For over 100 years, observers have described what may be a critical flaw in agricultural pesticide use. Many licensed pest control advisors are employees of companies that distribute agricultural chemicals. These pest control advisors provide their field-scouting services free of charge to farmers, and their firms rely on chemical sales for their income. Furthermore, individual sales staff generally are paid commissions on chemical sales. From society’s perspective, this creates a perverse incentive, in which pest control advisors are incentivized to increase sales, potentially increasing pesticide use and all the negative impacts on environmental quality and human health. Survey-based studies of pesticide use have, however, largely failed to document clear evidence that this perverse incentive actually translates into elevated use of pesticides, perhaps in part due to modest sample sizes and low statistical power. In this study, we use two California Department of Pesticide Regulation databases, CalAgPermits and Pesticide Use Reporting, to contrast pesticide use by farmers working with different classes of PCAs, including sales PCAs (who receive commissions on pesticide sales) versus independent PCAs, in-house PCAs, and farmer PCAs (who do not receive sales commissions). Our analysis achieves greater power by collating data on pesticide use across commercial California agriculture for a period of up to ten years (2012-2021). We discuss implications for pesticide policy.
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