From the early 2000s, The California Department of Pesticide Research has provided data on statewide pesticide applications as a series of data tables intended as part of a relational database that could be queried by SQL. For part of this period these data were distributed as CD-ROMs, and the size of the data set was kept within the limits of that medium. As of 2022, these are available to be downloaded as ZIP files (see https://calpip.cdpr.ca.gov/main.cfm).
As of March 2022, the 2018 data set is the most recent available. Those files are in the accompanying directory, ./pur2018. The relationship between these files is described in "diagram.pdf". Note that most of the text files are, in fact, comma-delimited data files
- udc18_01.txt to udc18_58.txt are actual application data, with each files corresponding to an individual county.
- product.txt describes pesticides
- site.txt matches "site_code" and site_name
The name of crops is found in site_name.
Counties 10 and 27 were over 50MB for 2018. For this proof of concept they were dropped. For practical use, they would need to be split or arrangements would need to be make for large file storage.