LAKELAND, Fla. (AP) – This year’s hurricanes may have spread the dreaded citrus canker to as much as a quarter of Florida’s commercial citrus groves, federal agriculture officials said.

Hurricanes Wilma and Katrina, the two hurricanes that hit the state’s citrus-growing regions in 2005, may have spread the disease to between 169,000 acres to 183,000 acres, officials from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and University of Florida scientists told growers at a meeting Monday.

“It has been very sobering news,” said Casey Pace, a spokeswoman for Florida Citrus Mutual, the state’s largest growers group.

The canker spread in 2005 would be twice as large as that caused by three hurricanes in 2004.

After a decade-long battle, state and federal agriculture workers had been close to eliminating citrus canker, which causes fruit and leaves to drop prematurely, but the hurricanes of 2004 spread the disease to new areas in the heart of the state’s citrus production. Growers already had lost more than 80,000 acres – or more than 10 percent of the state’s groves – to canker spread by Hurricanes Charley, Frances and Jeanne.