by Bob West
“When it rains, it pours” has never been more true than in California to start 2023. Heavy rains covered much of the state in December 2022 and January 2023, which obviously helped mitigate the state’s drought challenges. However, much of the rainfall was so intense that many farmers were unable to get into their fields and make their normal January applications of restricted use products (RUP).
In fact, preliminary January data reported by Meister Media’s PURE Intel(TM) platform forecasts that the state’s farmers made as many as 80,000 fewer RUP applications in January than in January 2022 (a decrease of roughly 40%), which is the lowest application volume for the first month of the year ever reported by PURE Intel. As the chart below illustrates, the slow start to the year extends the number of farms reporting any January applications, the number of sites treated in January, and the number of applications of RUP products made across the state. 
Fortunately, January is not a particularly intensive month for pesticide applications in California — roughly 5% of the total number of applications occur in January — so farmers shouldn’t have much difficulty catching up.
Bob West is the Direct of Meister Media’s data business. For more information about this data or for more details about Meister’s PURE Intel+ and PURE Intel+ PCA (patent pending) products, contact him at 440-602-9129 or [email protected].
PURE Intel is a trademark of Meister Media Worldwide. PURE Intel+ PCA is patent pending.
About PURE Intel
Meister Media’s PURE Intel platform offers subscribers comprehensive insights into California’s specialty agriculture market by aggregating monthly crop protection product application data from approximately 20,000 California farms and providing that data through a user-friendly, web-based platform that enables subscribers to customize their data queries.