By Bob West
As California’s farmers work to catch up on applications that were delayed due to the heavy rains experienced in the first quarter of 2023, a preliminary look at first-quarter application data reported by Meister Media’s PURE Intel™ platform shows wide variation for different product types.
For all product types on all crops, treated acreage looks to be down 8% to 14% vs. the same period last year. But while insect-control products look to be impacted most severely (down approximately -30% to -35% vs. Q1 2022) and herbicide applications also appear down to start the year (-6% to -10%), the story on fungicides is clearly different.
The state’s farmers have already reported more than 2.8 million treated acres of 539 different fungicide brands for January – March 2023 compared to reporting 2.5 million treated acres for Q1 2022 initially by April 10, 2022. And approximately half of all fungicide brands show growth in treated acreage thus far in 2023 vs. the previous year. (California farmers are required to report restricted-use product applications to their respective county department of agriculture by the 10th of each month for the previous month, but many growers miss that deadline for various reasons. PURE Intel updates treated acre numbers monthly for one year beyond the required reporting date in order to capture all late data.) Ultimately, we project the final treated acreage number for fungicides in Q1 2023 will be between 3.4 million and 3.8 million treated acres, which represents nearly 20% growth over 2022.
This roughly 10% increase in fungicide treated acres is even more noteworthy when considering that PURE Intel categorizes sulfur as a fungicide given that farmers typically apply it for disease control. Sulfur applications are down approximately 55% through the first three months of the year. So, applications of non-sulfur fungicides have been particularly strong to start 2023, especially when compared to other product categories.
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.