We identify the location of ~9,000 organic fields from 2013 — 2019 using field-level crop and pesticide use data, along with state certification data, for Kern County, CA, one of the US’ most valuable crop producing counties. We parse apart how being organic relative to conventional affects decisions to spray pesticides and, if spraying, how much to spray. We show the expected probability of spraying any pesticides is reduced by about 30 percentage points for organic relative to conventional fields, across different metrics of pesticide use including overall weight applied and coarse ecotoxicity metrics. We report little difference, on average, in pesticide use for organic and conventional fields that do spray, though observe substantial crop-specific heterogeneity.

Please see description in manuscript & supplementary information. 

Please see README. The Stata code file is a supplementary data file associated with the manuscript. As noted in the README, missing values are represented by empty cells, per the syntax for Stata. See README for an explanation for why different variables have missing data.