Reading the map

One economy, assembled

Every node on the map is an operation or a company, a person, a town, an institution or an event. Operations carry the layer colour; gold rings mark the top ten landowners on the resolved owner table of the BusinessFlare® GIS Heartland Agricultural Land Module [MOD]. Persons are dashed circles and appear only as documented founders, principals, moving executives or public officials. Towns are square place nodes with edges of their own, because the map's thesis is that the towns hold the economy together rather than sit beside it. The map treats the Heartland as one agricultural economy: the region that gets a steer from the 90 Mile Prairie to an auction ring, a box of oranges to a juice plant, and a stalk of cane to a refinery, across county lines and out of them.

Connections come in three weights. Solid lines are land, capital and people moving between operations, towns and institutions: a family or company founding an operation, a town, a cooperative or an institution; a person as principal or an operation as member; land moving by documented sale or lease; a subsidiary, a second operation or a company town; an earlier operation on the same land or under the same family; a related venture; a processor or mill built by or for named growers. Dashed lines are influence, used only where an operation or institution has itself said it followed another; there are none on this release. Dotted lines are programs, permits and leases with agencies, fairs and industry events with documented participants, documented joint ventures and supply agreements, and time bounded institutional roles, including the documented role of a freeze, a hurricane or a rule in an operation's history.

Land conversions. A conversion is an edge with the acreage and the year in the note: Talisman's 50,960 acres to the state in 1999, U.S. Sugar's 26,800 acres to the district in 2010, the Blue Head closing of 2019 [SB10][BNO10][SPPBH]. An announced conversion, above all the eighteen FPL solar centers of the 2026 Ten Year Site Plan, is coded as announced, never as completed, until the parcel roll or a completion record shows it [TYSP][MOD].

Inclusion rules. A node is on the map when it has at least one documented link of an edge type to another node; nothing is included to make a case, and a famous ranch with no documented link stays off until one is found. Four resolved owners from the module's table, Llano Ranches, 4C's Land & Cattle, Udder Cattle Company and Bexley Sumter, carry no drawn relationship yet: their documented placement is the module's owner table itself, they are disclosed in Method and Open items, and the module's water use permit join becomes their first edges in the map's next release [MOD].

Timeline placement. An operation or institution enters at its founding year, from Sunbiz, a company history, a county record or press; a person at their first documented activity; an event at its date. A node with no recorded founding year enters at the first year the map documents it, never earlier, and its panel says so under Placed at. A node with no dated link enters at the cutoff year. Influence never dates a node.

People on the map. Persons appear as founders and principals of mapped operations documented in company records or press, executives who moved between mapped operations, and public officials in institutional roles. No owner of a small operation is named from the roll or Sunbiz alone, and family relationships are mapped only where a company history or press record states them.

Hub regions. Every node folds into one of the four agricultural districts the module defines, or into the clusters. The Ridge: Highlands County with Sebring, Avon Park and Lake Placid, plus Frostproof and Fort Meade as the optional Polk extension, reported separately. The Peace River valley: Hardee and DeSoto counties with Wauchula, Bowling Green, Zolfo Springs and Arcadia. Okeechobee: the town and the north shore. The Glades: Glades and Hendry counties with Clewiston, Moore Haven and LaBelle, and the Palm Beach County Glades communities of Belle Glade, Pahokee, South Bay and Canal Point. Belle Glade, Pahokee and South Bay are Heartland although they sit in Palm Beach County; coastal Palm Beach County sits in the outside cluster. Outside the Heartland holds Florida entities elsewhere and folds further into Outside Florida where that applies. Nodes with no recorded place go to a place not recorded cluster. A town carries edges, and every count by place uses the district.

The outside share. Beside degree and betweenness, every node carries the share of its connections that leave the region: edges to nodes in the outside hubs divided by all its edges, computed in the build on the dataset, reported in the panel, the workbook and the network metrics section, by lane and by district as well, and never adjusted.

The module. The BusinessFlare® GIS Heartland Agricultural Land Module, version 1.0 of 12 September 2026, is the source of record for the 2025 agricultural base, the acres by class by county and district, the reconciliation to county land areas, the ownership split at the Census farm size boundaries, the region's natural break, the independent check columns, the announced conversions table and the DeSoto rotational crop limitation. This map states those figures as authoritative with the module as the source and never recomputes them [MOD][MODX][MODM].

The eleven layers of the place

CitrusAlico and the Griffin line, Latt Maxcy, Joshua Citrus since 1887, Consolidated Citrus, Southern Gardens, the cooperatives, and the wind down that ended a listed company's citrus century.

SugarU.S. Sugar from the Southern Sugar wreck, the Fanjul group from a 4,000 acre start, the growers cooperative, Talisman's reversal, and the Wedgworths of Belle Glade.

Cattle and ranchingLykes Bros at 337,036 acres, the Parker land under Bright Hour, the Carlton line, Blue Head on the 90 Mile Prairie, the Seminole Brighton program, Williamson, Adams and the Okeechobee auction.

Vegetables, melons and row cropsThe muck growers of the EAA, sweet corn, lettuce and radishes; the Peace River watermelon economy on leased range; Duda from one celery crop.

Specialty cropsThe caladium capital at Lake Placid, the Okeechobee dairies, the sod farms.

Phosphate and miningMosaic and its land companies, the mine that crossed into Hardee, the permitted Ona project and the stalled DeSoto proposal.

Energy and land conversionFifteen operating FPL solar centers and eighteen announced ones, the first master planned communities, the mitigation banks and the easement counterflow.

Processing, packing, cooperatives and marketsThe mills, the juice plants, the packinghouses, the railroads that carry the cane, the cooperatives that market it, and the auction barn.

Research, extension and industry institutionsThe stations at Belle Glade, Canal Point, Ona and Lake Alfred; the districts that move the water; the associations; the drainage works that made the region possible.

Towns and citiesEighteen places from Fort Meade to Canal Point, each created by a railroad, a canal or a company, each folded into its district.

Outside the HeartlandKing Ranch, Tropicana, Cutrale, Coca-Cola, the refiners, the lenders and the agencies elsewhere that the region's structure routes through.

NextHow it assembled itself