PAN Pesticides Database - California Pesticide Use

Pesticide Use in California

Note: See Working with the Information on this Page section below for important notes about this data.

Working with the Information on this Page

* Complete 2001 data for Kern county was never submitted by the Kern County Agricultural Commissioners office. This missing data includes approximately 32,000 records totaling roughly 10 million pounds. An omission of this scale will significantly impact statewide trends.

** The 2005 data for Ventura county is incomplete because not all of the data was available at the time of DPR's release. Missing data includes mostly applications made in November and December. An estimate based on reported use in Ventura County during November and December from 2002 to 2004 suggests that the 2005 total pounds is underreported by approximately 500,000 pounds. The active ingredients most affected are captan and petroleum oil. See the DPR's 2005 PUR report for additional details.

NOTE! See methodology and documentation for California Pesticide Use Reporting for important qualifications on these numbers.

Click on the commodities name links for special caveats on the data for each commodity. For more detailed use information, including data for other years, search our California Pesticide Use database. Original source for all pesticide use data is the California Pesticide Use Report (PUR) dataset, collected and managed by the California Department of Pesticide Regulation. Significant processing of the original dataset is required to generate the summary data presented here; see documentation for a full discussion of data handling.

NOTE! Comments on the accuracy of Acres Planted reflect PAN's analysis of acreage data from the California Agricultural Statistics Service (CASS) and Department of Pesticide Regulation Pesticide Use Reporting data. The method used to assess acreage accuracy is described in the documentation. Accuracy was evaluated for aggregate, statewide California acreage, but not for smaller regions (e.g., counties). See CASS acreage estimates for additional information.

Click on underlined terms for definitions or go to the Pesticide Tutorial overview page.

Any underlined term with a book icon has additional information.

To print this page, choose Print. To export this data, choose Save As 'HTML Source' and open it in Excel or equivalent program.

Definitions

• Acres Planted is the planted acreage of the crop in the selected region where the selected chemical was applied. This figure may not be the total acreage of the selected crop. To obtain the total planted acreage for a crop or county, see the crop and county pages available from the Pesticide Use Search Page. See documentation for important distinctions between acres treated and acres planted.
• Acres Treated is the acreage of the crop actually treated with the pesticide. Gross Pounds applied divided by Acres Treated is the application rate of the pesticide. The difference between Acres Planted and Acres Treated is best explained through an example:If a farmer has a 100-acre field and sprays 50 acres, then the Acres Planted will be 100 and the Acres Treated will be 50. If a farmer sprays 50 of their 100 acres three times, then the Acres Planted will remain at 100 acres, but now the value of Acres Treated will be 150. This figure may not be the total acreage of the selected crop. See documentation for further distinctions between acres treated and acres planted.
• Application Count indicates the number of times this chemical was applied.
• Application Rate indicates the total pounds applied to acreage divided by the total treated acres. Only pounds applied to acreage are used to calculate the application rate. This excludes pesticides used to fumigate stored commodities or other non-cropland applications. See documentation for important distinctions between acres treated and acres planted.
• Chemical Class indicates the chemical classification of this chemical.
• Chemical Code is the California Department of Pesticide Regulation code number assigned as an identifier for each chemical.
• Chemical Uses indicates the major uses for this chemical, with the most common use listed first.
• County Code is a code number that various California State agencies use to identify each California county. There are 58 total counties.
• Field Count is the number of fields where this chemical was applied.
• Gross Pounds indicates the total pounds used, including both pounds used on acreage and pounds used in other applications such as commodity fumigation.
• PAN Bad Actor indicates whether this chemical belongs to the group of most toxic pesticides or not. See link for a full definition of this term.