If you have driven west on 81st Street in October for the past decade, you know the scene by heart: cars parked crooked in a grass field, kids hauling pumpkins toward a hayride, the smell of El Sid's tacos drifting past seven acres of corn cut into a maze. This year, that field will stay empty. Countryside Family Farms closed its 81st Street farm store and corn maze for good, and the fall festival that filled it every October isn't coming back.
It's tempting to read that closure as one more line in the familiar story about Florida citrus dying off, and plenty of drivers past that quiet field will do exactly that. But the corn maze closing and the county's citrus industry struggling are two different stories that happen to be landing in the same season, for very different reasons. Knowing which is which tells you something the empty field on 81st Street can't: where citrus season in Indian River County is actually still happening this year, and why the industry underneath it is doing something more complicated than dying.
Why the Corn Maze Isn't Reopening
The 81st Street property has been a Vero Beach institution since Frank and Florrie Van Antwerp started selling fruit from their front porch to friends and northern visitors in the 1950s. Their daughter's family, the Banacks, ran it alongside them for decades, and it was Cheryl Roseland who brought the idea of a corn maze down from a family farm operation in Georgia in 2013, turning a citrus stand into an agritourism destination with a hayride, a petting zoo, an Orange Blossom Train, and a maze cut fresh into seven acres of corn every fall.
Sid Banack, Cheryl's father, died in July 2024. He had been, by his daughter's account, the person most in his element at the festival gate, greeting families even as his health declined. After his death, Roseland made the call not to reopen the store or replant the maze.
"My favorite memories center around our annual Fall Festival and Corn Maze," Roseland told TCPalm. "We loved seeing families out together, running around, away from screens and enjoying the outdoors."
That's a family closing a chapter, not an industry collapsing. The citrus farming itself didn't stop. Rusty Banack, Cheryl's brother, still runs the growing side of the business, and the Countryside Citrus brand is still very much alive at its beachside location on Ocean Drive, where El Sid Taqueria still serves tacos and the store still sells citrus and orange slushies. What ended was the inland farm-store experience: the corn maze, the u-pick strawberries in December and January, the flower fields in October and spring. That's worth grieving if you took your kids there every fall. It isn't proof that citrus season skipped the county this year.
A Different Kind of Closure
Compare that to what happened this past July, when Riverfont Packing Co. announced it was shutting down after 65 years in Indian River County. This wasn't a family deciding to step back from running festivals. Riverfont was packing infrastructure, and its CEO, Dan Richey, told local radio station WTTB that the company's own strategy for managing sick trees had failed faster than expected, with older trees declining faster than the business could plan around.
That's the disease talking, not a family's bandwidth. Citrus greening, the bacterial disease that's been moving through Florida groves for two decades, doesn't care how many generations have worked a piece of land. According to USDA figures reported by Florida Phoenix this July, Florida's citrus harvest fell from nearly 300 million boxes in 2004 to roughly 14.5 million boxes by the 2025 season, a decline driven by a combination of hurricanes, land converting to other uses, and greening itself. A packing house that's operated since the 1960s closing its doors in that context isn't a surprise. It's the trend catching up to one more name on a list that's been shrinking for years.
So when you hear about a citrus closure in Indian River County this season, it matters which kind you're hearing about. One is a family retiring an attraction. The other is the industry's back end finally running out of trees healthy enough to justify the packing line. Both are real. Neither one means the same thing about whether you can still find good citrus this fall.
Where the Season Is Actually Happening This Year
You can. The county's working groves and farm stores that survived the last two decades of freezes, storms, and greening are still open, and several of them are built for exactly the kind of visit the 81st Street maze used to offer.
- Schacht Groves, a few miles from downtown Vero Beach, runs U-Pick through the season with a rotating lineup of fruit, from mandarins and Fallglos early on to Temple oranges and Honey Murcotts as winter moves in. There's a picture window where you can watch the juicing process, and a life-sized slingshot for launching an orange into the farm's pond on your way out.
- Peterson Groves, a mile from the Indian River Mall, has been in continuous operation since 1913, one of the oldest citrus packing houses left in the county. The gift shop sells fresh-squeezed juice alongside local honey and Florida taffy, and kids can do a Squirrel Treasure Hunt through the trees.
- Countryside Citrus hasn't disappeared, it's just consolidated. The beachside location and El Sid Taqueria on Ocean Drive are open year-round, so the orange slushies and soft serve that made it a Vero Beach habit are still there, even without the inland farm and maze.
None of these replace what the 81st Street property offered exactly, and that's fair to miss. But if the question you're actually asking is whether you can still take out-of-town guests to see a working Indian River County grove this season, the answer is yes, and it doesn't require driving out of the county to find one.
The Quiet Bet Behind the Closures
Here's the part that the empty field on 81st Street won't tell you: while one packing house closes and one family exits agritourism, other parts of the local citrus world are doing the opposite. Rusty Banack is expanding, planting new groves at a moment when, by his sister's own account, plenty of other growers are walking away from the industry entirely.
He's not alone in betting on the next decade. Researchers at the University of Florida's Indian River Research and Education Center in Fort Pierce have spent years working on citrus varieties bred to survive greening rather than just endure it, including a hybrid known as the 914 pomelo that's shown it can keep producing quality fruit even while infected. In 2026, the EPA cleared a separate gene-edited rootstock for use in Florida groves, aimed at helping young trees limit how much the disease takes hold before they mature. Neither development undoes twenty years of decline overnight, and a newly planted tree still takes years to bear fruit worth harvesting. But it means the story of Indian River County citrus this season isn't simply subtraction. It's a county losing some of its old landmarks while placing new bets on the ground behind them.
That's the piece worth carrying into this fall. The corn maze on 81st Street closing and a 65-year packing house shutting down can look, from the road, like the same slow fade. They're not. One is a family choosing when to stop. The other is a disease finishing what it started decades ago. And somewhere between the two, a grower who grew up on that same land is putting new trees in the ground.
If you're the kind of Indian River County resident who plans your October around a corn maze, this year asks you to redirect that habit toward Schacht Groves or Peterson Groves instead. If you're the kind of person who's been wondering whether the whole citrus tradition here is on its way out, the honest answer is more interesting than that. Some of it closed. Some of it is being replanted, right now, by people who've spent their whole lives on this ground.
If you're weighing what it actually means to put down roots in a place like this, citrus season and all, Catherine Curley is always glad to talk it through, over coffee or a glass of fresh-squeezed juice.
