If the anti polution people hadn't banned smudge pots it wouldn't be a problem!
I really don't mind so much that they don't use them anymore, as they were pretty nasty when getting low on fuel. Once they're burning good they give off huge amounts of heat and burn pretty clean, but as they run low they can sit there and chug black smoke for hours on end. The morning after can look like Apocalypse Now. :) I do wish they'd make some allowances for special situations, such as extreme cold during a critical window of fruit growth.
But honestly, I don't think that the big growers have the manpower to use smudge-pots anymore. Old rancher friends of mine tell me stories about the old days when all of the teenage boys would get on work lists, and the phone calls would come in the late evening, meaning they'd be out there all night long trying to keep the smudge-pots running. I don't know if that would be practical in these times.
All of the big orange growers use giant wind machines now, that run on propane, gas or diesel. They do a pretty good job. But for a guy like me who has maybe two dozen trees, a wind machine is not only impossibly expensive, it's completely impractical because of the way my trees are dispersed. (They're not all together in a grove)
I have two smudge pots that I use for back yard parties, and, yes, on rare nights like this last weekend in an attempt to save some yearling avocado trees that mean a great deal to me.
My dear friend has a couple of hundred acres of oranges with no wind machine. It was his fires I was stoking for much of the night on Friday. I came home around midnight and got my own fires burning. Whenever I get my hands on an old washing machine I take the drum out and weld legs onto it. They make a great portable firepit. I had those going all night long, along with some propane space heaters that mount on top of 5 gallon propane bottles. Those propane ones are nice because you light them and they run all night without intervention, but they are really only good for one single tree per heater. I also have old fashioned strings of Christmas lights around the base of the avocado trees. The old fashioned lights put out some decent heat. I think they're "C-9" bulbs.
It was lots of work from 4:00am Friday morning when I got up until about 10:00pm Saturday night when I went to bed. By late Saturday night my eye was twitching nonstop and my sciatic nerve was twanging like a guitar string. :( I crashed and slept for ten hours.