This California County Saw Crop Protection Activity Surge in 2025
December 31, 2025 When viewed through the lens of crop protection activity, California farmers experienced a mixed bag of results in 2025 with some part of the state showing solid year-over-year increases while farmer in other areas reported less crop protection activity compared to 2024. Stanislaus County’s farmers clearly reported the greatest increase in crop protection applications compared to the state’s 57 other counties. Let’s take a deeper look at what transpired in this area in the northern part of the San Joaquin Valley.
Stanislaus County is undoubtedly almond country. Slightly more than half of the actively farmed acres in that area produced almonds in 2025 – roughly 200,000 acres out of 362,000 total acres. Corn gets the second most acres of any crop in Stanislaus County but farmers only reported planting about 43,000 acres last year.
The number of acres planted for all crops in the county has generally been declining since PURE Intel began tracking this data in 2014 (see table below).
But the picture is very different for almonds, which represented slightly less than 40% of the county’s total planted acres in 2014. That figure has climbed all the way to 55% in 2025. (The total number of planted acres for other crops in the area has declined for nearly every other crop grown there during the same period).
While the total number of treated acres across all crops planted in Stanislaus County has seen its ups and downs since 2014 (see table), farmers in the area clearly reported increased crop protection activity in 2025 with final planted acres likely to top 5 million once farmers’ final pesticide use reports are filed.
Closer examination of the critical almond market in Stanislaus County shows that almond growers’ crop protection activity has been fairly consistent across the five critical product categories.
Two product categories showing the greatest increase in treated acres of almonds in Stanislaus County during this timeframe are miticides (increased from 29,000 treated acres in 2014 to 77,000 treated acres in 2025) and mating disruption (increased from not being reported at all in 2014 to 24,000 treated acres in 2025).
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.