January is consistently among the least-active months for California farmers, but all good news matters so the fact that the initial report for January’s treated acreage exceeded the initial report for three of the past four Januarys is certainly encouraging. This chart presents the number of applications and treated acres reported in California farmers’ first filing of January Pesticide Use Reports (PURs) for the last four years:
| Month | Applications | Treated Acres |
| January 2024 | 100,331 | 2,784,938 |
| January 2023 | 83,727 | 2,276,691 |
| January 2022 | 122,982 | 3,526,687 |
| January 2021 | 106,976 | 2,775,312 |
The number of growers reporting a January 2024 application increased roughly 10% compared to January 2023 while the number of applications increased nearly 20%. Not surprisingly, January applications were dominated by weed control activity (42% of all January treated acres) as the farmers work to prepare their fields and orchards for the upcoming season. Oxyfluorfen (10.8%), rimsulfuron (9.9%) and indaziflam (9.4%) were the most widely used herbicide active ingredients in the month.
Bob West is the Director 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 products, contact him at 440-602-9129 or [email protected].
PURE Intel is a trademark of Meister Media Worldwide.
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.