Will California Farms Top 100 Million Treated Acres This Year?

By Bob West|August 31, 2024

Meister Media’s PURE Intel™ platform recently published its first look at California farmers’ restricted-use product (RUP) applications through the end of June. To now, the numbers show California’s farmers are taking advantage of great weather and much-improved access to water for a very busy 2024 season.

Increased crop protection activity can be seen in all of the high-level metrics – the number of growers reporting RUP applications, the number of sites that have been treated, the number of applications made, and, most importantly, the number of treated acres, which speaks to the overall volume of product applied.

	2021	2022	2023	2024
Growers	16,391	15,482	14,951	15,247
Sites	58,882	57,354	57,357	57,846
Applications	1,530,406	1,456,514	1,366,150	1,509,645
Treated Acres	46,738,688	44,183,460	42,633,245	48,651,604

Much of the year-over-year growth in treated acres occurred in the first quarter when 2024 application data greatly exceeded the application figures from the rainy first quarter of 2023. In fact, 2024 treated acres were up 25% through Q1 2024, but that growth is down to 14% through Q2 because the California farms had such an active Q2 2023 with all of their catch-up applications. But the most recent 2024 figures have the market in position to top 100 million treated acres in 2024, which would be a first since 2020.

To dig deeper into the data, continue reading more about treated acres in California at PureIntel.com.