By Bob West
As heavy rains pummeled California last winter and Spring and greatly limited farmers from getting into their fields and planting crops, everyone took solace in the potential long-term benefits of that precipitation for the state’s depleted water supplies. Those benefits are evident this year as near-perfect conditions are supporting much more farm activity, according to the latest data published by Meister Media’s PURE Intel™ platform.
Application data for restricted-use products for the period of January – May 2024 offers widespread evidence of strong farming conditions in California:
- 16% more treated acres reported this year vs. last year
- 13% more applications reported this year vs. last year
- 3% more growers reporting applications this year vs. last year
- Applications reported to 3% more sites this year vs. last year
More farmers treating more sites obviously speaks to increased availability of water, but the much greater growth in the number of applications and overall treated acres clearly stems from increased activity throughout the state. Even more encouraging is that treated acres for January – May 2024 is the most treated acres reported for this timeframe since 2020.
Digging deeper into the PURE Intel data provides additional indications of the strength in the market, including:
- Treated acreage is up for the first five months of the year in eight of the top 10 counties in California. (Only Imperial and San Joaquin counties have less treated acreage through May than in 2023, and that decrease is only 3%.)
- California farmers report more treated acres in 21 of the 22 different product types tracked in PURE Intel with only vertebrate control showing less activity.
- Similarly, 10 of the top 12 crops grown in California have more treated acres through May with forage/fodder and stone fruit being the two outliers.
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.