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)…