nature in a experiment i don't know yet why is blight so far like it sounds so simple they had no idea

but now the data's i find this not only refreshing but but at some level astounding nature

welcome back to the Nature podcast.

This week we'll be hearing about a proposed plan to spray antibiotics on citrus crops

and finding out why some statisticians think we should throw out statistical significance.

I'm Nick Howell. And I'm Benjamin Thompson.

Wednesday the 20th of March is the first day of spring here in the Northern Hemisphere,

and many of our plants are waking

up from their long winter slumber. For our first podcast piece this week, we're going to head to

Florida's orange groves, where the first flush of leaves will soon be emerging from the trees.

However, all is not well, and many of these trees are at risk of a serious bacterial disease.

The US Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA, is in the process of allowing growers to use two antibiotics to treat this disease,

a move that's got some public health researchers concerned.

This week, science journalist Marin McKenna has written a feature for nature describing what's going on.

I gave her a call, and she gave me an overview of the state of orange farming in Florida.

The situation is really quite desperate because the trees are under attack by a disease that's usually called citrus greening,

which is an invasive disease that's been in the

orange groves for more than a decade now. And it ruins the trees. It causes them to drop fruit

early. It causes them to lose their leaves. And it's taken hundreds of thousands of acres of

orange cultivation out of production already.

And I imagine this is having severe economic impacts for the farmers involved.

Absolutely. The growers have been really quite desperate. So finally, now they have turned

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