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Pesticides/Residues

Spinach, Kale, and Strawberries Are Missing From the Government's Last Two Pesticide Reports

Published August 25, 2026

Spinach, kale, and strawberries do not appear anywhere in USDA's two most recently published pesticide residue reports. Not because the results came back clean. Because the government didn't test them.

Every year, USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service publishes an Annual Summary from its Pesticide Data Program (PDP), the agency's actual testing operation: fruits, vegetables, and other foods bought at ordinary distribution points, washed the way a shopper would wash them, then screened in a lab for hundreds of pesticide compounds. The most recent complete report, covering calendar year 2024 and published January 6, 2026, tested 9,872 samples across 19 commodities: apples, avocados, blackberries, cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, head lettuce, leaf lettuce, onions, oranges, pineapples, potatoes, sweet corn, tomatillos, almonds, salmon, and four processed versions of items already on that list. Spinach and kale are not on it. The report before that, covering 2023 and published in November 2024, tested 21 commodities — almonds, apples, avocados, seven kinds of baby food, blackberries, celery, grapes, mushrooms, onions, plums, potatoes, sweet corn, tomatillos, tomatoes, watermelon — and contains no leafy green at all.

This isn't a gap in reporting. It's how PDP is built. USDA's own tracking document, "PDP Commodities Analyzed in Last 4 Years," dated June 9, 2025, lays out exactly which commodities were sampled in 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025. Spinach, kale, and strawberries are absent from the 2022, 2023, and 2024 columns entirely. All three reappear, together, only in the 2025 column — the first time in at least three years that any of them were back in the testing rotation. Based on how long USDA has taken to publish its two most recent reports (roughly 11 to 13 months after each calendar year closes), a full 2025 Annual Summary with actual results likely won't post until sometime in 2027.

That timing gap matters because these three crops are exactly the ones that show up most often in the "worst produce for pesticides" rankings that circulate every year, refreshed annually, using the same handful of names. Those rankings imply a fresh year of testing behind each year's list. For the government's own testing program, that wasn't true for three consecutive years running. A ranking can repeat a crop's name every January without the underlying federal residue data changing at all in the years between it — because there was no new federal residue data being generated for that crop to begin with.

The EU runs a structurally different version of the same idea, and the comparison is instructive less for who's "tougher" and more for how differently each government designs its monitoring calendar. Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2025/854, adopted May 7, 2025, sets out the EU's coordinated multiannual control programme for pesticide residues for 2026, 2027, and 2028 — and it names its target commodities years ahead of time. Spinach, strawberries, and lettuce are slotted for the 2028 testing year, published now, in 2025, so producers, regulators, and the public all know the schedule in advance. USDA's PDP doesn't publish that kind of forward-looking, multi-year commodity calendar; its "Last 4 Years" document is a retrospective record, not a forward one. Neither design is inherently more protective — a fixed forward schedule and a flexible year-to-year one both carry tradeoffs — but only one of them lets you check, today, what will be tested three years from now.

None of this means spinach, kale, or strawberries are somehow riskier for having gone unsampled. It means the specific, current, government-verified residue number you'd want for any one of those three crops simply doesn't exist for 2022 through 2024, and won't exist for 2025 until roughly 2027. A ranking published this year that cites "USDA data" for any of those three crops is, at best, citing data collected in 2021 or earlier — years old by the time you read it, not a reflection of anything USDA has measured lately.

If you want to check for yourself which commodities were actually tested, and when, USDA publishes the underlying database at ams.usda.gov/datasets/pdp, searchable by commodity, year, and pesticide compound, with every result traceable back to the same PDP program these Annual Summaries report on. It's also worth knowing that a "USDA Organic" label is a separate system entirely: a production-standard certification under 7 CFR Part 205, governing how a crop was grown, not a promise that it was residue-tested that year. PDP samples both conventional and organic-labeled produce within whatever commodities happen to be in that year's rotation, and the public database lets you filter results by that label whenever the commodity you care about is actually being tested.

This is what PurityIQ is built to put in front of you at the shelf: not a score, not a verdict, but the actual state of the federal record — including the honest answer, when it applies, that the record for a specific crop is currently a few years out of date. You see what the government has and hasn't actually checked lately, cited to the report itself, and you decide what that's worth to you.

Sources:

As of August 24, 2026.

Sources

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