Pesticide use in California agriculture with information on pest control advisors

Pesticides support crop production, enhancing global food security, but are associated with serious environmental and health risks. Factors that promote overuse of pesticides are therefore of great concern. Pest control advisors (PCAs) are agricultural professionals who scout fields for pests and may recommend pesticide applications. We test two hypotheses regarding the influence of PCAs on pesticide use by California farmers, contrasting four groups: independent PCAs, sales PCAs, farm-staff PCAs, and farmer PCAs. The long-discussed conflict of interest hypothesis posits that sales commissions earned by PCAs who work for agricultural chemical retailers (“sales PCAs”) incentivize pesticide use; it predicts elevated use of all pesticides by farmers advised by sales PCAs. The risk aversion hypothesis posits that the risk of damaging pest outbreaks incentivizes pesticide use; it predicts elevated pesticide use when targeting pests that can exhibit outbreaks (arthropods and plant pathogens) ..., , # Pesticide use in California agriculture, with information on pest control advisors

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.8pk0p2p0h](10.5061/dryad.8pk0p2p0h)

## Description of the data and file structure

This dataset, which is taken entirely from publicly available data, describes pesticide use on approximately 1.4 million crop-years grown in California from 2012 to 2021 by farmers advised by different types of pest control advisors (PCAs).  Records are for pesticide use in outdoor, commercial agriculture.  The dataset was assembled to test whether conflicts of interest among sales PCAs, who work for agricultural chemical distributors and who earn commissions on pesticide sales, are associated with elevated use of pesticides by their client farmers. The values from permit_number and site_code fields were removed to avoid the risk of re-identification.

### Files and variables

#### File: PCAstudy2_metadata-for_anonymized_data.csv

**Description:** This file defines each of the variables (colu...,