s ranch. Instead, commission staff provided a letter sent to Chesnutt that described altercations with staff members. The Railroad Commission has not issued any fines to CORE Petro.
Chesnutt’s ranch is one small window into the vast problem of Texas’ aging oil assets. Existing financial mechanisms are not enough to retire the thousands of low-producing oil wells littered across the Texas countryside. The problem eventually falls to the state or becomes a thorn in the side of landowners like Chesnutt.
Persimmon Creek Ranch lays where the desert scrubland of the Trans Pecos region meets the rocky woodlands of the Texas Hill Country. The ranch, about 200 miles northwest of Austin, gets its name from the native persimmons she collects to make preserves.
“One of the biggest things we have focused on out here since we’ve bought the place is water, water, water,” she said. Chesnutt, now widowed, relies on a windmill-operated well to provide water for her residence and animals.
Chesnutt’s home office displays professional mementos, including her diploma from the University of Texas, Austin, where she was an early female graduate of the engineering program. She now applies an engineer’s attention to detail to investigating the drilling operations on her property.
Chesnutt holds 50 percent of the mineral rights on the property, meaning she receives a share of profits from the wells. This has amounted to only a few hundred dollars in royalties every couple months in recent years. This money is hardly worth the trouble the wells have caused, she said. She riffled through documents on a sunny fall afternoon, her dog Einstein asleep at her side.
While the lease was operated by a previous company, Amor Petroleum, Well #10 had been shut down for lack of production. That left only four producing wells.
Then CORE Petro took over the lease in 2021. Chesnutt says that is when the problems started.
Once a well is inactive, the operator has 12 months to plug it or obtain an extension. The clock started ticking for CORE Petrol to get Well #10 producing again. CORE Petro reported a small amount of production at the well to bring it back to active status.
Chesnutt said that the company caused numerous spills in their attempts to get oil flowing.
“They made a big mess of it,” she said, showing photos of spills of oil and produced water, a hazardous byproduct of drilling. Chesnutt fears the spills could contaminate her groundwater and has paid to get her water tested multiple times.
“We have worked our asses off to make this place wonderful and beautiful,” she said. “I refuse to accept that the next person is going to have this happen to them.”
The Railroad Commission issued CORE Petro multiple violations for unpermitted disposal of oil and gas waste, or spills, at the lease. But each time, the violation was later resolved without the company paying fines.
“RRC records indicate four pollution violations for this lease,” Railroad Commission spokesperson Dubee said. “In each instance the operator was notified and upon reinspection all violations have been fixed on the lease indicating compliance.”
CORE’s Ohlhausen said that some amount of spillage is to be expected and that the company always cleaned up the spills.
But Chesnutt’s frustrations only grew.
“What has really blown my mind about this is that we have to follow one set of rules in industry,” Chesnutt told Inside Climate News. ”But the oil companies, they allow them to just come out here and do whatever the hell they want.”
By her account, only one of the wells on her property has produced oil in years. But CORE Petro reports ongoing production at all the active wells. The Railroad Commission requires well testing to prove wells are producing oil. CORE Petro’s most recent well testing, in 2025, shows each well producing less than one barrel a day.
Chesnutt claimed the company is falsifying production numbers to keep the wells operating. The company denies this claim. “The operators can fill in any information they want and nobody checks them,” she said. “It’s unacceptable. I’m really sad that the Permian Basin and all these areas are like this.”
Operators submit monthly reports to the Railroad Commission of how much oil is produced and how much is stored at each lease. While the state rules require every well to be actively producing oil, production reports are only required for the entire lease, not individual wells. Inside Climate News found inconsistencies between public records of oil production and inspections at the lease.
On July 2, 2025, a truck picked up oil from the ranch and recorded the level of oil in the tank afterward, according to a commission inspection report. A Railroad Commission inspector visited the site on Sept. 16. He noted that the amount of oil in the tank hadn’t changed since July 2.
But in the intervening months, CORE reported producing 10 barrels in July and another 15 barrels in August. The company was reporting production on paper but the volume of the tank did not rise, according to the RRC inspection.
The Railroad Commission declined to answer questions about this and it does not appear the agency has investigated the discrepancy. Cassie Ohlhausen said that the company uses an auxiliary tank to collect the oil. Once it is full, the oil is transported to the tank battery, a large metal tank that stores oil. She said this could explain why the tank battery did not rise even though oil was being produced.
“The reporting of production is accurate and is done by a third party who tracks our oil sales and inputs those numbers into the RRC system,” Ohlhausen said.
Inside Climate News observed an auxiliary tank at only one well. Any oil produced at the other wells would have to flow directly into the tank battery.
Commission documents reveal other inconsistencies. On February 7, 2025, the Railroad Commission issued a violation to CORE Petro that said Well #9 was an “inactive unplugged well.” However, the next time the inspector visited the site, the well was determined to be compliant. The Railroad Commission declined to respond to questions about this.
Property owners have little recourse other than reporting the problems to the Railroad Commission. Chesnutt feels the Railroad Commission is ignoring her complaints about CORE Petro.
“Not one single acknowledgement that [the wells] should be plugged,” she said of her interactions with the state agency. “I’ve had resistance on even cleaning up the spills.”
Meanwhile, Chesnutt’s behavior has alarmed Railroad Commission staff. An attorney for the agency sent a letter to Chesnutt on Oct. 31, 2024. The letter states that she “verbally threatened and physically assaulted Commission staff” and “engaged in reckless and aggressive driving,” threatening the safety of commission staff. The letter also says that she told commission staff of her “intent to commit several violent crimes” against CORE Petro’s employees.
Chesnutt disputes the commission’s characterizations. “I don’t know, because I’ve never assaulted anyone,” she said.
The Tom Green County Sheriff’s Office has responded to calls from Chesnutt, Kent Ohlhausen and the Railroad Commission about incidents at the ranch, according to call sheets. The Railroad Commission requested the sheriff’s office be on “standby” when visiting Chesnutt’s property.
Commission inspectors have also noted in inspection reports that Chesnutt is turning off power to wells on her property. Chesnutt maintains that the wells pose a fire hazard and she is within her rights to turn them off. State rules require electricity be disconnected at inactive wells. Electrical lines for oil wells were blamed for starting devastating wildfires in the Texas Panhandle in 2024.
In response to the regulator’s claims of her “reckless driving,” Chesnutt said that last October she saw a Railroad Commission truck on the road leading to her ranch. She was driving in the opposite direction, so she did a U-turn and flashed her headlights to get the driver’s attention. She asked him to pull over and asked if he was headed to her property, because she was waiting for an inspector.
CORE’s Ohlhausen said that Chesnutt has threatened their staff multiple times.
“All the wells produce at some point or another until she goes and turns them off,” she said.
“We can’t afford a lawsuit, but we have every right to call the sheriff and the justice of the peace and have her stand down on turning our oil wells off,” she said.
CORE Petro specializes in operating aging, low-producing wells, Ohlhauser explains, noting that her husband Kent is called “the Oil Well Undertaker” because he works with “end of life wells.”
“We’re the ones that end up with what they call the stripper wells that have already been stripped of all their oil,” she said. “They’re just producing a bit of oil every day to keep somebody alive.”
Kent Ohlhausen owns several other oil companies. Many of the leases he operates meet the bare minimum requirement of one barrel of oil production a month for 12 consecutive months. For example, the Olhausen Oil Company’s Ohlhausen, West Texas lease reported one barrel of oil production for each month from April 2023 to April 2024. The same company’s Barker C.P. lease reported one barrel of oil production every month December 2023 to January 2025.
