The acre addresses the question as to how many acres on which a particular chemical was used in reference to the statewide acreage of a particular crop. Chemical treatment addresses the question of how much of a particular chemical was used on a crop. The grower is the individual respondent growing the crop for the survey year. We used a combination of these factors to report the findings. The survey instrument was designed to optimize chemical reporting and hence concentrates on the chemical treatment unit analysis.
Treatment acres refers to the acres treated accounting for multiple applications.
For example, a 100 acre field with two treatments of a given chemical would result in 200 treatment acres of chemicals being reported. This unit of analysis allows the reader to determine the approximate average number of applications used on a crop by dividing the treatment acres by the acres of actual crop reported grown by the total growers of the crop. This provides a ratio of the average number of applications per acre of crop. For example, if the results state that there were 20,000 treatment acres when the growers reported growing 5,000 crop acres, then pesticides were used about 4 times on each acre. A third unit of analysis is the grower.